Food Systems: Our food does not just appear in a restaurant or a supermarket; it has to get there, somehow. How is our current food system doing us a disservice, and what can we do to improve upon it? In this panel, professionals in the food industry as well as advocates for food justice will share experiences working toward a better food system.

• Tanya Fields is a working mother from Bronx, New York. In 2006, she quit her day job in the corporate sector to become a full time activist for food justice and local farming. In doing so, she created her own organization called The BLK Projek to help underserved women of color by creating women-led economic development opportunities. In her attempts to construct an urban farm on a piece of underdeveloped New York City Parks land as well as other underdeveloped land in the South Bronx, she is shaking up the NYC borough from the earth up. Currently, Fields is not only still solidifying space for the Libertad Urban Farm but working on creating a women-led cooperative food business - a mobile market that run would provide residents of the South Bronx organic produce and support local growers. These opportunities give underserved women the chance to build community with other woman, learn in workshops and gain skills.

• Anthony Fassio is the Chair of Slow Food NYC, an international organization that works to create a food system based on the principles of high quality and taste, environmental sustainability, and social justice—in essence, a food system that is “good, clean and fair.”  Anthony is a food professional with experience throughout the food supply chain. Past experience include; growing up on a farm; corporate food processing, distribution, and food safety; Paris culinary training; and food sourcing.  Anthony currently spends his time helping large and small farms, slaughter facilities, and restaurants develop a Slow Food NYC sustainability philosophy.

• Ian Calder-Piedmonte is co-owner of Balsam Farms, which is located on the South Fork of the beautiful East End of Long Island. Balsam consists of several fields between the small villages of Amagansett and Sagaponack, where hundreds of different vegetables are grown, including over 75 different varieties of tomatoes as well as potatoes, greens, flowers, herbs, small grain and locally famous corn. Ian grew up on a standardbred race-horse farm and also showed horses in hunter and jumper competitions.

• Graham Meriwether is a documentary journalist who serves as the director at Leave It Better, a film production company committed to telling solutions-oriented stories about environmental challenges. Graham studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is based in New York City. For the past five years, Graham has been focused on directing and distributing  American Meat. In 2010, Meriwether founded the non-profit organization, Leave It Better Foundation, whose mission is to empower youth to heal our environment.

• Moderator: Matthew Hoffman is a rural sociologist whose research bridges food systems, community development, land tenure, and natural resource management.  A once and future farmer from Vermont, he is currently a visiting professor at New York University in the department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health.

4/15 @ 7 pm: Buy Tickets to Screening & Panel
Cinema Village, 22 E 12th Street NYC

PANEL INCLUDES:

Chefs & Butchers: Any New Yorker will tell you that one of the best things about the city is its restaurants. And in those restaurants, you will not only find beautifully-prepared steaks and perfectly-seared hamburgers, but you’ll also see local farmers like Michael Yezzi dragging entire pigs into a kitchen--because many chefs and restaurateurs are devoted to supporting local farms that practice sustainable, humane methods of raising animals. This is a chance to hear leading chefs and restaurateurs talk about how they made their visions into reality, and how meat can be an art form.

• Mary Cleaver is the founder and owner of the Cleaver Co. and the Green Table in New York City. The Cleaver Co. is a full-service event planning and catering operation with a large roster of private, non-profit and corporate clients, and a full-time staff of 50. The Green Table is a farm-to-table restaurant in the Chelsea Market where guests enjoy delicious dishes that demonstrate a commitment to seasonal cuisine. Most recently, Mary opened two food and beverage kiosks at The Battery in partnership with the Battery Conservancy, which are bringing a local focus to concession-style food and drink. The Cleaver Company and the Green Table are widely recognized for utilizing local farms and purveyors in order to obtain the best-quality product, and for supporting small to mid-size farms and family farmers. Mary is a founder of the Farm to Chef network and a board member of Food Systems Network NYC and Local Infrastructure for Local Agriculture.  

