Lola Milholland is a food-business owner, social-practice artist, and writer.

Her work has been published by The Guardian, Time Magazine, Oprah Daily, Gastronomica, Oregon Humanities, and others. A former editor for Edible Portland magazine, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs Umi Organic, a noodle company with a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunch. Her debut book, Group Living and Other Recipes, was released by Spiegel & Grau in August 2024.

Lola was born in Portland, Oregon in 1985, the child of counterculture parents involved in food and agriculture activism and cultural history.

Why “Lola’s Beef”? In college she became enthralled by studying the history of beef in Japan—forbidden by Buddhist and Shinto doctrine for more than a millennium, then widely propagandized, and now the focus of a couture-esque industry producing some of the most expensive beef in the world. From that time on, she’s had an intense fascination with the way that shifts in food culture reflect and influence larger cultural moments. The intersection of food justice, cultural history, and ecology is her favorite place to linger.