Eat, Drink, Think: Recent Episodes
Edible Communities
An Edible Communities Podcast Eat, Drink, Think, is a podcast brought to you by Edible Communities, the James Beard Award-winning network of magazines published across the US and Canada. We celebrate all things local and sustainable in the food world.
Today we’re speaking with Marion Nestle. She is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, Emerita. From 1986-88, she was senior nutrition policy advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services and managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health. Her research examines scientific, economic, and social influences on food choice.
She is the author of three prize-winning books: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health; Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, and What to Eat. Her new memoir Slow Cooked: an unexpected life in food politics was released in late 2022 from the University of California Press. She blogs almost daily at foodpolitics.com. In her memoir, Professor Nestle says, “I still believe that studying food is an exceptionally effective and accessible way to get at the most vexing societal problems that affect all of us. Food is about taste and pleasure, but it is also about nutrition, health, community, and culture. I am hard pressed to think of a problem in society that cannot be understood more deeply by examining the role of food.”
We’re talking fermentation with Sandor Ellix Katz and Julia Skinner. Julia is a food historian, writer, and author of Our Fermented Lives: A History of How Fermented Foods Have Shaped Cultures and Communities. She's also the founder of Root, Atlanta’s fermentation and food history company, and her work is regularly featured in local, national, and international publications as well as in her own weekly food newsletter. She has a PhD in Library Science, cares for two wildlife habitats, and is a visual artist. Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. He is the author of five books: Wild Fermentation; The Art of Fermentation; The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved; Fermentation as Metaphor; and his latest, Fermentation Journeys. Sandor's books, along with the hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, the New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.”
In this episode, we’ll be speaking with Emily Payne. Emily is a writer covering the intersection of food, agriculture, climate, and health. She focuses on regenerative food systems and profiles farmers in transition to more sustainable practices. She’s served as editor of the global sustainable food nonprofit Food Tank since 2015 and worked with a series of ag-tech startup companies, focusing on how to build technologies that better meet farmers' needs. Her work has appeared in Food Tank, Edible Communities, The Counter, AgFunder News, AG DAILY, Mad Agriculture, Thomson Reuters Foundation, the New York City Food Policy Center, and more. She is based in Denver, Colorado.Emily contributed to the fifth in a series of pieces produced by Edible Communities for publication in Edible magazines across the US and Canada and at ediblecommunities.com. The piece is titled, “Is Plastic Waste the Cost of Eating,” and it was written in collaboration with Food Tank’s founder, Danielle Nierenberg. The piece takes a dive into the piles of what we as consumers do and don’t know about the materials—often single use materials—that wrap and contain almost all the food we eat. We’ll take a look—from the perspective of packaging—at where the buck stops when it comes to the challenges of being a human who eats on a planet in environmental crisis.
In this episode, we’ll be speaking with Danielle Nierenberg. Danielle is the President of Food Tank, which she co-founded with Bernard Pollack in 2013 to build a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters. She's the recipient of the 2020 Julia Child Award.Danielle contributed to the fourth in a series of pieces produced by Edible Communities for publication in Edible magazines across the US and Canada and at ediblecommunities.com. The piece, by Elena Seely, content director for FoodTank is titled, “In Labels We Trust: how food certification labels, seals, and standards can help eaters make better choices.” It’s an explainer and guide, leading us into a fuller understanding of how to read food labels not just on packages, but on produce, meat, and poultry in order to eat in a way that supports the safety of the growers and producers of our food, our health and safety as eaters, and the health of the planet.
In this episode, we’ll begin by speaking with Twilight Greenaway, senior editor at Civil Eats, and then have a conversation with Frances Moore Lappe, author of the 50th anniversary edition of Diet for a Small Planet, and her daughter and contributor, Anna Lappé. Both conversations take different looks at what we eat, how we eat, and the climate crisis.
Twilight Greenaway is the senior editor at Civil Eats and its former managing editor. Her articles about food and farming have appeared in The New York Times, NPR.org, The Guardian, TakePart, Modern Farmer, Gastronomica, and Grist.
Frances Moore Lappé has authored 20 books, including Diet for a Small Planet and in 2017 she co-authored with Adam Eichen, Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want. Frances co-founded Small Planet Institute and is the recipient of 20 honorary degrees and the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “Alternative Nobel.”
Frances’s daughter, Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author and a renowned advocate for sustainability and justice along the food chain. Anna is the co-author or author of three books on food, farming, and sustainability and the contributing author to thirteen more, including Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. With her mother, she helped curate the recipe section of the 50th anniversary of Diet for a Small Planet.
Read the show notes and more at the Edible Communities website.
In this episode of Eat, Drink, Think we’re digging into the important issue of Hunger. Unfortunately, it’s more timely than ever. Last year saw the first uptick in food insecurity in America in years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our guests are:
Ben Perkins, CEO of Wholesome Wave, a national nonprofit working to increase access to healthy food for all. Before joining Wholesome Wave, Ben held leadership roles with the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association. He’s also an ordained minister with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School.
Leanne Brown, author of the cookbook Good & Cheap: Eat Well on $4 a Day. The book began as her Master’s thesis project in food studies at NYU. She wrote it to help people on a tight budget, especially SNAP recipients. She has always offered the book as a free PDF and it’s been downloaded more than 15 million times.
Mark Winne is a food activist who’s worked on issues related to hunger and nutrition for 50 years. He’s an author and a Senior Advisor to the Food Policy Networks Project at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future. His most recent book, Food Town USA, explores seven often-overlooked American cities that are now leading the food movement.
Today I'm talking with Kay Cornelius, a fourth generation rancher and the new general manager at Panorama Organic as well as Marshall Johnson, vice president of Audubon's conservation ranching initiative. And before you go shopping for your sustainable grass fed beef, you'll definitely want to hear my conversation with Marilyn Noble, a food writer and recipe developer with special expertise in cooking grass fed beef. But first, Kay's here to talk birds, beef, and what it's like to be a woman in the male dominated business of meat.
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