Anya Fernald - Anya Fernald served as Program Director of Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) for three years. At CAFF, she led three primary projects active in six regions of California: a Farm-to-School program active in over 90 schools; a social venture produce distribution company; and the California Buy Fresh, Buy Local Campaign.
Fernald came to CAFF after five years with Slow Food International. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Fernald spent a post-graduate year of study as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow.
Harold Goldstein - Harold Goldstein is the Executive Director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy. For a number of years Harold developed health promotion programs for the Los Angeles County Health Department. He has a bachelors degree in Physiology from U.C. and a doctorate in public health from UCLA.
Bertram Lubin - Throughout his career in medicine, Dr. Lubin has directed his energies to fostering biomedical research and has been involved in a number of clinical and basic research projects. His primary research interest has been in sickle cell disease.
He developed a Sickle Cell Screening, Counseling, and Education Program at Children's Hospital Oakland (CHO), and subsequently with a UCSF colleague, started the Northern California Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center, a program that is in its twenty-third year of NIH funding.
Lubin was a member of the NIH Executive Committee that initiated the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease, a program that supported clinical research in sickle cell disease for over fifteen years. He is an editor of the NIH-published monograph "Current Treatment for Sickle Cell Anemia."
In addition to his interest in clinical hematology, Lubin directed a NIH-funded basic research program to study membrane phospholipid organization in human red blood cells. His group discovered that alterations in membrane phospholipids occurred when cells containing sickle hemoglobin were deoxygenated and that these changes could contribute to clinical events that occur in sickle cell anemia.
Recently, Lubin began the CHO Related Donor Cord Blood Program. The program is offered to families across the United States who currently have a child with a blood disorder such as sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, aplastic anemia, or leukemia, and are expecting another child.
Following the birth of a healthy child, blood remaining in the placenta (cord blood) is harvested. Because cord blood is enriched with bone marrow cells, it is cyropreserved and can later be used for transplantation. A number of lives have been saved following transplantation with cord blood units collected in this program.
Eric Schlosser - Eric Schlosser has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in American History, Schlosser tried his hand at several professions (playwright, novelist, script writer) before finally turning to non-fiction in his early thirties. Although his idea for an article on homosexuals in the military was turned down by the Atlantic Monthly, the magazine offered him another assignment: writing about the New York City bomb squad after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Other assignments followed, one of which was about America and its fast food industry. What began as a simple magazine article turned into an international bestseller. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal, was on the New York Times bestsellers list for nearly two years. It appeared on the bestseller lists of the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, USA Today, Business Week, and Publishers Weekly, as well as on bestseller lists in Canada, Great Britain and Japan.
His second New York Times bestseller, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (May 2003), was also inspired by his earlier articles on the enforcement of marijuana laws in America and illegal immigration in California. His two-part series, "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" (Altantic Montly, August and September, 1994), won a National Magazine Award for reporting, and his article, "In the Strawberry Fields" (Atlantic Monthly, November 1995), received a Sidney Hillman Foundation award.
Schlosser has appeared on 60 Minutes, CNN, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, FOX News, The O'Reilly Factor, and Extra!. He has been interviewed on NPR and covered in Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, and the New York Times. His work also has appeared in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker.
Alice Waters - Alice Waters is a chef and the founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant and Cafe in Berkeley, California.
An advocate of local farmers markets and sustainable agriculture, she features organic and seasonal foods and promotes the power of growing, cooking, and sharing food.
She has also created the Chez Panisse Foundation, whose primary beneficiary is the Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.
Her books include the Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook and, most recently, The Art of Simple Food.
Help kick off our Third Annual Platforum Series, "How We Eat," with Waters, one of the most knowledgeable and dedicated slow-food advocates in the world.
This James Beard Award-winning chef and author will discuss the importance of sustainable agricultural methods and practices, as well as the joy and the pleasure of eating well- The Commonwealth Club of California
Right on Alice Waters! I would have loved to have that kind of curriculum in school, working in a garden and growing food. It's sad that between the generation of my grandparents and my own, we have lost the connection with growing our food. Too bad by the time I was born there were no orchards left in the Valley of Heart's Delight.
