Dan Barber - Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City, a 2001 James Beard Award nominee for best new restaurant and a noted neighborhood eatery that continues to celebrate the farms of the Hudson Valley with its menus.
In the summer of 2002, Food & Wine Magazine featured Dan as one of the country's "Best New Chefs." He has since been featured in The New Yorker and Gourmet Magazine, and included in "The Next Generation" of great chefs in Bon Appetit's 10th annual restaurant issue.
Winona LaDuke - Winona LaDuke is the Founding Director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project.
Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations, and is the mother of three children. As Program Director of the Honor the Earth Fund, she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups.
She also works as Founding Director for White Earth Land Recovery Project.
In 1994, Winona was nominated by Time magazine as one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the BIHA Community Service Award in 1997, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women's Leadership Fellowship, and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project.
A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, Winona has written extensively on Native American and Environmental issues. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves, as co-chair of the Indigenous Women's Network, a North American and Pacific indigenous women's organization. In 1998, Ms. Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth. Also in 1997, her first novel, "Last Standing Woman", was published by Voyager Press. In 1999, South End Press published "All Our Relations", a non-fiction book on Native environmental struggles. Both books are available through the Native Harvest catalog. Winona's editorials and essays have also been published numerous times in national and international journals and newspapers. Links to a few of her recent articles can be found at left.
Gary Nabhan - Gary Paul Nabhan is an ecologist, ethnobotanist, and writer whose work has focused primarily on the plants and cultures of the desert Southwest.
A first generation Lebanese-American, Nabhan was raised in Gary, Indiana. He served as Director of Science at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH, a nonprofit conservation organization that works to preserve indigenous southwestern agricultural plants as well as knowledge of their uses. Nabhan is currently director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University.
Among his books are The Desert Smells Like Rain, Cultures of Habitat, Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation, Cross-pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, and Gathering the Desert, which won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing. He was also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
Nabhan has been a significant contributor in calling attention to the environmental issue of pollinator decline. He co-authored with Stephen L. Buchmann one of the key works on the topic - The Forgotten Pollinators from Island Press (1996).
James Oseland - James Oseland is the editor-in-chief of Saveur. He was twice recognized by Australia's Jacob's Creek World Food Media Awards for his work for the magazine: Three of his Saveur articles led to his nomination as best food writer in 2004, and he was a silver-medal recipient for his 2001 piece Lady Baltimore Eats.
The Spice of Time,¯ also written for Saveur, was nominated for a 2002 James Beard Award, the top honor in the culinary world. Additionally, he has written for Vogue, Gourmet, Food & Wine and Time Out New York.
He is the author of Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, to be published by W.W. Norton in August 2006. As an editor, he has worked at Organic Style, the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, TV Guide, Vibe, Sassy, and American Theatre, where he was formerly the managing editor. He teaches cooking classes at New Yorkā€™s Institute for Culinary Education and the New School.
Before becoming a journalist, Oseland wrote, ghostwrote and acted in numerous films, including Guncrazy (Showtime, 1993, starring Drew Barrymore). A California native, he now lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Michael Pollan - Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a New York Times bestseller.
His previous books include The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own (1997); and Second Nature (1991). A contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism.
Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing 2004, Best American Essays 2003, and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.
In addition to preserving precious fossil fuel energy, buying food locally saves money and supports local economies. So why does everyone coast-to-coast buy their oranges from Florida? This panel explores the challenges of building a local food system, and compares the environmental and social impacts of both a local and global approach to food.- Slow Food Nation
I see value in the local food movement in reducing fossil fuel use in food and simply better gastronomical practice. I am very pleased to see fewer hippies and more economists and agronomists. The "left" can found such movements, but then reality has to take over.
Wow, that is a profoundly ignorant statement, especially from someone looking for every opportunity to use big words. Economists are the reason we have such horrible environmental-economic practices in the first place because the majority of them perform work that benefits a few financiers and not everyone else. "Hippie" is a group-think term that lumps a lot of people together based on perception of one shared trait that may or may not actually exist and is trivial for understanding their one actually shared value or social cooperation with one another. It is just as vague as "liberal" or "conservative" and is often used to apply narrow pejorative definitions to people that often are much different from one another in many other ways not described by such a useless term. Human interaction is much more complex than that and if you lived in the real world instead of the imaginary convention imposed on you by the media and narrow minded academia, you would understand that. Reality taking over for a greater good is a system by which all people who think critically and produce work together, not a narrow segment of altruistic self serving idealists becoming the special interest for their self-interest. The only reason economists and agronomists are jumping on board is conditions are chasing the direction of the money flow. Too bad they can't sell us farmers markets, co-ops and gardening because it has already been thought of.
