Twilight Greenaway

An Interview with Food, Inc. Director Robert Kenner

Food, Inc. director Robert Kenne spoke to CUESA recently about what he learned while making a hard-hitting film about the increasing corporate control of America’s food system.

CUESA: What do you think about the term “conventional agriculture”?  Does it reinforce the idea that when people are not buying sustainably produced food, they’re doing what’s "normal"?

Robert Kenner: If you call chemical-laden agriculture conventional, yes. But it’s important to realize that’s only been in existence for 40-50 years. For ten thousand years “conventional” was the opposite of what it is now. The world’s food has been fundamentally transformed in a way that these agribusinesses want to keep you from seeing. And that was the most shocking thing for me in making Food, Inc.

Read more in the CUESA E-Letter

An Interview with Novella Carpenter, Urban Farmer

Most urban farmers confine their agricultural efforts to vegetables, fruit, and the occasional egg-laying chicken. But on her small plot in Oakland, California, Novella Carpenter has raised bees, goats, rabbits, geese, and turkey, among other fauna.

A graduate of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied with Michael Pollan, Carpenter now writes about urban farming and sustainable-food production for various publications, including her blog, Ghost Town Farm. Her memoir, Farm City, is due out this summer from Penguin Press.

Why did you want to start a farm in the city, rather than moving to a rural area?

I think people have a lot of nostalgia and yearning for these pastoral places, but my parents did that — they were back-to-the-land hippies in the 1970s — and it quickly became clear to me that city people moving to the country is kind of a horrible idea.

Read the complete interview on Culinate >

Interview: "Meatpaper" Founders Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen

 

Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen are the team behind Meatpaper, a new art-and-culture magazine designed to look at meat “as a growing cultural symbol and phenomenon.”

What has been the initial response to Meatpaper?
Standen: We both found that whatever kind of meat story people wanted to see, they found in us. 

Wizansky: When we tell them it’s a magazine about meat, they assume that we’re either militant vegans or that we’re on a pro-meat soap box, but we’re not either.

In a way, that really gets at people’s passionate feelings about meat.
Wizansky: Exactly, which is why we wanted to start the project in the first place.

Read more on Culinate

Eat for a Week

Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio’s books pose more questions than they answer. The husband-and-wife team behind such epic works as Material World and Women in the Material World have long been combining exquisitely constructed photographs with insightful text to provide detailed examinations of inequality on a global level.

In their most recent effort, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, the pair trained their lenses on the planet’s food habits. Menzel and D’Aluisio bought a week’s worth of food for 30 families in 24 countries, then took portraits of each family, posing them with their groceries. The result is a captivating look at a rapidly changing global pantry.

Read the interview on Culinate

A Conversation with Gary Paul Nabhan

"We feel that a participatory kind of food conservation and celebration is a much more effective way of saving the rich diversity of foods unique to this continent than telling people, “Hands off!” Until there are food communities that care enough to invest more in the people who are sustainably producing them, we’ll still be losing foods that have such incredibly unique flavors and textures and fragrances that future chefs will regret that we ignored them." Read the interview on Culinate