From Laptops to Bagels: Jeff Mao on Education, Food, and Reinvention

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today I have with me a fellow Bowdoin College classmate from maybe more than a few years ago. This is Jeff Mao. He is the founder and operator of Knead and Nosh. He's also an educator and author, and he is a former statewide leader in educational technology. So many things. You've done a lot since you and I finished at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. I think I did a lot of things that I never thought I would do. I left the college and just kind of thought, I'm going to go be a teacher. Really I decided to go into teaching so I could coach. I really wanted to just coach sports, and teaching is the way you can do that because it gives you your afternoons off. Obviously it's a closed system, so it's much easier to be a teacher and then take on one of the sports teams. So I did coach for a number of years and I still do some sports stuff, but in general, that's kind of where I started. Then eventually I became a bureaucrat in nonprofit education stuff. And now I'm running a little micro bakery and food business.

Lisa Belisle: It's little, but you're small but mighty. You've gotten a lot of recognition. You won a statewide honor within the last year for your bagels. The book that you wrote is getting some recognition. So it's a lot. You're balancing a lot.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. It's a lot of things juggling in the air at the same time. When I started the food business, I tried to base it on this idea of it taking up, of course, totally failed, but taking up like a day and a half a week because I already had another nonprofit job that was supposedly three to three and a half days a week. So I figured, okay, together that makes a full-time thing. I think last summer I ended up working seven days a week almost every week just because I was a failure at my own schedule. I would do things like schedule Sunday cooking classes, but I had Saturday farmers markets, and then I was doing the nonprofit Monday to Thursday-ish and also a Friday farmer's market. So it just kind of snowballed from there. It definitely keeps me busy, but I kind of like it.

Lisa Belisle: It was very interesting. My daughter, Sophie, who now works with us and does a lot of the scheduling, she was the one who brought me out to find you at the Freeport Farmers Market representing Knead and Nosh. And I said, "Wait a minute, I know this guy." So I did not make the connection, but what this tells me is that you've become known within a larger audience. You're speaking to people in the next generation, maybe the generation ahead of ours, which means that you've generated quite a lot of interest in the work that you do.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. It's been really interesting that for a while in Maine, everywhere I went, when I would get recognized, it was always like, "Oh, you're the laptop guy." Because I was running the state laptop program from Augusta, so I was kind of the state bureaucrat behind the scenes. The Portland Press Herald would write about me sometimes, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but that's the newspapers. More recently now, in Brunswick, relatively common, I'll be walking through Hannaford or something and someone will say, "Hey, aren't you the bagel guy?" So I've gone from being the laptop guy to the bagel guy. Over the last couple of years, after having spent 30 plus years in the education sector where I did do a lot of things, I ran the laptop program, and one of our other classmates actually had me out speaking at international symposia around the globe. I was speaking about the laptop program to UNESCO and World Bank events and things like that. Then I got asked to teach a workshop at a bread conference. So it was the first time I was like, "Oh, you want me to do something with bread as opposed to with laptops and technology." So that was a lot of fun to break into a whole new sector and a different space, but the same kind of work. It's been fun to get into that community and meet a lot of folks. I've increasingly started to find my way into the food community and learning more and more about how things work, and just joined the board of another food-based nonprofit here in Maine. So a lot of good stuff going on.

Lisa Belisle: Since you've mentioned the laptop program a number of times, and I'm obviously very familiar with it myself, my children benefited from it and it's been in place a long, long time, but not everybody who's listening will know what that is. Could you give a little background on that for us?

