Kitchen confidential with Sophia Bush
The actress and activist dishes on what sustainable living looks like for her at home in Los Angeles.
Sophia Bush is no stranger to forward-thinking. Whether it’s her public advocacy work for voting rights and gun control or personal shifts toward eco-friendly living at home, the same thoughtful approach applies. She’s playing the long game, focusing on the small moves that add up to big change.
Her day-to-day routines at her mid-century home in the Hollywood Hills are no exception. She spent years restoring the house and almost a decade developing its impressive hobby farm, which now yields a backyard bounty of produce, eggs and honey.
Read on to hear how Sophia weaves earth-friendly practices into her everyday—and how it’s all a work in progress.
Food for thought
Building planet-friendly habits into your everyday life might seem overwhelming. On her journey, Sophia has discovered a few guiding ideas:
■ Start small: “Lean into what you can do. It’ll remind you how capable you are.” For the self-proclaimed foodie, sourcing local ingredients—and growing her own (including avocados!)—was a simple way to start.
■ Nature knows best: “Nature builds in a closed loop,” Sophia says. “Everything has a life cycle and gets reused. Us humans, we’re the only ones who make trash.”
■ Adopt a community mindset: Sophia takes a cue from her backyard beehive. “The way the bees work in cohort, in perfect harmony to keep the community healthy, is something that the rest of us could learn from.”
“It’s incredible how wild the city used to be,” says Sophia. “Laurel Canyon used to be a hunting trail. People would venture up to these canyons that span Los Angeles to deer hunt. When I see critters in the yard or ravens sitting in our big tree, it feels really cool to be contributing to a healthy ecosystem in a way that I can.”
“For me, figuring out how to lead a more sustainable life is a work in progress.”
—Sophia Bush
Sophia’s breakfast salad
One of Sophia’s garden-to-table go-to’s is inspired by a favorite LA restaurant, All Time. She tosses gem lettuce with a simple homemade vinaigrette (featuring honey from her hive!) and tops it off with a runny egg straight from her coop. “Egg shells are great for compost,” she says. “They go into the ground and become fertilizer for the garden or into chicken feed to support the chickens themselves.”