Slow Food Nation '08

Author Talks

Presented by Point Reyes Books and Book Bay at Fort Mason

All talks took place at Book Bay at Fort Mason at the Book Bay Bookstore, Building C

Saturday, August 30th

• Gary Nabhan

  12:00pm

  Editor of Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods and author of Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods.

  Gary Nabhan’s new book is a call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives North America its distinctive culinary identity that reflects our multicultural heritage. It offers rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants and animals in North America. Nabhan is a writer, food and farming advocate, rural lifeways folklorist, conservationist, and researcher based at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona. He was honored with a MacArthur “genius” award and a Pew Fellowship in Conservation and Environment, among other awards. Coming Home to Eat was instrumental in introducing the idea of eating within one’s local foodshed.

  www.garynabhan.com

• M. Kat Anderson

  1:00pm

  Author of Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resource.

  The notion that California was a pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans is held by most everyone. But as Kat Anderson’s groundbreaking book demonstrates, the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, selective harvesting, and burning. An ethnoecologist, Anderson documents 12,000 years of Native American horticultural and land management practices through interviews with the remaining elders of the Indian communities and other source materials. A complex picture is revealed of a middle way between exploitation and “hands off” of natural resources and we come to see California’s indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.

  www.ucpress.edu
  Watch a Video

• Jessica Prentice

  2:00pm

  Author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection and creator of Local Foods Wheel for the San Francisco Bay Area (Local Foods Wheel for New York City Area soon to be released and distributed through Chelsea Green.)

  Full Moon Feast follows the thirteen lunar cycles of an agrarian year, from the midwinter Hunger Moon and the springtime sweetness of the Sap Moon to the bounty of the Moon When Salmon Return to Earth in autumn. Each chapter includes recipes that display the richly satisfying flavors of foods tied to the ancient rhythm of the seasons. Combining the radical nutrition of Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, keen agri-political acumen, and a spiritual sensibility, Prentice seeks to provide a model for how communities can feed themselves in a way that is satisfying and health-supportive on all levels. Prentice is a founder of Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, was the Chef of the Headlands Center for the Arts, the first Director of Education Programs for the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, and a co-founder of Locavores.

  www.wisefoodways.com

  www.threestonehearth.com

• Joyce Goldstein

  4:00pm

  Co-author of Mediterranean Fresh: A Compendium Of One-Plate Salad Meals And Mix-And-Match Dressings.

  Mediterranean Fresh, Joyce Goldstein’s 21st cookbook, focuses on small delicious salads and small plates to show the versatility of Mediterranean dressings and marinades. She hopes to change the way we think of salad from leafy greens that are the precursor to a meal to the meal itself with a wide variety of ingredients. Goldstein is a chef, author, teacher, and consultant to the restaurant and food industries, who teaches at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley. She was the chef/owner of Square One in San Francisco and a chef at the Café at Chez Panisse.

  www.wwnorton.com

• Tim Porter

  5:00pm

  Co-author and photographer of Organic Marin: Recipes From Land to Table.

  Organic Marin is a tribute to the Marin County farmers, artisans, and cooks, is full of recipes for delicious seasonal meals and beautiful pictures. The stories and philosophies of 16 of America’s most esteemed organic farmers are matched with recipes from 25 of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most popular organic restaurants. The strong connection between field and farmer, land and table, and food, family and community is illustrated through beautiful pictures of the people, land, and produce. Proceeds of Organic Marin support Marin Organic’s school lunch program, which serves 12,000 lunches a week with food grown in Marin County. Tim Porter is a photographer and a writer with an extensive background in newspaper and magazine journalism, currently an editor-at-large for Marin Magazine.

  www.timporter.com

  www.marinorganic.org

• Raj Patel

  6:30pm

  Author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

  Raj Patel proves that ‘free’ trade - free of any ethical limits, that is - is the last solution we should look to in the struggle to feed the world. He then reveals better ways of being free, showing why ’strong local food systems first! is a rallying cry as much for Zambia as for Canada, as much for India as for the United States. He proposes that we can eat healthier, tastier food and give the world’s poorest the power to feed themselves. His website Stuffed and Starved.org extends the book, providing resources and commentary on hunger, obesity, injustice and inequality in the world’s food system. Patel is an activist, academic, journalist, and writer who is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, a Fellow at the Institute of Food and Development Policy, and a Research Associate at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is a former Policy Analyst at the Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First.

  www.stuffedandstarved.org

Sunday, August 31st

• Wendy Johnson

  11:00am

  Author of Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate.

