Sharon Louise Crayton has been intimately involved with cooking and food for more than 30 years. After studying nutrition and French cooking at San Jose State University in California and the Bay Area, she began creating recipes for companies such as S&W Foods, Foster Farm Chickens, Del Monte, and Spice Islands. Then she struck out on her own, opening the Café Sparrow, a California-French fusion restaurant, in Aptos, California. There she served as proprietor, chef, and maître d’ while also raising two children. In the mists of this busy operation, she met Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, who became her Buddhist meditation teacher and inspired her to slow down her life and begin investigating the intersections of Buddhism, cooking, and compassion.

In 1989, after selling Café Sparrow, Crayton immersed herself full-time in the study of Western and Chinese herbal medicine, food theory, and acupuncture. Eventually, she began traveling the world. Her journeys took her for long periods to Dordogne, France, and to Portugal, where she honed both her culinary skills and her Buddhist knowledge, cooking fresh, simple, lovingly prepared meals for some of the great Buddhist masters of our time. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

www.SlowFood.com
Good, clean and fair food is only possible with knowledge: the knowledge of those who bring food to the table and the knowledge of those who eat it. Understanding more about our food, how it tastes and where it comes from makes the act of eating all the more pleasurable.

Recorded:  June 25th, 2008
Show: 32

Ivy Manning is a freelance food writer, cooking instructor, and personal chef. Her work has been featrured in Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, Best Places Northwest, Sunset, and tthe Oregonian. Her website is www.chefivy.com , and her new book is “The Farm to Table Cookbook: the Art of Eating Locally..”

www.SlowFood.com
Good, clean and fair food is only possible with knowledge: the knowledge of those who bring food to the table and the knowledge of those who eat it. Understanding more about our food, how it tastes and where it comes from makes the act of eating all the more pleasurable.

Shannon Hayes has a rare relationship with her food - she writes and works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York, where they raise and sell only grassfed meats, including beef, pork, lamb and poultry.

She holds a Ph.d. in sustainable agriculture and community development from Cornell, and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Binghamton University. She is the author of The Farmer and the Grill and The Grassfed Gourmet, as well as numerous articles and essays on food, farming and rural living. To learn more about Sap Bush Hollow Farm, visit www.SapBush.com.

More onGrass Fed

Grass Fed Cooking Books:

The Farmer and the Grill
A guide to grilling, barbecuing and spit-roasting grassfed meat …and for saving the planet, one bite at a time.

The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook
The original, definitive guide to finding, selecting preparing and enjoying grassfed meats.

www.SlowFood.com
Good, clean and fair food is only possible with knowledge: the knowledge of those who bring food to the table and the knowledge of those who eat it. Understanding more about our food, how it tastes and where it comes from makes the act of eating all the more pleasurable.

Diane Hatz is the Executive Director of SustainableTable.org. Sustainable Table celebrates the sustainable food movement, educates consumers on food-related issues and works to build community through food.

The program is home to the Eat Well Guide, an online directory of sustainable products in the U.S. and Canada, and the critically-acclaimed, award-winning Meatrix movies - The Meatrix, The Meatrix II: Revolting and The Meatrix II½.

Sustainable Table was created in 2003 by the nonprofit organization GRACE to help consumers understand the problems with our food supply and offer viable solutions and alternatives. Rather than be overwhelmed by the problems created by our industrial agricultural system, Sustainable Table celebrates the joy of food and eating.

More on Sustainable Table
More on The Meatrix

Tom Philpott is Grist’s food editor. Grist is based in the Emerald City of Seattle, in the Evergreen State of Washington, with contributors scattered the world ’round. They are a nonprofit organization funded by foundation grants, reader contributions, and just a touch of advertising. Their website and email services are free — and worth every penny.

Tom is a founder of Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture non-profit and small farm located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. He writes the biweekly Victual Reality column for Grist.

The Tale of Two Counties

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Slow Food Good, clean and fair food is only possible with knowledge: the knowledge of those who bring food to the table and the knowledge of those who eat it. Understanding more about our food, how it tastes and where it comes from makes the act of eating all the more pleasurable.

Born and raised in Honolulu, Dr. Pang graduated with Honors from Princeton University with a degree in Chemistry. He received an MD and Masters in Public Health Degree from Tulane.