Jeff Mao: Sure. I guess it was probably sometime around 98, 99, our governor, Angus King, it all started with a meeting he had with Seymour Papert, who was a leading global thinker around education and technology and how technology could help kids learn. Seymour was a professor emeritus down at MIT in the media lab, but lived here in Maine. So they had a meeting, and it was Seymour who clarified in Angus's mind this idea that if you gave every student a personal digital device, you could really start to change things. But up until you got there, nothing was going to change. You can't just have another computer lab and expect any kind of change to occur. So that planted a seed in his mind. Then a couple years later, as Angus has told me the story, somebody from the budget office essentially called him and said, "Hey, governor, we just did the revenue projections and we think we're actually going to have a surplus," which is an unknown word nowadays in government, right? You're going to have a surplus, so you better think about what you're going to do with that before the legislature and the press and everybody else kind of gloms onto that. And that's when he realized, maybe we could do this thing that Seymour Papert suggested. So he took one of his big ideas, had some folks who worked for him, put them in a room and said, "Okay, figure this out." What they figured out was they could actually fund purchasing a laptop for every student by taking that surplus and essentially creating an endowment, collecting more private funds and operating it similar to a college in a sense that you live off the interest. If you could build up that principal endowment amount, you would have enough money to run the program. And that's how it started. It took a lot of legislative action, a lot of political clout, and eventually it got started. Ultimately the endowment never happened, but the state did continue to fund it for a number of years. So we were really one of the very first large scale organizations to deploy a laptop to every kid, put in wifi networks, gave the computers to the teachers. I saw that I was teaching at a small little private school in Western New York at the time, and my wife and I had always talked about how do we get back to Maine, because she grew up here in Maine, I went to college in Maine. So Maine was our summer home. We would come back and I would teach tennis on the coastline. Then the news kind of hit the internet like, "Oh, the state of Maine is going to buy a laptop for every seventh grade student." I looked at that and just thought, okay, there's the ticket back, because at the time I was the education technology coordinator for a small little private school. I thought, well, I do the computer stuff, so there's got to be a school somewhere in Maine that could use some help. And so of course, in my delusions of grandeur as a relatively youngish educator, I reached out to the top of the system. I figured out, oh, look, the commissioner of education, he went to Bowdoin, so I wrote to him. I had recently met one of the senior vice presidents of Apple because he was friends with somebody who was a parent in our school who was a senior executive at Kodak. So I reached out to him and a number of different people and managed to land a few interviews here and there. Eventually the state did offer me a position to come join the state team. Then a couple days later after the weekend, that job disappeared through a hiring freeze that the legislature passed over the weekend. So I remember calling them back on the Monday after the Friday that they made the offer. I said, "So is there a contract? How does this work?" And they said, "Oh, about that." Unfortunately, during that brief interlude from Friday afternoon when they called me and said, "Hey, we've got something for you," until Monday, I had already told my headmaster, "Hey, I'm going to take that job in Maine." So at that stage, it was kind of like, "Oh, you're dead to me. I'm going to go find someone to fill this position." But I did end up getting back to Maine, ended up landing in a school district for the first couple of years. Then within two years after that, I was at the State Department working with that program. So we were able to provide a laptop to every seventh and eighth grade student initially in every school across the entire state and their teachers. Eventually in the time that I was at the state department running the program and working with others, we were able to expand it to include high schools. Here in Yarmouth, in fact, was one of the first schools to go on their own dime before the state was able to throw some funding behind it. By the time I left the system, which was 10 years later, we had about 60% of the high schools who had provided a laptop to every student. We were still funding the middle school kids. Then a bunch of the schools also now were doing these same kinds of programming in the younger grades because they were using, for the most part, retired devices. So after four years of using the device, we would buy new fleets of devices, and the older ones would trickle down through the system. So we really were one of the very first to do it. Our program ultimately then inspired MIT's $100 laptop program, and that was really from Seymour Papert, again, going back down to MIT and telling his cohort down there, "Hey, did you see what we're doing up in Maine? We've got this cool thing." And they said, "Oh, being MIT peoples, we can engineer a better solution." So they came up with what they thought would be a way to build a computer for $100. It never quite got to 100, but they were able to actually deploy, I think, close to six million computers to students in developing nations around the globe. So that program has persisted to the point where now there are kids who have laptops in Maine schools whose parents had a laptop in a Maine school. I remember even when I was still in the program or recently out of the program, one of my friends who was an IT director up in one of the schools said to me, "Oh yeah, I met some parents who came to the normal parent night to talk about the program and how to take care of the computer and such. They came up to me and said, Hey, this all sounds pretty normal. It's basically what you told us when we were kids." This was the first time a parent had come up to her who had previously been a student who now had a student in the school. So we've definitely gone through the generations, and it's gotten to the point where even when I was still with the program, and I left in 2014, there were kids I would run into, middle school kids who would ask me questions like, "How come my cousin doesn't have a computer?" And I'd say, "Well, where does your cousin live?" "Oh, well, he's in Massachusetts." "Oh, well, because only in Maine do we do this." So kids here in Maine at that time just didn't realize. Why would they know that this wasn't normal? It became a very normal thing in Maine in the same way that probably across the country, one of the major milestones of youth is you turn 16, you get a driver's license. In Maine, it was you become a seventh grader, you get a laptop, and it just became normal. As they often say in the education and technology world, technology are only those things that were invented after you were born. So for these kids nowadays, this program long predates their birth. So it's not new and novel. It's just that's the way it is. That's life. And of course now post pandemic, pretty much every school has put forward some sort of a program to provide devices for kids. I think for better or for worse, the pandemic accelerated the adoption of the technology, which was something that I've always worked on in the public spaces, trying to help schools move forward. But at the same time, because they did it as a result of the pandemic, most of them weren't able to plan in the ways that you would want them to. As a result, I think we're starting to see some pushback, the pendulum swing of schools now backing off because they went too fast for themselves. But it wasn't really their fault. The pandemic just made things happen.

Lisa Belisle: I think for people who don't have this perspective, partially of, we'll call it our experience, when you and I were in college, they still had computer labs. I think I still had a typewriter in my dorm room that had a computer program on it, but if you really wanted to print something off or work on something, you'd go to the computer lab and you'd work on the Mac and then you'd wait for something to print off with the computer next to the computer lab person. We didn't even have cell phones back then.

Jeff Mao: Right.

Lisa Belisle: I mean, that's the perspective. Looking even further back in Yarmouth, there was one computer for our entire middle school, which the math teacher, Mr. Martin, had in the back room. I think it probably ran on some sort of DOS based program. So that's how far things came, and your part in it was incredibly important, because what now exists and is commonly known is something that somebody had to put in place, and that was you.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. I was very lucky to step into things and just run into it. It wasn't necessarily my plan. Looking back in hindsight, I know that the first ever school-based one-to-one programmings, as they're often referred to, was in 1989. It was in Australia, and it was a guy named Bruce Dixon at a girls school who led that effort, and I've gotten to know Bruce over the years. Then in my very first teaching job right out of school, so fall of 1992, I joined a school in New Hampshire, and by the fall of 1993, we deployed a laptop to every freshman in that school. So I was part of that one-to-one program, which was one of the first in the nation. So of course, similar to kids today, I just thought it was normal, like, "Oh, this is what we do in schools now." It was my first school and we decided that it would be a good idea and so we did it. Then when I left that school, went to another school, of course, I would then ask people, "Well, are we going to provide laptops to kids?" And they would look at me like I had two heads, "What are you talking about?" There was a period of time through the '90s where it just wasn't normal and the idea was pretty spectacular. So when Maine first jumped into that, it really was a very groundbreaking idea. It's very normal now, but at the time it was definitely pretty crazy. I'm glad we did it. I think we ended up paving a road that a lot of people don't realize we paved, but I think it helped.

