Discovering My Love for Agriculture Liv Cramer

My first love was food—a love I hold in common with all the women in my family. When my mom started a catering company, I discovered that not only was I obsessed with the preparation and transformation of ingredients, I was freakishly good at it. I have a “perfect palate”—sort of like perfect pitch for musicians but with taste—meaning that I have a heightened sense of flavor quality that can detect more flavors than the average person.

In the 7th grade, I began to delve deeper into the world of food through molecular gastronomy, a field that incorporates both my love of science and cooking to transform food into new forms through chemistry. Deep down, my true nature is as a problem-solver; I have always viewed science as a sort of puzzle. I used emulsifiers to make “lemon air” to top my cookies and obsessively stalked food journals to hear about the newest technologies from the world's top restaurants.

At this time I had already discovered my love of agriculture and the outdoors and knew that the study of molecular gastronomy would confine me to a life away from the fields I loved. Since age 15, I’ve spent my summers hunched over vegetables under the scorching Colorado sun at a small organic farm called Ollin Farms, and I...