Edible Communities Publications - Local Food Magazines - Stories and Recipes from the Sustainable Food and Farm Scene

Edible Communities Publications is excited to announce our first Edible Institute, a gathering of influential writers, thinkers, and eaters from around the country. (Tickets are available to public for the Edible Institute at Brown Paper Tickets.)

Agenda for Edible Institute, Thursday, January 28, 2010:

Edible Institute Keynote Speaker: Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture: (TBD) Why Sustainability Matters

Panel #1 Communicating SOLE Food Messages: How Journalists are Telling Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical Stories
Moderator: Brian Halweil, World Watch Fellow, Edible East End, Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Leading journalists who cover the sustainable food beat discuss the importance of SOLE food stories and the pushback of industrial agriculture. Jane Black: staff writer at the Washington Post food section, Tom Philpott: Grist.org., Samuel Fromartz: Author, Organic, Inc., Elissa Altman: The Huffington Post.

In Conversation: Tom Phillpott and Maisie Greenawalt.
Tom Philpott, food editor for Grist and Maisie Greenawalt, Vice President and Director of Communications & Strategic Initiatives at Bon Appetit Management Company, will discuss BAMCO’s support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, and why labor and human rights issues have yet to make an impact on the sustainable food movement.

Panel #2 The Southwest Foodshed: Sustaining the Culinary Heritage of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma.
Kate Manchester, publisher of Edible Santa Fe, will moderate a panel on the Southwest Foodshed: Sustaining the Agricultural and Culinary Heritage of the Southwest. Deborah Madison, author What We Eat When We Eat Alone Gary Nabhan, PhD., writer, lecturer, food and farming advocate, and Emigdio Ballon, Director of Agriculture at the Pueblo of Tesuque.

In Conversation with Lisa Hamilton and Will Harris.
Journalist Lisa Hamilton and cattle rancher Will Harris discuss his decision to switch his family’s operation from industrial/commodity practices to one that features sustainable and organic methods.

Panelist bios:

Fred Kirschenmann: is a distinguished fellow the of Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and its former director. Fred is the president of Kirschenmann Family Farms, a 3,500-acre certified organic farm in Windsor, North Dakota. He has served on the National Organic Standards Board, and in 2006 was appointed to the National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (funded by Pew Charitable Trusts) to conduct a two-year study of key aspects in the farm animal industry. He serves on numerous boards for non-profit organizations involved in food, farming and conservation.

Jane Black: staff writer at the Washington Post food section, covering everything from restaurants and trends to food policy and culture. Before moving to Washington she was food editor at Boston Magazine. She has also written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Chow, Food & Wine, and BusinessWeek.

Tom Philpott: in addition to being a full-time farmer at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, he is food editor for Seattle-based Grist.org, and writes the nation’s only weekly column on food politics (called Victual Reality).

Samuel Fromartz: is a business journalist who began his career at Reuters in 1985 working as a correspondent and editor in New York and Washington, D.C. His work has since appeared in Fortune Small Business, Inc., Business Week, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is the author of “Organic, Inc.” (Harcourt, 2006).

Elissa Altman: is the founder of the blog Poor Man’s Feast and has written about food, culture, and publishing for The Huffington Post since 2007, where her subjects have ranged from Monsanto and the death of real food, to food safety, slow media, and what was eaten on the GOP campaign bus. A longtime editor at HarperCollins and Clarkson Potter, her print work has appeared in publications running the gamut from Saveur and the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and beyond.

Deborah Madison: her most recent book is “What We Eat When We Eat Alone.” From her website: “My interests lay with issues of biodiversity, seasonal and local eating, farmers markets, and small and mid-scale farming. I am on the board of the Seed Savers Exchange, have been involved with Slow Food for over a decade, and am presently co- director of the Monte del Sol Edible Kitchen Garden in Santa Fe, New Mexico.”

Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD.: is an Arab-American writer, lecturer, food and farming advocate, rural lifeways folklorist, and conservationist whose work has long been rooted in the U.S./Mexico borderlands region he affectionately calls “the stinkin’ hot desert.” He recently accepted a tenured professorship as a Research Social Scientist based at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona.

Emigdio Ballon: was born in the High Andes Mountains, in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He is currently the Director of Agriculture at the Pueblo of Tesuque, the Executive Director of Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute, and serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Insititute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he teaches Ethno-Botony. He is also a plant geneticist and has specialized in research on quinoa and amaranth grains.

Lisa Hamilton: is the author of two books: “Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness” and “Farming to Create Heaven on Earth.” Her work has also been published in The Nation, Harper’s, National Geographic Traveler, Orion, and Gastronomica.

Will Harris: is a fifth generation cattle farmer and owner of White Oak Pastures, the largest certified organic farm in Georgia. In 1995 Will decided to change his family’s traditional practices of raising corn fed cattle and raise grass fed beef.

Tickets are available to public for the Edible Institute at Brown Paper Tickets.

Edible Institute 2010 is sponsored in part by:

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