Lisa Belisle: I would also add that you were impacting not only students, but teachers, because for example, my mother was teaching in middle school and she taught for decades and she became pretty proficient. She wasn't a tech person per se, but she became pretty proficient in technologies. Even now, and she's, we'll just say she's a little older, she is one of the people who knows how to do the stuff on the phones. She'll have other friends that will say, "Well, I don't know how to send a photo on my phone." And my mom's like, "I think I could help you with that." That's pretty minor. So I think that's also an interesting sidebar, that if you're giving the stuff to the kids, you also have to make sure that the teachers are helping the kids use these tools.

Jeff Mao: Absolutely. In fact, when we used to talk about the program when I was at the state and representing the program at large, the thing that we used to always push hard on was this is not a technology program. It's a teacher professional development program. This is about helping teachers learn to teach better. Not that they weren't teaching well before, but there's other ways that we can do things to try and improve their practice and help them help kids learn better. That was always the root of the program. I think that's why Maine's program in those years was so successful, because we maintained a focus on trying to help the teachers become better teachers as opposed to just getting distracted by fancy computers, which of course in today's day and age wasn't a very fancy computer. If you really start looking at what we have today, what you carry around in your pocket nowadays has more power than the first laptops that we deployed in 2002, I guess. But at the time, it was state of the art. The idea of even a wifi laptop at the time, people thought we were nuts deploying wifi laptops and building wireless networks in schools because at the time it was so new. So the idea that these public schools would have these systems that most people in their homes did not have, I know that the public outcry here in Maine was very divided. There were some who thought, "This is a crazy idea. Why are you spending all these public dollars on this?" And other people thought, "This is great, that finally we're paying attention to the next generation and we should be doing this for them." So I, for better or for worse, missed most of that early politicking that occurred because I was in New York totally unaware that this was going on until that first post went up on the internet that Maine had signed a contract, and that's when I started reaching out to people.

Lisa Belisle: I also love that, and I think you said it yourself, as somebody when we were younger, we're like, "Why can't I just talk to the top guy?" So I love that you are networking, but you weren't going to talk to the person who's easy to get to. You're like, "I want to go with that guy over there who happens to have a connection." And you had a sense that networking was going to be your ticket.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. It's funny, when I look back on it now, I just think I was probably too naive and too dumb to stop myself, so to speak, which is a good thing, right? Because if I had been maybe more aware of what I was trying to do, I probably would have talked myself out of it. But at the time, I think it was that youth and brazenness that you say, "Well, just because this guy's the senior vice president of Apple," which now I know he was one of the inner circle that hung out with Steve Jobs, but he handed me his card when I met him and said, "Hey, if you ever need anything, reach out." So I did. Then I didn't know Duke Albanese at the time, but when I looked him up and I Googled around, I was like, oh, this guy went to Bowdoin. Well, then polar bears, I'll write him a note. It led to an interview and ultimately to an offer that, again, didn't quite materialize. It took a couple of years of downtime before it finally worked out, but it did. And now I see Duke at the annual Colby hockey game. So it's an interesting path that I've walked over the years, and it's definitely not the one that I thought I was going to walk on.

Lisa Belisle: Well, this, in an interesting way, brings me to the cookbook that you wrote, Essential Chinese Hot Pot Cookbook, which you wrote in 2021. It brings me to the Sichuan dragon bagel that you've created that won best bagel at the 2025 Maine Bagel Bake Off judged by national experts. And you're not somebody who has a baking background per se.

Jeff Mao: Not a formal baking background, no.

Lisa Belisle: Not formal. Right. But the idea that you could say, "Well, I would like to do these things, let's see if I can, and let's see if I could talk to people who might be able to help me." It kind of follows. It's not just a youthful naivete, it's also, "Hey, why not?" Not everybody has that. Some people would be like, "Well, I'm not a this or that. This is what I am. This is what I'm not." But I guess that's not you, Jeff. You've said, "I can be one of these other things."

