Sustainable and Adventurous Eating with The Perennial Plate | Civil Eats

Sustainable and Adventurous Eating with The Perennial Plate

Civil Eats contributor Sarah Henry reports at KQED’s Bay Area Bites on the edible explorations of Daniel Klein, the omnivorous chef and his vegetarian girlfriend/cameragal Mirra Fine, who form the dynamic duo behind The Perennial Plate, a web-based, weekly documentary real food romp devoted to socially responsible, sustainable and adventurous eating.

Season one of the good grub chronicles introduced video viewers to a year of food finds in Minnesota, a state that Klein and Fine used to call home. Klein wants people to see where their meat comes from, so he documents rabbit, pig, and turkey killings, along with deer hunting, squirrel slaughtering and bison butchering, often set to a haunting soundtrack. For the more squeamish among us, there’s also cranberry harvesting, morel mushroom gathering, and wild food foraging, typically accompanied by more uptempo tunes.

In season two, which began in early May, the culinary couple took their show on the road for a six-month journey across America in search of stories (and the people behind them) that speak to the heart of food and farming practices in the nation. To date their eating expeditions have led them to harvesting produce in urban farms in New Orleans, hunting feral pigs in Texas, and catching frogs in Arkansas.

Read Henry’s interview with Klein and more about the show at KQED.

Watch episodes of The Perennial Plate here. For a taste, watch:

 

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Paula Crossfield is a founder and the Editor-at-large of Civil Eats. She is also a co-founder of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Her reporting has been featured in The Nation, Gastronomica, Index Magazine, The New York Times and more, and she has been a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio. An avid cook and gardener, she currently lives in Oakland. Read more >

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