“I want food that you can eat and feel fantastic afterward,” says Renee Jakaitis Trafton ’07. “I want food that makes you feel powerful.” As the owner and head chef of Beak Restaurant in Sitka, Alaska, she's on a mission to not only provide delicious food, but create a healthy work environment for her employees. Case in point: Beak opened in 2017 as a no-tipping restaurant as a way to arm her front-of-house workers with a consistent wage and liberate them from potential guest harassment. Trafton—a semifinalist for Best Chef (Northwest and Pacific) at the 2023 James Beard Foundation restaurant awards—traces her restaurant philosophy back to Oberlin where she was, indeed, a philosophy major. She was also a member of OSCA, initially overseeing their tofu-making program and then being elected lead dinner cook at Harkness Hall for four semesters. “Majoring in philosophy, you can work on a paper for two hours and get two sentences,” she says. “If you’re working in the kitchen for two ho...