Jeff Mao: I guess so. It's interesting because on one hand, I do tend to just do that. I pick, "Oh, I'm going to do this," and I just do it. When I went into government, I didn't know anything about actually working for government. When I decided to write the book, it was based on another connection through Bowdoin, but this publisher then offered me this opportunity to do it and I thought, "Let's do it." I figured, I know how to write. I've never actually formally written a recipe or anything like that, but let's just do it. And I figured it out. I guess most of the things that I've done over the years has been that way, because if you look at my pedigree, so to speak, I went to a good college, I studied history and I had a Russian language and literature minor, but then when I started teaching, I taught math. So history and Russian kind of gone, start teaching math. Then because I taught math, they gave me the computer lab because that's what you do. "Oh, someone has to take you to the lab. Give it to the math teacher." Which then eventually turned me into the IT guy. I didn't know anything about it. I still remember reading these white papers online, trying to understand how computer networks worked and being completely flummoxed by them. I couldn't figure them out for the longest time. I'm drawing things on the chalkboard, literally a chalkboard still, and trying to understand what is an IP address and what is a subnet mask and all these technical things. Eventually I figured it out, but it was a lot of reading and a lot of exchange of information and questions and answers on things like listservs, which eventually become things like bulletin boards and discussion groups. Nowadays, I do the same kinds of things in Reddit groups and in Facebook groups, but now I'm often talking about bagels with people. Same thing, I took a bagel class, but it was just a simple consumer bagel class at King Arthur Flour, but that was way back in 2015, long before I ever thought I'd bake a bagel and sell it to somebody. It was just because I had an interest. I thought, "Oh, this would be fun. I'm going to go learn to bake a bagel." But I guess I just kept reading. The thing that I think has been interesting that I've noticed the most about a lot of these things is while I wasn't a math major, somehow at least I was good through middle school and into high school math, which I think is the math that most people actually need for their day-to-day lives. But many of them I've discovered, especially after having taught middle school math, a lot of people don't actually get. You see the same thing in the baking world now, because I interact with lots of bakers, and there are a lot of folks who are just hobby bakers, just like I was when I started, and they don't always know their basic science. So you can tell by the phrasing of their questions that they don't always understand things, simple questions like, "What temperature should I boil the water at?" I said, "Well, if it's boiling, I think I know what temperature it's at unless you live in Denver, but for the most part, we know what temperature the water's going to boil at." So I think it's just a matter of taking the background of information you have and piecing it all together. Maybe at some levels it is a bit of the advice that they always say when we were at Bowdoin, which is liberal arts education, and this idea that having an understanding of lots of things helps you then do whatever it is that you're going to do. So I think that definitely has rung true in my ability to jump around from being a math teacher to a computer person, to a school administrator, and then a government bureaucrat. Really in government, the things that I spent a lot of my time on were things like procurement, leasing, finance, along with technology, the context with the technology and the education and teaching and learning, but I had to learn all those other things on the backside as well as just understanding how policy is made. So I had to go through all of those things, but just kept learning it on the fly. So maybe it's a bit of a mindset thing that given enough time. That's definitely something we talk about a lot in education that I guess I've always just held onto and decided it's true, which is for anybody, you can learn pretty much anything given the time. It may be that the amount of time you need to learn it is more than you've got, entirely possible, but you don't really know until you just start going down that road and trying to figure it out.

Lisa Belisle: You also mentioned something that I think is important, and that is there's people who are, you call them hobby bakers, and then there are people who are trying to turn things into a business. I know because when my daughter and I showed up at the Town Green in Freeport, there weren't that many people hanging out at the town green that day, but you were there, you were under your pop-up tent with your products and you were the one selling and you were frontline doing the work, which I think also seems like a theme for you. You're willing to put the hours in, not only to learn these things, but to do the work required to actually build products, build businesses and create success for yourself.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. For me, I've always just thought of it as a necessity. You have to do the work. Nothing is free, so to speak. And for better or for worse, one of the things I think I've always been challenged by is that sometimes I do just go and do everything and I don't necessarily seek help or let others do it. So for years, I've been constantly working on my ability to delegate, which I'm still not great at. But right now as a solopreneur, as they say, it doesn't really matter because I've got no one to delegate it to. But that's something I continue to contemplate. If I open a brick and mortar bagel shop, I know that I can't do that alone, right? Not only the planning effort, I need help in the planning parts because there's parts of that process that I just don't know. But once you literally are open, I can't bake and work the front counter and sell something and restock something over there and be rolling bagels and baking bagels. You can't be in all those different places, so I'm going to have to bring people on and figure that out with them. I definitely learned a lot about being better at that when I was at the state, because the laptop program was something that was way bigger than any one person. So for better or for worse, I was often the front person and the one who was speaking to the legislature or speaking to the press, but there were a lot of people behind me running around doing things. Fortunately, they did a good job and so they made me look good most of the time. When I didn't look good, it wasn't necessarily that they didn't do a good job, but sometimes it's just the way it goes, that public perception is always so positive about things, especially when you're talking public dollars. So I think learning to delegate was one of those things that I still continue to work on because I'm pretty good at just grabbing something and saying, "Here, just let me do this." And you know that that's not always the right way. So that's a bit of a push pull.

