I spent last week in Monterey at the Sustainable Foods Institute, which was hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium as part of their Cooking for Solutions event.

Aaron French, who writes the Eco Chef column for the Bay Area News Group newspapers (Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, etc.) and is the Environment Editor with the Civil Eats blog has an excellent wrap up of the panel “Communicating Environmental Messages: How Journalists are Telling Stories of Sustainability.” Jane Black (WaPo), Barry Estabrook (Gourmet), Katherine Alford (Food Network), and Debbie Levin (Environmental Media Association) were on the panel, which was moderated by Sam Fromartz (you can read his recap here: Notes from the Sustainable Food Institute).

Jane Black of the Washington Post, confessed she’d love to write exclusively about sustainable ag issues, and one way for journalists to do just that was to seek out the movers and shakers of the movement and tell their stories; narratives tend to have more impact on readers when told via the personality and character of the subject (see: Barton Seaver Has Something to Save).

Gourmet’s Barry Estabrook confided that none of the glossy food mags (Gourmet included) were doing a good job of bringing issues of sustainability to their readers, and stressed that preaching issues was the surest way to turn off an audience interested in sustainability. (Read Barry’s recap of the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Best Practices and New Directions panel)

Initially, I wasn’t sure why Katherine Alford of the Food Network was on the panel (Food Network and sustainable food, huh?), and she admitted that a show on “sustainability” was the last thing you’d ever see. Keeping with the confessional theme of the panel, Alford said the Food Network has done a great job of celebrating chefs to the detriment of home cooking. Home cooks aren’t chefs, and we should be celebrating cooking, not personalities.

To be perfectly honest, I was just sitting there with my mouth open and shaking my head when Debbie Levin of Environmental Media Association told her story. She was literally the fish out of water on the panel, but her message was clear: “never underestimate the power of using celebrity to role model positive trends.” Debbie mentioned a photo op with Nicole Ritchie, who appeared in high heels with a shovel at a school garden, and that’s all it took to get hundreds of school kids inquiring how they could get involved in gardens (just like Nicole). And getting celebrities to arrive at the Oscars in a Toyota Prius a couple of years ago was the launching point of the nationwide Prius craze. Let’s hope a celebrity takes up the sustainable sushi challenge, like maybe Jeremy Piven?

If you want to look back on the Twitter chatter from the event, search for the hash-tag #sfi09.