Judson Berkey
Judson Berkey is the Managing Director of Group Operational Risk for (UBS), coordinating operational risk management activities across the worldwide operations of UBS. He is an expert on international regulatory frameworks for agriculture, finance, and e-commerce. Judson closely follows policy and trends surrounding sustainable agriculture. Judson holds a BS from UVA and a JD from Harvard Law, and he resides in Zurich, Switzerland.
Liz Bomze
Liz Bomze lives in Brookline, MA and works as the Associate Features Editor for Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. She also freelances regularly for the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, the Improper Bostonian, and Martha’s Vineyard Magazine; practices bread-baking and canning; takes photos; reads; and watches baseball. Top 5 foods: fresh noodles, gravlax, sour cherry pie, burrata, ma po tofu.
Jason Bond
Jason Bond, from a family of ranchers, spent most of his youth in the mountains and otherwise outdoors. Both of his grandmothers were great cooks, which he feels has been important for defining the way he looks at cooking and dining. After studying music in college, Jason drove to the East Coast to work with many nationally known chefs and in two Relais & Chateaux properties, The Inn at Little Washington and The Ryland Inn. After studying charcuterie in Paris and traveling throughout France to expand his knowledge of cheese, Jason spent four years at No. 9 Park, ultimately as chef de cuisine. He helped to design and open B&G Oysters and The Butcher Shop. Following a stint at Burdick Chocolates as head chef, Jason returned to Boston as executive chef at Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro. In his cooking, Jason constantly strives to balance tradition with modern tastes and techniques.
Cathy Burton
Cathy Burton is a member of the strategic development team at the Red Espresso tea company in Cape Town, South Africa, where she manages the firms corporate social responsibility initiatives. Cathy completed her BS in marketing at the University of Cape Town, after which she worked at one of the largest marketing research and consumer insights agencies in South Africa. She spent five years developing many local and international beverage brands before joining the Red Espresso team in 2006, where she launched the brand across numerous international markets as Red Espresso’s Global Brand Manager. Passionate about all things natural, she loves wholesome, healthful food, and spends her free time mountainbiking or running on the beach with her husband and two Border Collies.
Mike Cadoux
Mike Cadoux is Co-Owner of Peak Organic Brewing Company, a leading American brand of organic beers. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and reads science and history – a lot. Mike keeps an ant farm, makes his own pasta, and enjoys dry, complex rosé.
Jacqueline Church
Jacqueline Church is an independent food, wine & spirits writer. She authors and speaks on “sensible sustainability” issues. Jacqueline delights in helping people make practical choices to improve their lives and reduce their impact on the planet. Her work appears in national and regional print media, including Culture: the Word on Cheese and Edible Santa Barbara. She is a contributing writer to Nourish Network, writes the gourmet food column for Suite101.com, and publishes two blogs: The Leather District Gourmet and Pig Tales & Fish Friends, both of which can be found at her site: http://JacquelineChurch.com
Josh Dorf
Josh Dorf is president of the Stone-Buhr Flour Company. In 2002, he purchased the 100 year-old Stone-Buhr brand from Unilever and has since grown the company into the leading brand of whole wheat flour in major California and Pacific Northwest markets. Stone-Buhr is the only brand of wheat flour supporting Food Alliance certified sustainable agriculture and our American family farmers. Josh also launched www.FindTheFarmer.com, allowing consumers the unprecedented ability to track their bag of flour back to the specific farmers who grew the wheat. Prior to Stone-Buhr, Josh started and worked with a variety of technology companies before returning to his roots in the food space.
Nigel Dorward
Nigel is Managing Director of The Better Trading Company in Cape Town, South Africa. The Better Trading Company is a dynamic, for-profit trading company that acts as an ethical agent. They connect leading retailers and markets with exceptional horticultural and agricultural entrepreneurs in Southern and Eastern Africa.
A proud African from Zimbabwe, Nigel’s career experience centres on mixed agricultural production but also includes textile production, retail and small business start-ups. He holds a degree in Social Science (Politics and Economic History), has an MBA, and is a Nuffield Scholar.