Lisa Belisle: But it's also a pretty significant reality. So my husband and I, we do this podcast, we have a family business that's the art gallery, but we also have additional things that we work on and we're the ones who are doing the work. So if you're a content creator, you're also a content editor and a content promoter, for example. If you're doing one sort of media, you're teaching yourself different ways to get that media out there, which means you're doing your own photoshopping and you're learning how to market. I think when you start out as a solopreneur, as you put it, if you're bootstrapping it, that's just what you do. And it's simultaneously, I find it very interesting and fun, because as a doctor, I learned a bunch of stuff. A lot of it I'm not really using right now, but we weren't building stuff. I think that's what I really enjoy about your story and about myself working on these things, that you're building it, you're figuring it out, you're networking with people who know how to do this stuff, and it's just a really different experience than I think if you're working for a corporate structure or you're working in the government.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. I remember one of my good friends who's worked with me at two different places, he worked for me at the state of Maine and then he worked with me when I was at Common Sense Media, and he has always said to me, because he's very good, he's always been kind of my right hand person. So he likes to not be out in front, but he likes to do the work on the back end. He's often said to me, "The key to you, Jeff, is that you need to be in a position where you have command and control. It doesn't mean you have to do everything, but you're always better when you can be the one to make the primary decisions." At some levels, that was, I think, one of the struggles I've had at some of the jobs that I've held over the years where I wasn't maybe given full autonomy, but as you said, that's kind of the real world and the corporate structure. I think it worked out well at the laptop program because while I technically did report to the commissioner, for example, the commissioner was far too busy to be micromanaging what I was doing, and for better or for worse, the legislation that created MLTI, the laptop program, didn't have any real teeth to it. It just said, "This program will exist. Here are some basic guiding principles. Go do it." So we just did it and we did what was necessary. So now being able to control my own destiny with the baking business and the food business has given me again that opportunity to figure it out and build it on my own and be in control of it. And for better or worse, hopefully it'll work out. It's been working out, but it's still a long way to go, but it's been fun.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things I like about what you're doing is that you're integrating your own cultural, family cultural background with bagel making. Even this idea of the Sichuan dragon bagel, that seems pretty unique.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. One of the things that's been very interesting for me, and it goes way back. When I first was given my Chinese name by my family, which I wasn't born with, but later they said, "Oh, we need to give you Chinese names." Then I was told, "This is what your Chinese name means, and it has a meaning. It basically means contemplating your ancestors or contemplating ancestry." And for whatever reason, I don't know that it was necessarily because that was my name that it was given, but I have always been kind of curious, particularly growing up with a name like Mao. The first thing people always say to you is, "Are you related?" For years, I would say, "I don't know. I have no idea." Over the last 20 or so years, we've had much more opportunity to start learning more and more about the family. It was almost slightly less than 20 years ago that I got to take my first trip to China and started to learn more about this. That was the beginning of my own personal journey, just learning more about my cultural background, because otherwise for the most part, I grew up as a regular American kid. I always knew that I was Chinese, but typical of boys growing up, the thing that helped me move along through things was the fact that I was good at sports. So with guys, if you're good at sports, you're accepted among the peer group immediately, for better or for worse. But that's typically the way it goes in most teenage circles. If you're good at sports, people accept you no matter what you look like or how you might eat weird foods or who knows. It doesn't really matter. If you're good, everyone's happy. So I started to learn more about the family and the Chinese cultural background. Things like the cookbook were a great opportunity for me to delve back into it, a couple of trips to China and then learning more about the family. So I know that when I first went back to China, that was 2008, I had a chance to visit with my father who at the time was then living in China. He had moved back for a while. He had done some research and was able to isolate and through a variety of different kind of random chance meetings with different peoples, finally eventually found our ancestral village. So there is this little village that's a couple hours drive through these little windy roads back into the mountains from Fujian, down in the Fujian province, which is kind of directly across from Taiwan. There's this little village there that has about 4,000 people living in it, and about 3,000 out of 4,000 all have the name Mao. As it turns out, someone 18 generations before me founded the town. So we're the direct lineage of the founder of this town who was a Mao. Then lots of people, of course, were then related over the years. They have family tree books, and when my father first found these books, he discovered I was already in the book, which was pretty cool, because my grandfather had written a book about his mother to honor his mother and included a family tree that went as far as my brother and I, and somebody in that town got a copy of it and scribed it back in. So there are these books that go all the way back to like the 1500s and even into the late 1400s, I think, and we were already in there. So that gave us a huge amount of history that before was always this notion of just kind of amorphous, yeah, I'm Chinese and China's that thing on the other side of the map, but I'd never been there up until then. Then when I finally got to go there, it really rooted you, standing in this little village when you realize, oh, my family's been here, in this house because the house is still standing. It's just unoccupied because everyone knows it's the founding family's home, but they had been there for 400 years or 500 years at this stage. So it was kind of a big mind shift from going from this vague notion to like, "Oh, my family's from here, right here." So fast forward all the way to the bagel, it was really just a matter of, I wanted to have a bagel, particularly for that competition. So the Maine bagel bake off, they told us, "Bring a dozen bagels." I said, "Well, what kind of bagels do you want us to bring?" They said, "You pick." So I remember having conversations with a couple folks at the farmer's market, "What should I bring? What should I bring?" I started proposing to somebody, "What if I made a bagel that was kind of Chinese flavored?" Because I had previously made a bagel that had some basic Chinese flavors, just garlic, scallion, and ginger. And I remember saying to somebody, because that's more me. That's when she said to me, "Well, that's the bagel you should bring then." So that's the one I leaned into and then added more to it until I decided it just needed a little bit more kick. So that's where the chilies and the sichuan peppercorn got added to that. And that's ultimately the bagel that I then entered. It worked out, obviously, it did win, and it's become one of my better sellers. I think it's interesting to see the American palate. There are those who, of course, some people just don't like spicy foods, but increasingly more and more people like spicy foods. So when I explain it to people, they're like, "Oh, I have to try that bagel." So far anyway, everyone who's had it, who's at least come back to tell me, they really liked it. I guess someone out there probably didn't like it, but they haven't come back to tell me that. So I'll keep baking it.

Lisa Belisle: I think it's interesting to me because my brother-in-law is also Chinese and he has very strong ties back through his father who's now deceased, but his parents are from China. And I think it is easy to think, "Oh, somebody is Chinese the same way that somebody is from India." Those are enormous places. So when I talk to somebody and they say, "Oh, I'm from this particular place in this enormous country," it's kind of like somebody saying, "Well, you're from the US." It's like, sure, I'm from the US, but I'm from Maine.

Jeff Mao: It's like when I first came to Bowdoin and somebody, freshman year, everyone was, "Oh, where are you from?" And I remember telling someone California, and they said, "Oh, do you know?" And they threw a name out at me, and people kept doing that. And I'm like, "You think I know someone named Jenny and I'm from California? There's a lot of people in California." Eventually somebody said, "Do you know?" And they threw a name at me, a girl who was in my class in high school, and I looked at him like, "How did you?" And it turns out he was from San Francisco and I was from Mill Valley, which is 15 minutes across the bridge. So we were from the same basic place and it turned out that it was someone local to me. But after having so many people throw darts and completely miss, "Oh, I met this girl from California once, her name was Jennifer, do you know her?" And you're thinking, "I don't think so." And then having someone actually throw somebody out and saying, "Do you know this person?" And then you say, "Oh, I do. I went to high school with her."

Lisa Belisle: But some of that, I don't know where this person from Bowdoin is from, but the interesting thing is, having myself lived in Maine a big chunk of my life, if you ask somebody from Maine if they know somebody else from Maine, there's probably a pretty good chance that they might know that person. So here you are coming into a relatively smallish state, certainly a much less populated state than California, definitely much less populated area than China. And you're like, "Why would I know this person?" But if you're from Maine, you're like, "Why wouldn't you know these people?" Because your concept of space and locality is so different.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. I think that finding that village was really great. Then to throw a couple more elements into that, if we go back four more generations from the founder of that town, you reach a person who was a military leader who had nine grandsons. So he's now known as the kind of, the town he lived in is now known as the city of Dragon, because the mythical Chinese dragon had nine sons. So he had nine grandsons. He's famous because of course his seventh grandson leads to Chairman Mao, but his ninth grandson leads to me. So we go back 22 generations and there is a common ancestor, but that makes Chairman Mao my kind of, I don't know, cousin 21 times removed or something, very, very distant. But we at least now have the written records that line it all back up. Then it does get lost into kind of antiquity, so to speak, but the Mao family does go all the way back to the first emperor of the Zhou Dynasty when the family was created. So even in Western names, there's lots of names that actually were vocational or geographic. Someone was named Smith, they probably had a blacksmith in their family somewhere way back when. And there are Chinese names similar, same kind of things that they're connected to the vocation or to where they lived. The Mao family turns out was constructed because the emperor's son was born, in this case, his ninth son was born on the day of an earthquake, and they decided that was auspicious. So they created a new name. He's even in Wikipedia. You find this emperor on Wikipedia and it shows the list of his kids. One of them's right there. It's the Duke of Mao. And there used to be a kingdom of Mao in China. And there are a lot of written records still that talk about him and then some of the family as it continues, and then there's not a direct family tree that goes back because this is 3,000 years ago, but we do know that the family does ultimately connect back. So I'm pretty confident everyone I've ever met who's named Mao that has the same Chinese character, Mao, we're all one big giant family. But there's a lot of people in the United States who came from China whose name is Mao, but it's not the same Mao. It's just that when you translate it back into English letters, it's the easiest spelling for whatever the closest thing, Chinese characters go. So it is a relatively rare-ish name in China. I know when I've gone back to China, people always comment on it, "Oh, you share a name with our great leader," is kind of the common phrase that people would say to me. And I just kind of nod and say, "Yeah." I don't usually tell them the whole story because I'm not sure if that would play well or not. I have no idea.

Lisa Belisle: Do you speak any dialect of...

Jeff Mao: No. So my father was born in China, spoke a number of different dialects. My mother was born in New York, Chinese, but born in New York. So when we were kids, I think they just made a decision that, well, since mom doesn't speak Chinese and dad does, then why bother speaking Chinese to the kids because mom won't know what's going on either. So I didn't grow up speaking Chinese. So it's one of those things that I wish I did for a variety of reasons. Even the simplest is that Chinese food's better in Chinese food restaurants if you speak Chinese. If you don't, then you get the same menu as everybody else. Growing up with family around me who spoke Chinese, I grew accustomed to eating a certain kind of flavor base in the Chinese food, especially in the San Francisco area. So there's a big Chinese population. Then I come out here and it's very Americanized Chinese food, it's very different. And of course, even if the chefs know how to do it that way, if you don't speak Chinese, they won't cook it for you. They just don't trust it. It's a funny little thing that they do.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I love that you're talking about this, because when I was last talking with my brother-in-law and I asked him what he was going to do for his birthday, he said, "I'm going to get some Chinese food." And I was like, "Oh, well, where do you get your Chinese food?" Because my version of Chinese food is very Americanized. And he told me the places, and actually we did choose to go to that place, and I was like, "Wow, this is really different and very tasty." But when I went one step further and said, "Is there a regional relationship to the food in these places?" He said, "Well, it's hard to get regionally based Chinese food in states like Maine. If you go to a place like New York or you go to a place like Massachusetts, like in Boston, you can-"

Jeff Mao: Major metros.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah. You can absolutely get something that is going to be more specific, but I don't know why I ever thought about, I didn't think about this. It's like somebody saying, can you get, I don't know, it's like if I went to someplace in France and I was like, well, just give me some French something. What does that even mean? But it's an interesting thing to think that sometimes we lack the specificity because we don't even understand what we are or are not missing.

