Carol Lee Flinders is an author and former vegetarian food writer/syndicated columnist. She is best known as one of the three authors of the vegetarian cookbook Laurel's Kitchen along with Laurel Robertson and Bronwen Godfrey. She also wrote the syndicated news column "Laurel's Kitchen" based on the cookbook.
Flinders was born to Gilbert H. and Jeanne Lee Ramage, and grew up on a farm in Oregon's Willamette Valley. In 1958 her family moved to Spokane. She graduated from North Central High School (Spokane, Washington) in 1961, later receiving a bachelor's degree from Stanford University, and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley.
Flinders became nationally known in 1976 through her coauthorship of Laurel's Kitchen, a widely acclaimed guide to vegetarian cookery that has been described as a "renowned countercultural cookbook," and as "the Fannie Farmer of vegetarian cooking." Later, cultural historians contended that "Laurel's Kitchen was as much a lifestyle guide as it was a cookbook." Flinders also wrote a weekly syndicated column called âÂÂLaurelâÂÂs Kitchenâ for a number of years.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Flinders published a series of books on spirituality. The first published in 1989,The Making of a Teacher, (coauthored with her husband Timothy Flinders) provided an oral history of the life and work of Eknath Easwaran, who had helped inspire the creation of Laurel's Kitchen.
She was a lecturer in spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California.
Flinders published the syndicated newspaper column based on her cookbook, Laurel's Kitchen for many years. In 1987 it appeared in 20 newspapers. The column was published in a number of newspapers including The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), and The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR).