Brennan’s fascination with food culture and history was catalyzed by a trip to Western Europe with his family in 2009 to study communal brick ovens. He began baking bread soon after, baking out of his father’s own brick oven and selling at local farmers markets during his high school summers. He has a degree from Whitman College in Environmental Humanities—which for him meant exploring our culture’s relationship to food—and he has worked in restaurants and bakeries in San Francisco, Portland, and Asheville. His new project, the Walnut Schoolhouse, is for him a way to piece together those disparate experiences, combining his curiosity in food studies with his love of hands-on cooking. Here, he and others collaborate on baking workshops as well as interdisciplinary projects like food writing and foraging for cake decorations, in addition to putting on community events and baking for markets.