Meet Our Team

April McGreger is an award-winning fermenter, jam maker, writer, pastry chef, cooking teacher, and recipe developer whose work and recipes have been featured in Bon Appetit, Southern Living, The New York Times, Eating Well, Martha Stewart Living, and many other publications. Before moving to Philadelphia in 2018, she founded and operated the pickling and preserving business, Farmer’s Daughter, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for over a decade. There she turned the best of the North Carolina harvest into impeccable products that won 13 Good Food Awards. Her work preserving and promoting endangered cultural traditions and ingredients was recognized in 2014 with the Slow Food Ark of Taste Betsy Lydon Award. Her passion for social justice and food justice in particular led her to 215 People’s Alliance and then People’s Kitchen Philadelphia, where she is excited to share her fermentation and food preservation skills to help build food security, sovereignty, and community in Philadelphia. She is the author of two books, Sweet Potatoes (UNC Press) and Canning and Preserving (Centennial Media). Follow her on Instagram @preservingthesouth.

Alethia Erwin has been in the foodservice industry since 1988 and is accomplished in a broad range of specialties including restaurant management, staffing, cooking, serving, bar-tending, organizing, planning, catering, and overseeing events. From 2005-2014, Alethia was General Manager for Geechee Girl Rice Cafe, a critically acclaimed 50 seat restaurant in Philadelphia, PA where she managed the Front of the House, planned and executed catering events, served as prep and line cook, and recruited, hired, and trained staff. She was also instrumental in menu planning and recipe development. More recently Alethia served as the Events Manager for Material Culture, where in addition to overseeing events, she was responsible for staffing and for training front-of-the-house employees.
Alethia also independently plans and caters for events, using the Geechee Girl imprint.

Ben "Corn" Miller founded People's Kitchen along with Aziza Young at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, and has served the project as a chef and urban grower. Ben is a founding member of Masa Cooperativa (http://masa.coop) and serves that project building relationships with regional organic corn farmers and seedkeepers. Ben is from Easton PA and lives in SouthWest Philly.

Valerie Erwin is a Philadelphia chef and social activist. For 12 years, until 2014, Valerie owned the critically acclaimed Geechee Girl Rice Cafe. Geeche Girl showcased the food of the Low Country—the coast of South Carolina and Georgia—where her grandparents were born. For two years Valerie was the General Manager of EAT Café, a West Philadelphia neighborhood restaurant with an innovative pay-what-you-can model. Since 2020, Valerie has been the program manager of Farm to Families, a produce access program of St Christopher’s Foundation for Children.
She believes in the power of food as a tool in the pursuit of social justice. As such, she has worked for several years with Cristina Martinez and Ben Miller in the fight for rights for undocumented restaurant workers and with the People’s Kitchen, and with Restaurant Opportunities Center, an advocacy organization for food industry employees.
Valerie has served on the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance—the country’s premier institution for the study of food and culture. She now serves on the board of C-CAP, a culinary scholarship program for high school students, and on the board of the Philadelphia Interfaith Hospitality Network, an anti-homelessness organization.
When not at work, she spends her time catering, doing business consulting, and working on food related projects with cultural institutions such as the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Jazz Project.

Pete Angevine led a nationally distributed experimental Ice Cream brand which he founded with no prior experience in business or food, and grew to an industry-innovating, million-dollar operation with 60+ employees. Before that, he performed and recorded music internationally. Along the way he earned a degree in geography; produced an artist-designed historically-interpretive miniature golf course at a botanical garden; began designing clothes; built a comically small art gallery in his house; and so on. Currently, he works independently with a range of not-for-profit enterprises in fields including life science, public art, farmer cooperatives, and experimental music & theater.