About
Civil Eats promotes critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems as part of building economically and socially just communities. In our efforts, we support the development of a dialog among local and national leaders about the American food system, and its effects abroad. Civil Eats can be humorous, serious, academic, philosophical, conversational – its style of conversation is as diverse as its 40+ contributors – but it is always thought provoking, innovative, and focused on food politics.
Paula Crossfield
Paula Crossfield is a founder and managing editor of Civil Eats. She is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post’s Green Page and is a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio where she focuses on food issues. She is currently tending a vegetable garden on her roof in the Lower East Side.
Naomi Starkman
Naomi Starkman is a founder and editor of Civil Eats. She is a food policy media consultant to Consumers Union and others. Naomi served as the Director of Communications & Policy at Slow Food Nation ’08 and has been a media consultant to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and WIRED magazines. She was previously a senior publicist at Newsweek magazine and was the Director of Communications for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). From 1997 to 2000, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the S.F. Ethics Commission. She is the co-founder of Kitchen Table Talks, a local food forum in San Francisco, and a board member of 18 Reasons, a nonprofit connecting community through food. Naomi works with various clients on food policy and advocacy and is an aspiring organic grower, having worked on several farms.
Anya Fernald
Katrina Heron
Katrina Heron is a founder of Civil Eats. She is a San Francisco-based writer and editor who was Board Chair of Slow Food Nation 2008. A former Editor-in Chief of Wired Magazine, she was also a senior editor at The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The New York Times magazines. She is a director of the Chez Panisse Foundation.
Sarah Rich
Sarah Rich is a founder of Civil Eats. She is an editor at Dwell magazine, where she specializes in sustainable design and architecture. She was the managing editor of the Slow Food Nation blog leading up to the inaugural 2008 event in San Francisco. She was also the managing editor and co-author of the book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, 2006). Sarah lives in the Mission district of San Francisco where fog is scarce and tacos are not.
Jen Dalton
Jen Dalton is the editor of the Local Eats series, which features how cities all over the United States are rebuilding local food systems from the ground up. She is a San Francisco based writer who works to promote sustainable businesses, local economies and good food. She was recently the Parallel Programs Director for Slow Food Nation.
Stacey Slate
Stacey Slate is the deputy managing editor of Civil Eats. She is a food writer based in New York City who has contributed to Mark Bittman’s New York Times blog, Bitten, and is also a writer for Hungry Beast and a new print publication, Remedy Quarterly.
Regular Contributors:
Tamar Adler
Tamar Adler cooks at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, where she arrived two years ago after leaving Farm 255, a fully integrated farm-restaurant in Athens, Georgia, where she worked as head chef. Before that, she was an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Tamar is currently a leader of Slow Food Berkeley and directs the Bay Area Meat CSA, which seeks to create functional direct-sales models for small-scale ranchers.
Layla Azimi
Layla Azimi worked as the Communication Coordinator for Slow Food Nation, the first event of its kind, which drew 85,000 people to San Francisco in hopes of building a healthier, more sustainable food system. Co-founder of Kitchen Table Talks, she lives in Napa Valley where she is learning to perfect her marmalade and jam-making skills and planting her first vegetable garden.
Vanessa Barrington
Vanessa is a food writer and chef based in Oakland, California. She is the coauthor of Heirloom Beans: Great Recipes for Dips and Spreads, Soups and Stews, Salads, and Salsas, and Much More from Rancho Gordo. (Chronicle 2008). She works as a consultant with Straus Communications on food, agriculture, and environmental issues. She blogs about food policy and healthy cooking for EcoSalon and her own blog, Vanessa Barrington, and she thinks the world would be a better place if more people cooked real food more often.
Britt Bunyard
Britt Bunyard, PhD, operates a small sustainable farm in Wisconsin and is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Fungi, a journal dedicated to all aspects of mushrooms and other fungi.
Andrea King Collier
Andrea King Collier is a freelance writer and W.K. Kellogg/IATP Food and Society Policy Fellow.
