Edible Potluck

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. Read more...

In this episode, we've got an interview with writer Genevieve Morgan. She's here to talk more about her article, Survival Gardening: One Foot at a Timein Edible Maine.  And then we have a conversation with Jesse Hawkins about The Mocktail Projectas featured in Mocktails Grow Upin Edible Lousiville and Bluegrass. Recommended recipe: Refrigerator Radish Picklesfrom Edible Capital District.

In this episode, we've got an interview with writer Kate Washington about California's burgeoning coffee farms. She's here to talk more about her article, Black Gold.  And then we have a conversation with Leslie Jonath, author of the cookbook Feed Your People, and the creator of a collection of new regional books called The Little Local Series.

This week, we talk to Boston-based entrepreneur Erin Baumgartner bout her company, Family Dinner. Listen to learn more about the innovative meal kit/CSA hybrid.  And then we’ve got an interview with author Ronna Welsh (above) about her inspired new cookbook, The Nimble Chef. You might need to hear what Ronna has to say about how to free yourself from the shackles of meal planning.

  Edible Orlando publisher Kendra Lott explains why you should explore the city beyond the Magic Kingdom on your next Disney vacation. We've got an interview with journalist Virginia Sole-Smith about her book The Eating Instinct. She’ll also tell me what’s bugging her about food writer and famous locavore Michael Pollan.

We talk to Melissa Clark (NY Times) about the gadget she thinks could be the next Instapot. And farmer Charlie Tennessen weighs in on why you should buy fresh local wheat. 

Sarah Henry on how #MeToo is playing out in San Francisco. She covers both the problems and the potential solutions, with a focus on what restaurants can do to make change happen and make restaurants safer for all workers. In Boston, a small company called Cask Force is aging quality maple syrup in barrels to create complex layers of flavor that rise above the level of pancakes.

At Tiger Corner farm in South Carolina, you’ll see repurposed shipping containers and a growing operation that relies on cutting edge technology. Felicia Campbell's resume is more colorful than most. One of her first jobs was as a soldier in the US army in Iraq. She went on to write a cookbook, The Food of Oman: Recipes and Stories from the Gateway to Arabia.

Later this year, “Temporary Protected Status,” a special status granted to people from certain countries, will end for people from El Salvador. Edible Queens contributor Salvador Espinoza covers this story in his article Politics and Pupusas. Sonja Overhiser is a writer and recipe developer focused on easy, healthy home cooking. Her cookbook, Pretty Simple Cooking was one of our favorites from last year.

Forward-thinking restaurants are now working on getting rid of another all-too-common plastic: Straws. And there’s really just one Edible that can claim coffee as a truly local product: Edible Hawaiian Islands.

Emily Peterson definitely knows a few things about how meal planning can make even a busy life more a lot more tasty and a little less crazy. Marissa McClellan's fourth book, The Food in Jars Kitchen has more than 100 recipes to help you use up those ingredients in your homemade pantry.

We’re visiting California wine country for a talk with Jennifer Reichardt of Raft Wine. Then, we’re headed to DC to talk to Bonnie Benwick, deputy food editor and recipe editor at The Washington Post. We’ll have a conversation about last year’s surprising bestselling cookbook.

Edible Potluck is a podcast from Edible Communities, the James Beard Award-winning network of magazines across the US and Canada dedicated to celebrating local, sustainable food. We talk about eating in restaurants, finding great ingredients, and the fine art and mad scramble that is home cooking. Subscribe for big ideas, little actions, and fresh trends that affect your own local food choices, no matter where you live. Follow @EdibleCommunities on Instagram for show news and more. Hosted by Joy Manning. Produced by David Wolf.

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.”