• Tom Mylan is the executive butcher and co-owner of The Meat Hook, a butcher shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he cuts, smokes and cures meat that is sourced from small, family-owned farms. Tom has been featured on the Travel Channel's No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, the Cooking Channel's Food Crafters, NPR's All things Considered and The Brian Lehrer Show, in addition to appearing as a guest lecturer at Yale University. He has written for New York Magazine, Gourmet.com, and he currently writes a column for the Atlantic Magazine Food Channel. Tom is responsible for several community oriented-food projects, including the Unfancy Food Show, an annual, affordable event featuring local, artisanal food producers, which celebrates Brooklyn's return to hand-crafted, environmentally aware food ways.

• Jake Dickson, owner of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, found himself increasingly drawn to the food industry after spending years on a mostly unfulfilling corporate marketing career track. As he diligently researched food-based businesses to learn as much as he could about as many areas as he could, it became clear that meat was where his heart (and stomach) lay. He dug deeper and found that the meat options available to consumers were severely lacking in quality. How could it be that there were so few avenues through which people could purchase humanely raised and responsibly sourced meats? Following his passion, Jake started apprenticing at farms and butcher shops to get his hands dirty and immerse himself in the day-to-day operations of the meat business, in the hopes of starting one of his own someday. His dream became a reality in 2009 when he opened Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market. Now, his self-proclaimed, “candy shop for carnivores,” has become one of the most sought after purveyors of fine quality meats in the city and has expanded to a second location in TriBeCa’s All Good Things Market.

• Bill Telepan is the owner and founder of his eponymous restaurant “Telepan,” which opened in December of 2005 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Telepan was voted “Best Newcomer” by the Zagat Guide for 2007. Telepan is the author of the book “Inspired by Ingredients” and he serves on the Chef’s Advisory Board of the Institute of Culinary Education, City Harvest’s Restaurant Board, and a board member & executive chef of Wellness in the Schools. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. As Jonathan Gold wrote in his December 2002 review for Gourmet Magazine, chef Bill Telepan’s cooking is “like listening to a Haydn string quartet doubled at the octave. This is pretty much exemplary of Telepan’s cooking at its best: grounded in an American classic but lifted beyond it by absolute devotion to the quality and sourcing of produce, the smack of sharp fragrance, and the confidence to exploit subtle variations in flavor and texture.”

• Graham Meriwether is a documentary journalist who serves as the director at Leave It Better, a film production company committed to telling solutions-oriented stories about environmental challenges. Graham studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is based in New York City. For the past five years, Graham has been focused on directing and distributing  American Meat. In 2010, Meriwether founded the non-profit organization, Leave It Better Foundation, whose mission is to empower youth to heal our environment.

• Moderator: Rachel Signer is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on documenting and supporting social change projects. She received her M.A. in sociocultural anthropology from The New School for Social Research in 2010. Rachel is the Public Relations coordinator for American Meat and is a founding member of the Green Rabbits consultancy.

Markets: Our food doesn’t just come to us--we have to go out and buy it, or grow it. Greenmarket and other urban outdoor markets like the New Amsterdam Market are crucial outlets for area farmers to reach customers, and they are by no means easy to create or maintain. How do markets play into our changing national food system, what challenges are they facing (and the New Amsterdam Market in  particular has found itself in a difficult situation that we’ll hear about), and what can we do to support them even more?

• Robert LaValva is the Founder and President of the New Amsterdam Market, an outdoor market in the historic South Street Seaport district of Lower Manhattan . Robert studied urban planning at New York University and architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He worked for ten years as a planner for the City of New York, where he helped establish and implemented one of the country’s largest urban composting programs. In 2002 he left government to pursue his interest in sustainable agriculture and found his way to the international Slow Food organization, where among other activities he instituted a consortium for raw milk cheese producers; worked on programs to help preserve biodiversity in crops and livestock; and managed Slow Food’s Urban Harvest festival, which he staged in 2005 as the first New Amsterdam Market. He is committed to reviving this city’s tradition of a public market system, rededicated to responsible agriculture, regional economies, and fair trade.

• Michael Hurwitz is the Director of Greenmarket, a 36 year-old program of GrowNYC that operates 54 producer-only farmers markets throughout the five boroughs of New York City and the Wholesale Farmers Market located in the New Fulton Fish Market in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. Greenmarket works with 250 producers to preserve over 30,000 acres of regional farmland by bringing the freshest and healthiest foods directly to NYC residents.

