Miyoko Schinner

Miyoko Schinner (née Nishimoto, born 1957) is an American vegan chef, cookbook author, cooking show host, vegan activist, and social entrepreneur, who appears in the 2024 documentary, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment.

She is currently the host of the YouTube cooking show, The Vegan Good Life with Miyoko, and is working on her next cookbook, The Vegan Creamery, which will be released in 2025.

Schinner was born in a town outside of Tokyo, Japan as Miyoko Nishimoto.

She left Japan and moved to the United States when she was seven.

Schinner and her family settled in Marin County, specifically in Mill Valley, California.

Schinner became a vegetarian at the age of 12.

She describes this period as "the 60s and early 70s, the glory days of the hippie movement and spiritualism and hare krishna," or the turn to natural foods within the American counterculture.

Her initial exposure to this movement occurred during a camping trip that included vegetarians who "were from a spiritual family and didn't believe in harming animals. I went home and my mother put pork chops in front of me after being vegetarian for two or three days. I looked at the pork chop and just could not eat it. I stopped right there."

Schinner's mother did not support this shift towards vegetarian dishes, forcing Schinner to teach herself how to cook.

However, Schinner credits this period as the time that she grew to love cooking.

Although this interest in cooking led her to consider culinary school, she ultimately decided not to attend (as she would have to work with animal products), and is entirely self-taught.

Schinner began college at the Pratt Institute in order to study graphic design, but dropped out after a year.

She eventually transferred to St. John's College in Annapolis, and graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy.

After graduating from college, Schinner developed a number of vegan ventures through the lens of social entrepreneurship.

During the 1980s, Schinner returned to Japan and settled in Tokyo.

During this period she transitioned to a vegan diet for "health reasons" (she realized that she was lactose intolerant).

As she began to explore how to create vegan dishes for herself, she decided to sell her creations.

She started a small business called "Madam Miyoko" and sold vegan poundcakes (made of Okara), out of her backpack.

However, she missed cheese, describing the 80s as the "dark ages of vegan cheese" still dominated by "hippies and macrobiotic food."

She briefly visited the United States during this time to attend the Natural Products Expo, where she tasted "Vegan Rella," the only vegan cheese product available at the time.

However, she found it disappointing and began to dream of alternatives.

Schinner eventually returned to the United States and settled in San Francisco, where in 1988 she opened a vegan bakery.

It eventually evolved into the vegan Now and Zen Restaurant.

During the holiday season, she would make the vegan Unturkey (a seitan roast with a yuba shell), which she exhibited at the 1995 Natural Products Expo (and ended up with $50,000 worth of orders).

In 1997, Schinner sold the restaurant and created a vegan natural foods company called Now and Zen that focused on The Unturkey.

However, as more orders came in for the Unturkey as well as different products, Schinner found herself overwhelmed.

She also found investors more interested in investing in tech, as it was the dot-com boom.

In addition, she had "married shortly before starting the café, and three months after they opened the door she gave birth to her second child. In fact, her water broke on the restaurant floor during lunch hour. Then, the head chef quit and his replacement turned out to have a heroin problem. Her mother, who’d needed Miyoko’s care in her last few years of life, died in 2000, and within a few months her father began to fade, also requiring end-of-life care until his passing in 2002. Finally, in 2003 Miyoko called it quits."

During this period, Schinner produced three vegan cookbooks.

VegNews listed The New Now and Zen Epicure as one of the "Top 100 Vegan Cookbooks of All Time" in 2024.

Schinner co-hosted the PBS cooking show Vegan Mashup for three seasons (2012-2016) with Toni Fiore and Terry Hope Romero.

In 2023, she launched the YouTube cooking show, The Vegan Good Life with Miyoko.

In 2012, Schinner published another cookbook, Artisan Vegan Cheese, with The Book Publishing Company that focused entirely on the production of vegan cheese.

In 2021, Food & Wine referred to it as "the seminal cookbook that put vegan cheesemaking on the map," and VegNews listed it as one of the "Top 100 Vegan Cookbooks of All Time" in 2024.

Schinner initially thought her book Artisan Vegan Cheese had given readers all the tools that they would need to create vegan cheese.

Fans told her however, that they wanted her to make the cheese for them.

Although Schinner was reluctant to start a business again, she was eventually persuaded to create a new vegan cheese company.

She thus founded Miyoko's Kitchen in 2014, as an online business.

Schinner's initial goal was to create dairy-free products including butter and a wide variety of different types of cheeses using traditional cheesemaking cultures and techniques, chiefly out of cashews, oats, and chickpea flour.

She launched the company with herself as CEO and four employees on a Friday, and by Monday they had 50,000 orders.