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 100+ contributors–but it is always thought provoking, innovative, and focused on food politics.
Naomi Starkman
Naomi Starkman is a Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Civil Eats. She is a food policy consultant to Consumers Union and others, as well as a founding board member and the Strategic Communications Advisor to the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Naomi co-produces Kitchen Table Talks, a local food forum in San Francisco, is a board member of 18 Reasons, a nonprofit connecting community through food, and is on the Circle of Friends Council for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. She served as the Director of Communications & Policy at Slow Food Nation ’08 and has worked as a media consultant at 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. Naomi works with various clients on food policy and advocacy and is an aspiring organic grower, having worked on several farms.
Paula Crossfield
Paula Crossfield is a founder and the Managing Editor of Civil Eats. She is also the Managing Editor and a Founding Director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. She has been a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio. An avid cook and gardener, she currently tends a vegetable garden on her roof in the Lower East Side. You can follow her on Twitter for the latest food policy news.
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 and conducts interviews for our Faces & Visions of the Food Movement series. Jen co-produces Kitchen Table Talks, a local food forum in San Francisco and heads up Kitchen Table Consulting which provides strategy and communications services to promote and support sustainable businesses, local economies and good food. Jen is also serves as the Cheese Chair of the Good Food Awards and was the Programs Director for Slow Food Nation ’08.
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.
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.
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.
Vanessa Barrington
Vanessa is a food writer and chef based in Oakland, California. She is the author of the forthcoming book, DIY Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food From Scratch (Chronicle, Fall 2010) and coauthor of Heirloom Beans (Chronicle 2008). She works as a consultant with HavenBMedia 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.
Olga Bonfiglio
Olga Bonfiglio is a freelance writer, journalist and contributor to the Huffington Post. The former professor, public relations director and nun has written for newspapers, websites and national magazines on the subjects of food, religion, social justice and travel. She also does organic gardening and volunteers at small dairy farm in southwestern Michigan. Her blog is http://olgabonfiglio.blogspot.com/ and she may be contacted at olgabonfiglio@yahoo.com.
Helena Bottemiller
Helena Bottemiller is a Washington, DC-based reporter covering food policy, politics and regulation for Food Safety News (www.foodsafetynews.com and @foodsafetynews) A self-described food policy geek, Helena delved into the food safety world for the first time while writing her thesis on the politics of food regulation at Claremont McKenna College, where she graduated with a degree in Government. You can follow her on Twitter (@hbottemiller).
Siena Chrisman
Siena Chrisman is the Manager of Strategic Partnerships & Alliances for the Grassroots Action Network at WhyHunger. She lives, cooks, and eats in Brooklyn.
Debra Eschmeyer
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.
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.
Twilight Greenaway
Twilight Greenaway is the food editor at Grist. She 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 in Ventura, California. She serves as the leader for UC ANR’s Sustainable Food Systems Initiative. A practicing U.S. historian, she is a nationally recognized expert on Victory Gardens, food policy, and school garden programs. Hayden-Smith was a 2008-2009 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow (FASP); she writes as UC’s Victory Grower.
Sarah Henry
Sarah Henry is a freelance writer in Berkeley, California who blogs about good food matters at Lettuce Eat Kale. You can follow her on Twitter and become a fan of Lettuce Eat Kale on Facebook.
Kate Hoppe
A native Kansan with Okie roots, Kate Hoppe’s early encounter with worm composting solidified her passion for environmental work. She has contributed to the efforts of environmental and social organizations for over 15 years – including managing pr for Backpacker magazine’s Get Out more tour, leading at-risk youth in environmental, service learning programs, and working on farms in the U.S. and abroad. Kate currently serves as a creative marketing and social media consultant for non-profits and green businesses, and plans to pursue graduate studies in public health with a focus on food security this fall.
Andrea King Collier
Andrea King Collier is a freelance writer a Knight Digital Media Fellow and W.K. Kellogg/IATP Food and Society Policy Fellow.
Jerusha Klemperer
Jerusha Klemperer lives in New York City where she is a co-founder and the communications director at FoodCorps. She blogs for Huffington Post, WellandGoodNYC and her personal blog Eat Here 2. She also cooks up food and fun with Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant.
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.
Tracie McMillan
Tracie McMillan’s first book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, will be published by Scribner in 2012. You can follow her on Twitter at @TMMcMillan
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.
Kim O’Donnel
Seattle-based Kim O’Donnel writes The Family Kitchen column, which appears biweekly in USA Today, and hosts a weekly chat on Culinate. Formerly with The Washington Post, she has written for Real Simple, Smithsonian.com and The 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. She is the author of the cookbook, The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook.
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 and former columnist for the Santa Cruz Weekly. She ran her artisan baking business, the Sweet Pea Cookie Company, for five years before working on the Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco. She is a regular contributor to Civil Eats and and currently lives on Bonanza Springs Farm, her property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She also recently opened a small coffee shop called Filling Station with her husband and bakes organic treats fresh daily.
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.
Kristin Wartman
Kristin Wartman is a food writer living in Brooklyn. She has a Masters in Literature from UC Santa Cruz and is a Certified Nutrition Educator. She is interested in the intersections of food, health, politics, and culture. You can read more of her writing at kristinwartman.wordpress.com.
Mark Winne
Mark Winne is the author of “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty” and “Food Rebels,Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture.” Both books are published by Beacon Press. For more information, see www.markwinne.com.