I am not one thing.
I’m a meat scientist and strategist. A writer and speaker. A seminarian and preacher. An advocate. A husband and dad. Those identities have taken me into places that rarely appear on the same résumé — meat plants and boardrooms, pulpits and classrooms, farms and conference stages, recovery rooms and the complicated everyday work of family life.
For a long time, I thought those worlds needed to stay separate. I don’t anymore.
The intersections are the point.
The more life has unfolded, the less interested I’ve become in separating professional expertise from the rest of what makes us human. Each part of my life changes how I understand the others.
Food is my expertise.
I’ve spent more than two decades across the meat and food industry — from production and processing to markets, strategy, education and innovation. I care about good science, honest conversations and food systems that work for the people inside them.
Advocacy is my service.
Some of the most meaningful work I do grows from experiences I never would have chosen — recovery, trauma and the realities of raising and caring for people with disabilities. I try to use those experiences to make difficult lives less lonely.
Faith is my foundation.
Theology gives me a language for questions that business and science alone cannot answer: purpose, suffering, grace, vocation, neighbor and what it means to live faithfully in a complicated world.
Family is my vocation.
Before the titles, credentials and projects, I am a husband and dad. Family has taught me more about patience, sacrifice, humor, failure, love and showing up than any professional role ever could.
The path was never particularly straight.
I built my professional life in meat and food. I studied animal science, meat science and food science, then spent more than two decades working across a supply chain that has taken me from production floors and processing plants to sales, strategy, consulting, education and industry leadership.
But life kept opening other doors.
Faith led me toward preaching and theological education. Recovery taught me something about honesty, grace and starting again. Experiences with trauma gave me reasons to speak when silence would have been easier. Raising a family — including navigating disability and caregiving — changed the questions I ask about community, belonging and what it actually means to care for people.
Eventually I stopped trying to make those experiences fit into separate boxes.
Today, the intersections are where I find some of the most interesting work: science and ethics, agriculture and public policy, food and theology, leadership and humility, trauma and hope, expertise and lived experience.
The common thread is service.
Experience shapes the perspective.
My perspective comes from working across industries, institutions and communities that do not always speak the same language — and learning how to connect them.
Food & Industry
More than two decades across meat science, processing, sales, markets, strategy, consulting and food-industry education — from production floors to executive conversations.
Teaching & Leadership
Industry training, technical assistance, conference moderation, public speaking, writing and leadership across professional, academic, nonprofit and community settings.
Ministry & Service
Preaching, theological education, recovery ministry, survivor advocacy, disability and caregiver advocacy, youth development and disaster-response service.
The titles matter less than what I do with them.
I don't have all of this figured out. I have been successful and wrong, confident and humbled, wounded and healing. I have learned that expertise does not eliminate the need for curiosity, faith does not eliminate questions, and surviving something does not automatically tell us what to do with the life that follows.
What I can do is keep showing up — asking better questions, telling the truth as best I understand it, sharing what I have learned and using whatever influence, expertise or experience I have in service to other people.