Recipe for joy: Chef Lazarus Lynch blends food, connection at Culver Academies

YouTube celebrity chef Lazarus Lynch told Culver Academies students about the “ingredients” that shaped his journey from cooking with his father as a child to helping craft the menu for the famed Met Gala.

“I'm going to give you what I call my recipe for joy. It doesn't have a structure. It's kind of like the way I like to cook. A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” said Lynch, a two-time “Chopped” champion and author of “Son of a Southern Chef.”

Lynch spoke to about 70 students and a dozen adults at the Legion Memorial Building about what he called the essential ingredients that shaped his personal and professional journey. Those ingredients included instinct, adaptability, meaning, joy and self-care.

Audience members entering the talk were invited to take one of each of the five desserts available: red velvet cupcakes, chocolate mousse cups and three flavors of mini cheesecake samplers: blueberry, key lime and raspberry. Early in his talk, Lynch invited participants to take a taste of one of the desserts.

“I want you to notice how you are feeling in this moment,” he said. “Notice the scents, the taste, the flavors.”

Students described experiences ranging from “rich, chocolate, vanilla” to “freedom” and “childhood,” reinforcing Lynch’s central theme that food connects people to memory and identity.

“One of the things that I love about food is its capacity to connect us. What you all just did is what I do in my work all the time,” he said. “I provide people with a sensory experience, but that also helps them to go deeper into their own lives. And that is the power of food.

Lynch’s visit to Culver Academies, an elite leadership-oriented boarding school, included his talk on Thursday evening, participating in Diversity Day on Friday at the food trucks and judging the Culver “Chopped” cooking competition at the Dining Hall on Saturday.

Rebecca Hodges, Ph.D., a senior humanities instructor and director of Culver’s Global Studies Institute, which hosted the event, said Lynch was invited to Culver by Ray Fan ’25 after he saw Lynch speak at the Global Youth Institute of the World Food Prize.

Lynch encouraged Culver students to take ownership of their own mental well-being.

“I am responsible for my joy,” Lynch said, asking the audience to repeat the phrase.

“Let that sink in,” said Lynch, who also is a mental health professional. “I wish that when I was around your age, and I know there's a range in here, that someone had told me that I was responsible for my joy.”

Lynch’s message aligned with Culver’s theme for this year: “Find joy, fuel joy.”

He said he had to learn on his own the difference between happiness and joy. He said happiness is fleeting. Joy, he said, needs to be grown and nurtured.

“It's deep. It has deep roots. And the way that we get to know joy is by going through some hard stuff. That's how we really get to know joy,” he said.

He told students he had a hard time dealing when his father died of cancer when he was a junior in college. He said he was crushed, but an opportunity to study abroad in Rwanda helped him recover because he could see people living under difficult circumstances enjoying themselves.

He said he returned to the United States with a renewed commitment to finding joy. He said he learned that joy was a practice, not a feeling.

“You’ve got to have fun. People who make time for fun have more joy. People who make time to enjoy life have more joy. Joy is not this finite thing like happiness. Joy is not a few pieces of candy. Joy is the entire candy store, a universe of candy,” he said. “That is joy. You can have it.”