A San Francisco Bay Area native, Gigia grew up gardening and cooking. After moving to Denver in 1989, she developed a business teaching cooking and gardening to children and adults, eventually running the Slow Food Denver school garden program. This program provided support to 30 local school gardens in the form of cooking classes, teacher training, volunteer coordination, cooking and gardening lesson plans, youth farmers’ market support, garden to cafeteria coordination and school garden policy development. Her experiences allowed her to write the Slow Food USA Good and Clean school garden curriculum. Slow Food Denver now uses this curriculum to provide after school cooking and gardening programs to schools.

Her special focus is teaching learners to develop their intuition about cooking so that they can create without using recipes. Freedom from recipes allows you to take advantage of seasonal local produce, connecting the cook to a specific time and place. Her work involves transforming people’s relationship to food and cooking in order to restore its prominent place in every day life.