Board Certification in Preventive Medicine, Dr. Pang worked for 20 years with the Walter Reed Overseas Research Laboratories, assigned to Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro and Geneva, developing drugs and diagnostics for tropical diseases. He is a consultant to the World Health Organization since 1985 on tropical diseases. Dr. Pang retired and moved to Maui as the District Health Officer position in 2000, and has about 5 dozen publications in peer reviewed medical journals covering rabies, HIV, malaria, hepatitis E, and most recently dengue, and was selected in years 2006-8 to America’s Best Doctors list (3% of US physicians).

Dr. Pang speaks about the dangers of Genetic Engineering in our interview today.

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Articles on Dr. Lorrin Pang

Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Sierra Club, Maui Chapter
Genetically Engineered Organisms, Are They Safe?

Today we are talking to Esther Cook - the Chef Teacher at Chez Panisse Edible Schoolyard Kitchen in Berkely, CA.

Esther Cook, Chef Teacher
Since it’s inception in 1997, Esther Cook has been the Chef Teacher at The Edible Schoolyard kitchen. Ms. Cook has developed a cadre of kitchen lessons linked to classroom curriculum. She is a professional chef, artist, storyteller and educator of the first order.

Ms Cook developed and taught an innovative cooking program called Cooks Tell Stories and taught children to cook fresh, seasonal meals through Market Cooking for Kids, a program of the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture. Her youth spent on a farm in rural New England, is an important point of reference in defining the quality of the learning experience for her students.

Interesting links:
Garden of Eating: Middle Schoolers Grow Their Own Lunch

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Jo Robinson, an investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling writer, is the author of Pasture Perfect, and the principal researcher and writer for the eatwild.com web site.

Eatwild.com is the #1 site for grass fed information, food, and facts. Jo has spent the last four years researching the many benefits of raising animals on pasture. Her interest grew out of a previous book, The Omega Diet, co-authored with Dr. Artemis Simopoulos, that explores the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet. While researching the book, Jo learned that meat from pasture-raised animals is very similar to meat from wild game and that both promote optimal health.

To date, she has identified hundreds of peer-reviewed studies showing that raising animals on pasture is good for the animals, the environment, farm families, and the health of consumers. She gives talks to ranchers, government agencies, sustainable agricultural groups, and the general public around the country.

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A conversation with Paul Shapiro of the Humane Society of the United States. Paul Shapiro is the senior director of the Factory Farming Campaign.

Paul Shapiro has spearheaded numerous successful campaigns to improve the plight of farm animals, most notably several campaigns to persuade retailers to stop selling battery cage eggs.

Shapiro is also the founder and former campaigns director for Compassion Over Killing, where he helped lead campaigns such as the successful effort to end the use of the misleading “Animal Care Certified” logo on battery cage egg cartons nationwide. At Compassion Over Killing, he worked also as a farm animal cruelty investigator, primarily documenting conditions on egg and broiler factory farms, livestock auctions and slaughter plants.

If you do continue to eat animal products, know that not all animal products are equal when it comes to animal welfare. Each industry has its own abusive practices, and some are much more cruel than others. For example, the chicken, egg, turkey, and pork industries tend to be far more abusive to animals than the beef industry. And a growing number of producers are raising animals without intensive confinement. Refining your diet by choosing cage-free animal products, instead of the conventional factory farm products that fill most supermarket shelves, will help to reduce animal suffering.

Each year in the United States, nearly 10 billion land animals are raised and killed for food. Just like the dogs and cats we welcome into our homes, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and cows have their own personalities, inquisitive natures, likes and dislikes, and—most importantly—the ability to feel pain, suffer from boredom and frustration, and experience joy.

More on Factory Farming
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WARNING: This video contains very graphic images.

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The Problem
By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use (sources: FAO and NASA). Historically, some 15% of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to avoid this impending disaster?

 

A Potential Solution: Farm Vertically
The concept of indoor farming is not new, since hothouse production of tomatoes, a wide variety of herbs, and other produce has been in vogue for some time. What is new is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people. An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.

Press
February 8th, 2008 - Vertical Farm was featured on Science Magazine (Feb 2008)
December 12th, 2007 - Vertical Farm was featured on Wired Science
September 13th, 2007 - Vertical Farm was featured on CNN Money
September 3rd, 2007 - Vertical Farm was featured in Popular Science (July 2007)
June 19th, 2007 - Vertical Farm featured on BBC News - Vertical Farming in the Big Apple

Visit VerticleFarm.com
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