Jeff Mao: Right. I saw a thread online recently, somebody had asked a question in a board asking, in other countries, do they have American restaurants that serve as bad American food as we serve as say Chinese food in the United States? And some people chimed in, "Oh yeah, I was in such and such a country and they had this American restaurant," and then they started describing the food, which was a mishmash of things, which of course to an American, you're kind of like, well, why did they pair that together? So I guess when you leave any country and you transport that idea somewhere else, it always gets modified and changed, but to some degree it also then, the reality is in the food world, it just creates a whole new version of the food. In fact, I was just talking to somebody today at my bagel pop-up about the bagels, because people always ask me like, "Do you boil these bagels?" I say, "Yes, I boil the bagels." And we kind of talk about, are these bagels authentic New York bagels? And I do try and do what I think is a New York bagel, but it's a New York bagel that I think is probably a 1970s, '80s New York bagel. What's really interesting is that in the bagel world, what we found is, and I kind of ran into this pretty significantly just the other week, I was down at Bagelfest. There's this big industry event in New York City, Bagelfest, and I got invited down to judge this event. So I was one of the judges that got to pick the best bagel and we tried 23 different bagels. So 23 different bagel companies entered, they all submitted their plain bagel. We had to eat 23 plain bagels and they were wildly different across the spectrum of these bagels. Among the nine judges, some of us had picked a couple of them that we thought, "Oh, these are the best ones." And some of the other judges said, "Oh, those are the worst ones on my list." And they said, "I really like this one." And I'd look and I'd say, "Oh, well, that was like one of the worst ones on my list." And there was clearly these different versions of what we think of as a New York bagel. After more discussion with some folks about this, I think what we realized was that some of the bagel shops, for example, were not from New York. They were coming in from elsewhere. And in the same way that you get someone who might leave a country, like say maybe someone leaves China at a certain time, maybe in the 1950s, and they came to the United States, maybe they opened a restaurant, the style of Chinese food they're cooking is going to be authentic to the 1950s from wherever they came from. And they probably will hang onto that style. It'll morph a little bit just to localize it so the locals will eat it. But in general, it's locked in time to that version of the food because that's their taste memory. It's their nostalgia. This is how it was back home. Even though maybe they came from Beijing, big giant city, the food evolves over time, and so move forward 50, 60, 70 years, and it's going to be very different than what that person's cooking. And the same thing happened in the bagel world. There are a lot of New York expats who left New York. Maybe they grew up in New York, but now they live on the West Coast and they've opened a bagel shop. So they're baking a bagel from their childhood, but today's bagels in New York are very different. They're much bigger, they're much poofier and softer as opposed to chewy and crusty. So there's some really fundamental differences between the way the bagel gets baked from the way it was in the 70s and 80s to the way it is today. And it is one of these very interesting things how people lock in on a certain style, oftentimes based on when they left that place, right? So it happens with ethnic foods very commonly. And I think it's even happened then with the bagel that most of the bagels that I really liked were actually non-New York bagel shops, many of whom were either New York expats or people who simply were chasing after something maybe they had tried. And that's very much me. I was never actually a New Yorker living in New York City, but I ate bagels in the 70s, 80s, and that's kind of what imprinted on my brain, "Oh, this is a New York bagel, and that's what I want to bake." And a lot of what I do is even just based on one simple video that I found from the late 70s produced by the Brooklyn Library where they were trying to capture local culture and stuff. So there's this little seven minute video where they went into a bagel shop and they just watched them bake bagels and the people baking them talked through the process. This is what we do and this is how we do it and so on and so forth. So I've modeled a lot just even on that from what I could glean between what they said and what I could see and say, okay, that follows the process that I thought I was supposed to follow and the size of the bagel, because the size of the bagel affects the crust and the crumb. If it's too big, you get breadier and it's not quite as chewy, and all these different things factor in. So I do model after that version, but it's really interesting to see how food has changed over time in different places and how some things lock in and other things continue to evolve. So this notion of authenticity is a really big moving target. In some ways it's almost like a lost concept. To say something is authentic is almost semi-meaningless, because what's authentic to someone who grew up in the 2000s, maybe a millennial or something from New York is going to be completely different than someone who grew up in the 60s and 70s in New York. It could be in the same part of New York, even in the same borough, in the same street, in the same neighborhood, and it's going to be different.

Lisa Belisle: I can see why you were a history major at Bowdoin.

Jeff Mao: Perhaps, although honestly, I was a Russian major until I realized I didn't speak Russian, and it kind of caught up with me. I think I spent too much time running and turning left at Farley Fieldhouse and not enough time practicing my Russian. So by junior year, I realized I just don't speak Russian well enough to finish this major. So back then, talking about what we had back then, we had a course catalog, literally a printed book, and I flipped through the course catalog until I figured out which departments do I have enough coursework in that I can actually finish a degree before my supposed graduation date. And history was the only department that I had enough credits in because I had taken lots of classes across lots of different things. I did that liberal artsy thing. I took some anthropology classes and some art history classes and some music classes all over the place, but fortunately I had enough history classes I could finish a history degree. So that got me through the history piece, although I have found that I guess maybe working in government, understanding history became more important. I think that definitely did help me there. Anthropology classes also really helped me, I think, in government.

