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Lisa has lived in Flagstaff, Arizona since 1987.
She teaches sustainable cooking and permaculture workshops in northern Arizona. She is currently
working on several cookbooks with bioregional, vegan and renewable
energy themes. In Flagstaff,
Lisa is known as a progressive political activist who rides her bicycle
everywhere and writes frequent letters to the editor for the local daily
newspaper. Lisa gardens on two small balconies and is the coordinator
for Juniper Street Community Garden.
The daughter of a chemist and
a biologist, Lisa Rayner
has long had an interest in the natural world. As a young girl she was
an avid sea shell collector. The evidence can be found in every room of
her house. She spent much of her time exploring the
forest around her
Delaware
home. One exasperated teacher wrote in her second grade report
card, "Lisa tends to play with little books, paper, yarn etc. and rushes
through assignments." (Today, in addition to writing books, Lisa has a loom but doesn't have much time
for weaving.)
Lisa
hated cooking growing up. Then, in 1985 she became vegetarian, and soon
after, vegan. She spent the next year-and-a-half teaching herself to
cook and in the process discovered she enjoyed it. Lisa's reasons for
being vegan include animal welfare and factory farms, world hunger and
environmental sustainability. In 1993 she was teaching a vegetarian cooking class when she realized that she wanted
to learn about which foods grew in her cool, dry mountain home. She
began to learn all she could about growing and cooking
bioregionally-appropriate foods.
In 1996 Lisa obtained a word
processor while dumpster-diving and wrote the first edition of
Growing Food
in the Southwest
Mountains:
A Permaculture Approach to Gardening Above 6,500 Feet in
Arizona,
New Mexico, Southern Colorado and
Southern Utah.
Also in 1996, Lisa got to know her future husband Dan
Frazier at monthly vegetarian EarthSave potlucks. From 2000 to
2002, Lisa and Dan published a small progressive newspaper called
Flagstaff Tea Party that advocated for the protection of
northern Arizona's environmental riches and the preservation of Flagstaff's small-town
charm. During this time, Lisa also ran a community currency program called Flagstaff Neighborly
Notes.Lisa has been a solar cook for 12 years. She
started her solar cooking adventures with a used cardboard CooKitTM
panel cooker from
Solar Cookers International bought for $10 and later
purchased the
Sun OvenTM she currently cooks with on her
south-facing townhome balcony. She published her second book
The Sunny Side of Cooking: Solar
cooking and other ecologically friendly cooking methods for the 21st
century
in 2007.
Lisa has baked her own bread with a sourdough
culture since 1995. In 2006, she began hand-grinding her own whole wheat
flour for baking bread. She also grows a small plot of heirloom wheat at
her neighborhood
community garden. In
2009, Lisa published
Wild Bread - Hand-baked sourdough artisan bread in your own kitchen.
In 2008 Lisa won the Martin-Springer Institute Moral
Courage Award and the Friends of Flagstaff’s Future Liveable Community
Award.Lisa has a Bachelor of
Science degree in Natural Resource Interpretation from
Northern
Arizona
University. She
is a graduate of the 1993 Black Mesa Permaculture Project's Design
Certification Course and 1994 Coconino County Master Gardener Program.
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