Maggie Baird, the environmentalist founder of Support+Feed and mother to Grammy Award-winning artists Billie Eilish and Finneas, is teaming up with public media organization WETA for a new sustainable lifestyle series, Climate Kitchen.
Slated to begin production later this year and air on public media in 2027, the series will be “part cooking show, part lifestyle series, part docuseries,” according to a release. The synopsis continues, “Climate Kitchen is where practical meets powerful, as Maggie explores, from around the country as well as in her own kitchen, how our daily choices are linked to some of the most urgent issues of our time, from chronic disease to food waste and environmental justice to affordability. Providing recipes for sustainable living alongside delicious and affordable home cooked plant-based meals, Climate Kitchen will see Baird bring together some of the world’s most revered sustainable living experts, celebrity guests and members of her family to her kitchen, sharing stories and recipes that are both kinder to our planet and each other.”
Baird, known for her work with the nonprofit Support+Feed and for helping build sustainability initiates for Eilish’s tours, says she created the show because it’s something she’d been wanting to watch but couldn’t find. “I’ve been looking for it to exist for literally years,” Baird exclusively tells The Hollywood Reporter on a Zoom.
“I think, especially at the start of the pandemic, which coincided with the start of Support+Feed, and I was deep into the sustainability of the Billie touring, which we had then abandoned to come home. I literally was combing the channels for this show because is what I wanted to watch,” she says. “The other main reason we wanted to create it is because it’s the number one question we get asked when I do Instagram lives, et cetera — ‘How do I start?’ It’s just clear that people really need a very 101 intro.”
The series is slated to be directed Kristin Lazure and Stephanie Soechtig of Atlas Films. It’s co-produced by Support+Feed, WETA and Atlas Films. The series is part of WETA’s multi-year, multi-platform initiative, Well Beings, which is aimed at addressing critical health needs in America.
For Baird, the public media aspect of Climate Kitchen was essential. “First of all, we want to support public media,” she explains. “Everyone grows up with public media and maybe some young people have gone away from it. It’s never been more important to know where trusted media is than right now.”
She notes that public media also has the largest education platform, which is a large part of why this series, and her organization, exists — to teach people that sustainability is far reaching and attainable for people. “It’s very easy for people to feel like their individual choices really don’t matter,” Baird says. “There’s a challenging fact that corporations and [the] government are shirking their duties when it comes to [sustainability], so therefore, it can feel even less meaningful to do it yourself, but it really makes such a huge difference.”
The series will feature a mix of celebrity and expert guests including her two children, Eilish and Finneas, Martha Stewart, indigenous climate justice activist Xiye Bastida, longevity researcher and best-selling author of The Blue Zones Dan Buettner, co-founder of the Farm Link Project Aidan Reilly, actor and Cyklar founder and creative director Claudia Sulewski and renowned oceanographer and Mission Blue founder Sylvia Earle.
Initial sponsors for the project include Little Saint Healdsburg, Universal Music Group, Sam Ballmer and the PATH Foundation.