Lisa Belisle: So I should say, Bowdoin's not paying us to have a conversation around how wonderful Bowdoin is or how wonderful liberal arts education is. But I think essentially you're kind of proving the point right now. Even to say, "Well, I was a history major by default," but somebody who studies history, it can mean so many different things. And you kind of backed into it a little bit, but even now you're engaging in living, like food ways now, you're living history. And I love that, because I think the context means a lot. It's very important to understand where things came from, because if you don't understand that, then you might think, "Oh, something just sprang up de novo," and then it means a lot less.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. And I don't know that I have the time or the energy or even the expertise per se to do it, but I've always thought from my education work that if somebody could craft a history, and it wouldn't even necessarily be purely history, social studies, it would really be very cross-curricular, but a curriculum about food, I think kids would engage with it so much more deeply, particularly in today's day and age where identity and cultural identity has become so much more important to people, right? The notion of the melting pot of the United States, I remember I actually made this comment at my very first faculty meeting as a barely out of college kid when they were talking about cultural diversity. They didn't even use those terms at the time, but that's what they were talking about at the school. And I said to them, "You may not want to talk melting pot. It's more like salad bowl. We go in and there's cucumbers and there's this and that, but you maintain yourself. You're part of the salad, but you're still a cucumber or you're still a tomato because it's important to you." And in today's day and age, I think kids would engage with that because everybody engages with food and we all have certain foods that we love, and then starting to understand them. Because I can remember history classes, social studies even in grade school, and this idea of things like the Silk Road and mercantilism and trade and all these things, which at the time, I think when we were kids was just these kinds of things that you tried to memorize and you're like, "I don't know why we're learning this stuff." I mean, that was always kind of history classes when you were in grade school. But now, when you start to talk to somebody about the idea of the Sichuan dragon bagel that has sichuan chilies in it and chilies and hot, spicy food is now so deeply associated with central China, Sichuanese food and Hunan food and Guiyang and Guizhou province, that central region has a lot of hot and spicy food, but the chili pepper didn't come from there, right? The chili pepper came from Central America and it was Spanish and Portuguese traders who eventually brought it to China and to Europe and other places, and it's now proliferated all over the globe that people have chili peppers. So if you go back far enough in time, probably before the 1500s, there were no spicy food in Sichuan. But today, if you ask someone about Sichuanese food, they say, "Oh, it's always hot and spicy." Just like Thai food, right? Southeast Asian food is often really hot and spicy and that's kind of the signature of that food in our minds, but it wasn't always that way. So I think if you go through that idea, then kids would understand trade better and understand the notion of globalism and what the Silk Road really represented and how it affected things, because everyone, I think, is curious about their own backgrounds and what was the food that my grandmother made me and that she used to get from her grandmother because it dates back to wherever. So I always have thought that would be a really interesting way to teach history, but trade. And then of course when you get into food, then you very quickly get into science and math, because as I said before, understanding what temperature water boils at, or the fact that you don't get to pick, is a great science lesson. So you could hit all kinds of topics if we just built a curriculum around food and where it came from. I think it'd be really interesting. I just don't know that I have the time to pull it off.

Lisa Belisle: Well, maybe if you start delegating.

Jeff Mao: Yeah. Right.

Lisa Belisle: I mean, you're still young, Jeff. Maybe you got one or two kind of things left in you.

Jeff Mao: One or two, yeah.

Lisa Belisle: If you do, I want you to come back, because I love this topic. I think it's very apropos because you're right, it's something that we all have to eat. It's a very practical thing for us to understand and it's kind of fun.

Jeff Mao: It's fun, and food brings people together, which I think nowadays we need more of that. We need more people sitting down at a table, breaking bread figuratively and literally and just talking and hanging out as opposed to where our general society, whether it's people screaming at each other online or in Washington DC or wherever they happen to be, there's so much of a lack of real conversation occurring. You sit down and have a meal with somebody, usually that helps to just settle things down and have a real conversation.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I realize as you were saying this, that I've been mispronouncing the name of your bagel. It's the Sichuan dragon bagel. I was calling it something else, but we'll just...

Jeff Mao: Sichuan, sechuan.

Lisa Belisle: But I like that. See, I learned things and I really like learning how to pronounce things. So that's been helpful. I really enjoyed our conversation. I've enjoyed catching up with you. It's been a few years since, I mean, we've seen each other a few times between Bowdoin and now, but I love hearing about people and the directions their lives have taken them. So I appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me today.

Jeff Mao: Thanks for having me. It's been fun.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you've been listening to or watching our video podcast, Radio Maine, sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. The only thing I can't really do for you is to reach through the camera and give you one of the bagels that Jeff actually brought to our studio to share with us. So you're going to have to go find him and try out one of his Sichuan dragon bagels either in the Freeport farmer's market or where else can they buy your bagels, Jeff?

Jeff Mao: Well, if it's warm weather months, also the Cumberland Farmers Market. During the winter right now, I've been doing pop-ups at Wild Oats Bakery in Brunswick, and then some folks just order direct from me on my website and pick it up where I bake, which is at Midcoast Hunger Prevention Program in Brunswick.

Lisa Belisle: Well, there you are. I hope that you will, if you're listening to this and you're starting to salivate, I hope you'll complete the action and actually break some of Jeff's bread and engage in it, because I think hearing about these things and watching us talk, that's one thing, but really having a taste of that history is probably going to bring it home for you. So I've been talking with Jeff Mao. He is the founder and operator of Knead and Nosh. He's also an educator, author, and former statewide leader in education technology and a fellow Bowdoin graduate. It's been great to have this conversation with you today.

Jeff Mao: Thank you.