One chef goes as far as possible to find extraordinary food. Another transforms backyards into the source of it.
There are two distinct relationships people have with food that matters to them.
The first is the food you travel for. The dish that made a trip unforgettable. The market you found by accident in a city you’d never been to before. The local chef who showed you something you couldn’t have discovered any other way. This is Brett McGregor’s territory on The Travelling Chef — three seasons of following genuine food curiosity to Thailand, Kenya, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond.
The second is the food you grow. The fig tree that produces more than you can eat in August. The herb garden that changes how you cook every day. The food forest that, five years after you planted it, has become something extraordinary — resilient, abundant, and entirely yours. This is Pete’s territory on GreenDreams: Food Forests — eighteen episodes of transforming Florida properties into layered, productive edible landscapes that look as beautiful as they perform.
Both shows are about the same thing, approached from opposite directions: the relationship between people and the food they care about most.
Following food to its source
Brett McGregor won New Zealand’s first MasterChef competition and immediately did what most chefs dream about — he left the restaurant kitchen and went looking for the real thing.
The Travelling Chef follows Brett across Asia and the Pacific, learning from local masters in their own environments. In North Queensland he learns aboriginal food preparations in the Daintree rainforest and visits Cairns’ famous Rusty’s Market. In Fiji he goes on an organic quest, discovering produce that is among the cleanest and greenest in the world. In rural Kenya he learns an ancient goat dish from locals, travels north from Nairobi to meet a kiwi who has built a life in central Africa, and finds food that has been prepared the same way for generations.
What the show captures consistently is something that’s difficult to find in restaurant dining: the connection between a place, its land, its culture, and what ends up on a plate. The food Brett eats in Phetchaburi tastes the way it does because of where it’s grown, who grows it, and how it’s been prepared for centuries. The organic Fijian produce he encounters has a quality that comes from the soil and the climate and the farming practices of people who have been working that land for generations.
This is what food travel, at its best, teaches you — that flavor is inseparable from place.
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Bringing that thinking home
The food forest movement starts from a similar premise: that the best food comes from land that has been thoughtfully cultivated over time, in relationship with its climate and ecology.
GreenDreams: Food Forests follows Pete and his team as they design and install food forests across Florida — primarily in the Sarasota area, with projects ranging from single residential lots to multi-acre properties. What makes the show compelling is the follow-up structure: Pete returns to projects six months later, one year later, five years later, and shows what the landscape has become.
The five-year follow-up at a Florida property in Season 2 is particularly striking. What began as a design plan has matured into a resilient, biodiverse landscape producing fruit trees, edible flowers, and plants in quantities the homeowner couldn’t have imagined when the first plantings went in. The Candy Land project in Naples — nicknamed for its overabundance of fruit trees and edible plants — is another example: the one-year follow-up shows a transformation so complete it barely resembles the before footage.
The food forest model is a layered approach to edible landscaping drawn from permaculture principles. Rather than organizing a garden in rows and beds, a food forest mimics the structure of a natural woodland — canopy trees, understory shrubs, ground cover plants, and root vegetables all working together in a system that becomes more productive and more resilient over time with minimal intervention.
The result looks nothing like a vegetable garden. It looks like a lush, considered landscape that happens to feed you.
Watch GreenDreams: Food Forests on SHG Living →
What the two shows share
The connection between Brett McGregor’s food travels and Pete’s food forests is not immediately obvious. One is about going as far as possible to find extraordinary food. The other is about cultivating it as close to home as you can.
But both are fundamentally about the same conviction: that the relationship between people and food is worth taking seriously. That flavor comes from place. That the most interesting food experiences — whether in a market in Chiang Rai or in a backyard in Sarasota — involve a direct connection between the land, the grower, and the person eating.
Brett’s episode in Fiji is instructive here. The organic produce he encounters there has a quality he describes as unlike anything available through conventional supply chains. The Fijian farmers he meets are producing food in relationship with their environment in a way that simply cannot be replicated at scale. Pete’s food forests are pursuing the same quality at the residential level — not Fijian mangoes, but Florida avocados and citrus and herbs grown in soil that has been built over years of careful tending.
The food you travel for and the food you grow are, at their best, expressions of the same thing
Where to start this summer
If you want to travel to the food: start with The Travelling Chef’s North Queensland episode for the Daintree rainforest sequences and Rusty’s Market, or the Fiji organic episode for some of the most beautiful produce photography in the series. Brett’s Kenya episodes are worth watching back to back for the contrast between the coastal Mombasa food culture and the rural central African cooking he finds in the interior.
If you want to grow the food: start with GreenDreams: Food Forests’ five-year Florida follow-up to see what a mature food forest actually looks like, then go back to watch the original install. The Candy Land one-year follow-up is a close second. If you’re in Florida or a similarly warm climate, the deer-proof food forest episode in the Sarasota area is practically useful as well as visually compelling.
If you want to do both: watch The Travelling Chef’s Fiji episode first. Then watch Pete’s most abundant Florida follow-up. The conversation between them is worth having.
Both shows are streaming now on SHG Living — on Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, and on the web at watch.shgliving.com. No registration required.