Curt Ellis
Curt Ellis is a Food and Society Policy Fellow with the WK Kellogg Foundation and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. As a filmmaker, he co-created and starred in the feature documentary King Corn and produced The Greening of Southie. Curt lives in Austin, Texas.
Debra Eschmeyer
Debra Eschmeyer is a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow and the Marketing and Media Director of the National Farm to School Network and the Center for Food and Justice. She works from her fifth-generation family farm in Ohio, where she continues her passion for organic farming raising fruits, vegetables, chickens, and pigs. Debra’s previous non-profit work spans the globe in the humanitarian, conservation, sustainable agriculture, and food justice realms. Most recently, Debra was the Project Director at the National Family Farm Coalition in Washington, DC where she focused on U.S. agricultural policy and food sovereignty initiatives among grassroots domestic and international rural advocacy and social justice networks.
Eve Fox
Eve is the creator of The Garden of Eating, a blog about food–cooking it, eating it, and growing it. She has a legendary love of aprons and can often be found salivating over the fruits and veggies at one of the many farmers’ markets near her home in Berkeley, CA.
Sara Franklin
Sara Franklin is an independent food systems consultant focusing on social justice, community development, and urban agriculture. She has farmed and worked with various agriculture and anti-poverty organizations in Massachusetts and New York. She currently lives, works, grows and eats in Brooklyn.
Aaron French
Chef / Ecologist Aaron French writes about the environment for Civil Eats. He is the chef of The Sunny Side Cafe and is writing his first book “The Bay Area Homegrown Cookbook” (Voyageur Press, 2011). He has a Masters in Ecology and is currently working toward his MBA at UC Berkeley, with a focus on sustainable business practices.
Eddie Gehman Kohan
Eddie Gehman Kohan is an ag policy wonkette and mother who splits her time between DC and Los Angeles. She writes Obama Foodorama, a “living archive” about everything having to do with Barack and food, which includes Ag policy commentary, Obama food art, recipes, and busting the bubble on misconceptions about White House food practices. When not writing about Barack, she writes about food safety and other food and farming issues.
Jennifer Goldstein
Jennifer Goldstein is a doctoral student in cultural geography at University of California, Los Angeles. She often writes on the localization and globalization of food on her website www.rootingforfruit.com.
Twilight Greenaway
Twilight Greenaway writes about sustainable food systems for the San Francisco-based Center for Urban Education about Sustainable
Agriculture (CUESA). She has also worked as an editor for Alternet.org, where she ran a spin-off website for young community organizers called Wiretap, and for the start-up TV network Current TV. Her writing appears regularly online, at sources such as Culinate, GOOD, and The Bold Italic.
Rose Hayden-Smith
An academic with the University of California, Agriculture and Natural Resources, Rose Hayden-Smith’s work focuses on providing gardening and food systems education to youth, educators and community audiences. A practicing U.S. historian, she is a nationally recognized expert on Victory Gardens, wartime food policies, and school garden programs. She is a 2008-2009 Food and Society Policy Fellow (FASP). The creator of UC’s Victory Grower website and blog, her work can be found at http://groups.ucanr.org/victorygrower/
Sarah Henry
Sarah Henry is a freelance writer in Berkeley, California who blogs about food and family matters at Lettuce Eat Kale. You can follow her on Twitter.
Jerusha Klemperer
Jerusha Klemperer lives in New York City where she is the Program Manager of Networks and Partnerships at Slow Food USA. She previously served there as Assistant to the Executive Director, and is the editor of Slow Food USA’s blog.
Tom Laskawy
Tom Laskawy blogs on food and the environment at Grist.org and Beyond Green, where he covers food policy, alternative energy, climate science, and politics.
Ralph Loglisci
Ralph Loglisci is the project director for the Johns Hopkins Healthy Monday Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and is a regular contributor for the Livable Future Blog. Ralph has worn many hats over the years and writes about issues ranging from food politics to obesity and health behavior. He was the communications director for the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production and before that spent almost 15 years as a TV news producer. You can follow him on Twitter.
