TracyFood

Monkey Monday: My awesome food geek weekend 19 February 2007 2:49 am

Posted by Tracy in : CSA,Marion Nestle,WFFC,agriculture,anthropology,books,cooking,dessert,eating,fangirl,friends,geekery,health,monkeys,news,people,school,sustainability,tea , trackback

A short version of the weekend, in numbered list form:

Conferences attended and new journals started because the old one was full of notes
Books purchased (Safe Food by Marion Nestle and Eat Here by Brian Halweil), and hours driven to and from Corvallis for the conference.
Hours of tapes filled with recordings of talks, small sessions attended (i.e. not keynote or endnote), business cards collected (one from the Ecotrust guy promoting the Farmer-Chef Connection conferences, one from a very kind OSU geography professor, and one from an NYU food studies program graduate who now works for a Seattle market research firm that gathered the data I need for my book on what happens now that organic is mainstream), and Marion Nestle autographs collected like the fangirl I am.
Fountain pen cartridges emptied while taking the aforementioned pages and pages of notes, and total tea bags consumed at Allison’s house and at the conference.

I could go on and on, but I think you’re getting the idea. On Friday afternoon I drove from Eugene to Corvallis (a trip made possible thanks to our long-term loan from the fabulous Chiara). There, I met Allison at her house, and we promptly whisked off to dinner at Wildfire Grill, the restaurant formerly known as Intaba’s. I had the special dinner salad of mixed greens topped with roasted duck, reduced balsamic-fig dressing, and the kicker: polenta croutons. Allison had Cattail Creek lamb chops with Asian pear, garlic mashed potatoes, and a variety of veggies including roasted butternut squash, which I got to finish. Go Team! Adam, who met us at the restaurant, had some kind of schwanky pizza but I hardly noticed it because I was too distracted by my food and Allison’s, which was my second choice menu item (the salad won out because it was smaller). Then Allison dropped me off at LaSells Student Center for Marion Nestle’s free talk, “What to Eat: Personal Responsibility versus Social Responsibility” — which of course rocked my little world. I collected the first two autographs, on my copies of Food Politics (Dr. Nestle was happy to see it in hardcover form) and What to Eat, and left completely starstruck. Much too excited to stand in one place and wait for a ride, I made happy squealing noises on the phone to Allison while walking towards her house via downtown Corvallis. She and Adam met me on the way and we all went out to gelato for dessert. Yum!

The next morning I woke up early and had fried eggs on toast with Allison before driving to the conference (the original plan was for me to take the bus and walk, but I was lazy and wanted to charge my cell phone). The OSU bookstore had several tables of exciting reading material available for sale, and I wrote down a whole long list of titles before settling on Eat Here (hopeful, inspiring, and required reading for my sustainable agriculture class) in addition to Dr. Nestle’s 2003 book, Safe Food, which was also on my list. The morning’s keynote address by Dr. Nestle was not all that different from the talk she gave the night before; she basically cut a few examples to make time for more references to agriculture and U.S. farm policy. BUT! One of the sessions offered in the first time slot after the keynote there was a chance to continue questions and answers with Dr. Nestle and that was super-awesome. I got to talk shit about kids menus and people who say they can’t cook when they mean won’t, and for the rest of the day people kept coming up to me to ask where I cook. Sometimes I forget that I’m practically a people person by professional cook standards. Also I got my copy of Safe Food signed.

The other sessions I went to that day were about organizing local support for community agriculture (moderated by Lynne of WFFC) and “diverse marketing opportunities” for small farms (i.e. beyond farmers markets to farmstands, CSA and subscription services, U-Pick, and in particular I was curious about the farm side of direct sales to restaurants, because I am a big geek). The capnote was the aforementioned NYU food studies grad whose market research group has inadvertently researched my “on beyond organics” book for me. By that point I was teetering on the verge of a crippling migraine because my brain was so very full, but I stuck it out and made it back to Allison’s house and took some Aleve and we got hole-in-the-wall Mexican takeout for dinner and then I drove home to Eugene where Peter was very patient with me when I was still too excited to stop talking even though he was very tired from playing a lot of frisbee golf.

All told, it was a stupendously awesome weekend, and I’m more excited than ever to find a way to go to school about this stuff. It’s a good thing I’m writing a field report about the conference for my sustainable agriculture class, because I kept trying to do just that when I was writing this week’s reading critique (the reason this entry is posted at such a ridiculous time). I’ve started reading Safe Food and so far it is excellent but now I keep running across painfully relevant news and stuff during my web research on possible grad programs. (Shiny!)