• Michael Yezzi is a pig farmer and owner of Flying Pigs Farm.  He raises rare breed pigs, meat chickens, and laying hens rotating them through his fields and woods. He has sold at the Greenmarkets since 2001 and currently sells at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza markets. Half of his sales come from farmers market sales. Mr. Yezzi has a JD and Masters in Public Health.

• Peter Hoffman is the chef-owner of Back Forty, a casual East Village tavern that debuted in 2007. He owned the seminal SoHo locavore restaurant, Savoy, for 20 years before closing it in June 2011. In November 2011, he opened Back Forty West in the former Savoy space. Back Forty operates with a simple premise--to create delicious and memorable meals using the best ingredients from local farmers. Buying directly from producers and understanding what it takes to produce great ingredients is fundamental to Hoffman’s cooking approach and to his role as a teacher and leader in the culinary community.

• Graham Meriwether is a documentary journalist who serves as the director at Leave It Better, a film production company committed to telling solutions-oriented stories about environmental challenges. Graham studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is based in New York City. For the past five years, Graham has been focused on directing and distributing  American Meat. In 2010, Meriwether founded the non-profit organization, Leave It Better Foundation, whose mission is to empower youth to heal our environment.

• Moderator: Claire Hartten, co-founder of the consultancy Green Rabbits, is an integrative sitopian designer, special projects developer, strategic advisor and educator. She is a founding faculty member of the new program, MFA Products of Design, at SVA in New York City where she teaches Design for Sustainability and Resilience, a course focused on solutions involving food and agriculture.

The Making of American Meat: Making a documentary film is a collaborative process that starts with a question or an idea, and eventually becomes an edited, full-length narrative. In this case, American Meat began with Graham Meriwether’s interest in Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms. But the was American Meat was distributed is also a story worthy of documentation: rather than applying to any film festivals, the film premiered at the farm where it was filmed. From there, the film was brought directly to young farmers and students across the country as part of the Young Farmer Screening Series. In this panel, the people involved in producing American Meat discuss its evolution from an idea into a nationwide phenomenon, and the moments of difficulty, surprise, and learning that happened along the way.

• Ryan Nethery is a Brooklyn based cinematographer and documentary filmmaker. He is passionate about the outdoors, great food, social justice and important stories. He was a cinematographer and producer for American Meat.

• Memo Salazar is an editor and filmmaker living in New York City. He has edited the feature documentaries Wet Dreams starring Rebecca Romjin and E-A-G-L-E-S The Movie as well as television documentaries for Discovery and A & E. As a filmmaker he is responsible for Boy George Michael Jackson Browne and Public Enemy's Son of a Bush.Recently he edited and co-directed TURBOCHARGE! a comedy biopic about the 80's New Wave Band, The Cars. He is currently working on a documentary about the United States and its relationship with and impact on Mexico.

• Graham Meriwether is a documentary journalist who serves as the director at Leave It Better, a film production company committed to telling solutions-oriented stories about environmental challenges. Graham studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is based in New York City. For the past five years, Graham has been focused on directing and distributing  American Meat. In 2010, Meriwether founded the non-profit organization, Leave It Better Foundation, whose mission is to empower youth to heal our environment.

• Michael Hurwitz is a Canadian composer for audio and visual media currently residing in Boston, MA, USA. His work includes Feature-length Documentaries (Getting By, American Meat), Theatrical Performances (Tiradero al Cielo Abierto, Baltimore Ballet Conservatory), commercial Advertising campaigns (Boston Zoo, Frank Webb), as well as numerous credits as a record producer and arranger. His work on American Meat is a collaboration with Assistant Chair of the Berklee Film Scoring department, Allison Plante.

• Moderator: Rachel Signer is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on documenting and supporting social change projects. She received her M.A. in sociocultural anthropology from The New School for Social Research in 2010. Rachel is the Public Relations coordinator for American Meat and is a founding member of the Green Rabbits consultancy.