George Ball, Jr.
Many consider Ball, the president of Burpee Seed Company, a champion of that most highly prized aspect of fresh produce: fresh, garden-grown taste. He played a major role in helping popularize heirloom tomatoes. Through his catalog, he helped make seeds for such luscious, juicy varieties as the 100-year-old Brandywine tomato available to home growers and small farmers.

Joe Hernandez
Twenty years ago, tomatillos, mangos, or cherimoyas were not readily available at the average grocery store. Along with many other once-unusual produce items, they are now widely available due in part to Hernandez's business, Melissa's/World Variety Produce. Established in 1984 in Los Angeles, and named for Joe's daughter, Melissa's is the largest distributor of specialty produce in the United States. Hernandez and company is often the first call our Test Kitchens professionals make when our local sources are out of an ingredient needed for a recipe.

Mollie Katzen
Although Katzen told Cooking Light in a 2003 interview that she avoids the label "vegetarian," her influence on the cuisine is indisputable. Her classic Moosewood Cookbook, published in 1977, features charming hand-lettered recipes, line drawings, and 221 meatless recipes. It was followed by The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, Vegetable Heaven, Sunlight Café, and a revised Moosewood, in which Katzen updated her recipes to reduce saturated fat. Her latest project: She created healthful recipes for respected Harvard researcher Walter Willett’s book Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less.

Guillermo Payet
Payet immigrated to the United States from his native Peru to work as a software engineer. His love of food and farming dovetailed with his career in 1998, when he launched Localharvest.org. Since then, the Web site has become the go-to online tool for linking farmers' markets, family farms, community-supported agriculture programs, and other sources for locally grown produce with consumers—all connected from a computer in his Santa Cruz, California, home office.

Alice Waters
This list would be incomplete without Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, and author of Chez Panisse Fruits and Chez Panisse Vegetables. She is often credited with bringing the notion of seasonal eating to American restaurants by adopting the European farm-to-table model she discovered on a visit to France. It's a notion that has inspired a generation of chefs and cooks. They, in turn, inspire her, as she once told Cooking Light. "It's those special people who develop the ideas and embrace them who inspire me to go on."

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