Cerise Mayo
Cerise Mayo is the Program Director for the New Amsterdam Market Association, whose mission is to reinvent the indoor public market as a civic institution in the City of New York. She recently served as the Creating Leaders, Creating Change Program Manager at Slow Food Nation, as well as the Director of Special Projects for Slow Food USA from 2002-2007. She is currently starting (a yet to be named) urban kitchen garden design business, helping people grow their own food, no matter how small the plot of land.
Dave Murphy
David Murphy is the founder and director of Food Democracy Now!, a sixth generation Iowan, and a writer and advocate for sustainable agriculture.
Robyn O’Brien
According to the New York Times, Robyn O’Brien is “food’s Erin Brockovich.” As the founder of AllergyKids, an organization designed to protect the 1 in 3 American children with autism, allergies, ADHD and asthma, Robyn has appeared on Good Morning America, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and CNN highlighting the role that chemicals in our food supply are having on our health. Born and raised in a conservative Texas family on supply side economics and the Wall Street Journal, Robyn earned a Fulbright Fellowship, an MBA and served as an equity analyst on a multibillion dollar fund prior to moving to Boulder, Colorado with her husband and four children. She is the author of the book, The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.
Kim O’Donnel
Seattle-based Kim O’Donnel blogs at True/Slant and hosts a weekly chat on Culinate. Formerly with The Washington Post, she has written for Real Simple, Smithsonian.com and Huffington Post. She is the founder of Canning Across America, a collective of cooks, gardeners and food lovers dedicated to the revival of putting up food. Her cookbook, “Licking Your Chops: A Meatless Guide for Meat Lovers,” will be published by Da Capo Press in September 2010.
Antonio Roman-Alcalá
San Francisco native Antonio Roman-Alcalá has been irrationally dedicated to urban sustainability since he decided that there wasn’t enough “land” for all dropouts to go “back to”. Attempting to live both a well-examined life and a joyful one, he splits his time among such pursuits as: teaching farming and permaculture through Alemany Farm and the SF Permaculture Guild; playing drums, guitar and singing; writing about the sustainable food movement as a perpetually critical insider; resisting yet submitting to the dominant paradigm of institutional learning environments; and planning for an upcoming mock mayoral run.
Kerry Trueman
Kerry Trueman is the co-founder of EatingLiberally.org, a netroots website & organization that advocates sustainable agriculture, progressive politics and a less-consumption driven way of life. A farmers’ market fanatic & edible landscaping enthusiast based in NYC’s West Village and the Hudson River Valley, she blogs regularly at Eating Liberally, Huffington Post, Air America, Retrovore and Open Left.
Amber Turpin
Amber Turpin is a freelance food writer in Santa Cruz. She most recently worked as Office Manager for Slow Food Nation, taking a break from running her own wholesale cookie company, writing a weekly food column, and pulling weeds on her small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Melissa Waldron Lehner
Melissa Waldron Lehner is the editor and publisher of the online e-zine Fertile Ground USA, where she writes about the latest trends and innovations in farming and food. She is the contributing producer for a regular radio series with Gourmet magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, which explores the politics of the plate along with the real meaning of food in our lives and how it has become intertwined with our sense of self. Melissa is the recipient of the 2006 James Beard Foundation/Viking King Range Broadcast Media Award for best Radio Food Show. She is also a freelance writer and contributor to the local foods magazine Edible Nutmeg, part of the Edible Communities consortium and SARE, the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Eduction non-profit based in Washington DC.
Mark Winne
Mark Winne is the author of “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty” (Beacon Press 2008). For more information, go to www.markwinne.com.
MK Wyle
Mary Kathryn Wyle is an apprentice farmer and full-time good eater. Presently working at Caretaker Farm in Massachusetts, she also blogs about her agricultural and gastronomic adventures on her website:www.yeomanfarmgirl.blogspot.com.