  For more than thirty years, Wendy Johnson has been meditating and gardening organically at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where the fields curve like an enormous green dragon between the hills and the ocean. The garden, with Johnson as head gardener, played a pioneering role in California’s food revolution. The book is an extraordinary celebration of inner and outer growth and she shares practical knowledge as well as her abiding appreciation for the earth. In 2000 Wendy and her husband, Peter Rudnick, received the annual Sustainable Agriculture Award from the National Ecological Farming Association. Wendy is a mentor and advisor to the Edible Schoolyard program of the Chez Panisse Foundation, a project that she has been involved in since in its inception in 1995.

  www.gardeningatthedragonsgate.com

• Claire Hope Cummings

  12:00pm

  Author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds.

  Cummings has written a coherent, complete, and compelling account of genetically modified seeds and the dangers we face as our seed stock and food supply become increasingly privatized. She tells how seeds became lucrative, patentable private properties for some of the nation’s most powerful agribusinesses and focuses on the environmental and political implications of how we eat and farm. This is a book that will educate you about the current state, and possible future, of seeds and food supplies. Cummings has farmed in California and in Vietnam, where she had an organic farm on the Mekong Delta and was an attorney for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Office of General Counsel.

  www.clairehopecummings.com

• Daphne Miller

  1:00pm

  Author of The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World.

  A family physician in San Francisco, Daphne Miller and teaches nutrition and integrative medicine at UCSF. She traveled the world to find authentic indigenous recipes and traditions that can help preserve health and prevent the many modern diseases caused by a Western lifestyle. Michael Pollan has said of, “Daphne Miller shows us how we can bring the wisdom of traditional diets to our own plates, in the interest of both our health and our pleasure. The Jungle Effect is a fascinating, useful and important book.” Dr. Miller is an inspiring advocate for eating well and simply, in ways that fit into our hectic lives.

  www.drdaphne.com

• Desmond Jolly

  2:00pm

  Coauthor of California’s New Green Revolution: Pioneers in Sustainable Agriculture and editor of the pathbreaking book, Outstanding In Their Fields: California’s Women Farmers and Ranchers.

  Desmond Jolly led the University of California’s Statewide Small Farm Program, whose mission is to inhance the viability of small and moderate sized agricultural produces, until 2006. He has written extensively on food and farming systems and carried out innnovative research on organic and sustainable food and farming systems. Jolly has, since the nineteen seventies, been a strong advocate and national leader for family farming, alternative agriculture, and agricultural tourism. An Agriculatural Economist, he was on the faculty at UC Davis and served on the USDA National Advisory Board for Research, Extension, Economics and Education. He recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the California Farm Conference for his contributions in California and nationally to the small-farm community.

  www.sfc@ucdavis.edu

• Kiko Denzer

  3:00pm

  Author of Build Your Own Earth Oven.

  Kiko Denzer is an artist, writer, builder, and baker who has been working with earth since 1994. Earth ovens are as simple as a southwestern horno or European bee-hive oven and every bit as effective as a fancy brick hearth or modern, steam-injected commercial oven. Denzer’s book is a fully-illustrated handbook for making a simple, wood-fired, masonry-style oven out of the most available material—dirt. Some of the ovens are plain while others are formed into the shape of animals or human faces. Build Your Own Oven includes an explanation of basic concepts such as material selection, oven location, and design and then guides readers through the construction of their own oven.

  www.intabas.com/kikodenzer.html

• Jim Denevan

  4:00pm

  Author of Outstanding in the Field: A Farm To Table Cookbook.

  The book’s title is also the name of an roving culinary adventure— traveling open-air dinners of farm-fresh ingredients served right where they were grown, in fields, ranches, vineyards and community gardens across the country. Outstanding in the Field’s mission is to re-connect diners to the land and the origins of their food, and to honor the local farmers and food artisans who cultivate it. Outstanding in the Field is both a cookbook and a guide to supporting regional farms, including profiles of American farmers as well as original recipes culled from these spectacular yet uncomplicated feasts.

  www.outstandinginthefield.com