Mary Fifield
Mary Fifield is a writer and the Founder and Executive Director of the Amazon Partnerships Foundation, which empowers indigenous communities to design and implement their own projects to conserve the rainforest and their traditional culture. Living in the Ecuadorian Amazon, she experiences food in an entirely new way, from the struggles communities face with food security to the adventures of bonding with indigenous people through eating and cooking. Before moving to the Amazon in 2007, she was a communications consultant for non-profits such as Episcopal Charities, the Pachamama Alliance, and MoveOn.Org, as well as for companies such as Microsoft and Boeing. She has an MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University, and she has published fiction and non-fiction pieces in Colere, Verbsap, and an upcoming anthology from LaChance Publishing.
Andrew Gruel
Andrew Gruel manages Seafood for the Future, a non-profit seafood advisory and promotional program based at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Southern California. Andrew’s “food is simple” philosophy motivates people to enjoy food in a communal setting, at a slow pace, and with a sense of humor. Andrew holds a degree in Food Marketing and Culinary Arts from Johnson & Wales University and fingers that have smelled like garlic for over 13 years. He was a featured chef on the PBS series The Endless Feast, hosted his own radio show throughout New Hampshire called Cooking with Gruel, and routinely eats sardines for breakfast.
Jennifer Hashley
Jennifer Hashley, is the Director of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. New Entry is a beginning farmer training program that assists limited-resource individuals to begin small-scale commercial agriculture in Massachusetts as a way to preserve farmland and to expand consumer access to locally-grown foods. Jennifer is also a vegetable and livestock farmer and raises chickens, eggs, pork, sheep, and rabbit. Jennifer serves on steering committees for the Massachusetts Food Policy Alliance, Mass Grass, and the Concord Agricultural Committee. She is a farm business planning instructor for the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources and teaches farm labs for graduate students in the Tufts’ Agriculture, Food and Environment program. Jennifer served as an agricultural Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras (’99-01) and held a staff biologist position at an environmental consulting firm in Idaho. Jennifer holds a Master’s degree in Agricultural Policy from Tufts University and a BS in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Indiana University.
Deborah Krasner
Deborah Krasner won the James Beard Award for her book The Flavors of Olive Oil in 2003, and is the author of the 2010 book Good Meat: How to Find and Cook Sustainable Meat. A long time resident of rural Vermont, she raises her own poultry and lamb and keeps a flock of laying hens. She has written on food and design for magazines such as Food&Wine, Bon Appetit, Wine Spectator, Parenting, and Real Simple. She also designs cook-friendly kitchens which have been featured in House Beautiful and Home magazines.
Joshua Levin
Joshua Levin is a consultant to non-profits and their corporate partners in sustainable agriculture business development and sustainable food markets. Joshua has worked with Conservation International, the Rainforest Alliance, EcoAgriculture Partners, and Root Capital. He earned his MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business where he was a Catherine B. Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship, and he holds a BA from Harvard University in Social Theory and International Development. Joshua Levin also founded RedKey Education LLC in 2004, an education services and technology firm that operated in Cambridge, Providence, New Haven, and Paris, France, and which was acquired in 2009.
Kenji Lopez-Alt
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is a freelance food writer and columnist at Serious Eats.com, where his weekly “Food Lab” column explains the basics of kitchen science to home cooks. He spent three years as an Associate Editor at Cook’s Illustrated Magazine and as a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Boston Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, and Edible Boston. Before beginning his writing career, he was a restaurant cook for many years, honing his chops at some of Boston’s best restaurants including Clio, Uni, and No. 9 Park . An MIT graduate, he takes a strong interest in the role of science in everyday cooking and is currently working on his first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. He runs a private comp, KA Cuisine, available for the New York area’s most demanding clientele.
Natasha Larche
Natasha is the global brand manager for Red Espresso (a caffeine-free espresso made from tea). She’s living the dream in idyllic Cape Town, South Africa. Natasha loves discovering (and working to) new music, cooking, kung fu, documentaries that challenge her thinking, being with friends and travelling (preferably together). She has a passion for writing and a penchant for introducing a brand new way of drinking tea around the world, and is having a lot of fun doing it. Protecting the planet – and doing what we can to save it – is important to her and to her teammates, and they are doing and learning what they can to achieve more.
Pete Lowy
Pete Lowy has been a Farm Manager at Verrill Farm in Concord, MA for the past seven years. Verrill Farm is a diversified vegetable farm which actively grows over 125 acres of vegetables utilizing both IPM and organic growing practices. Pete is active in the sustainable agriculture community having authored several SARE (Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education) grants and serving as as a technical advisor to SARE. Pete is on the board for the newly created Battle Road Farms which is a program to revitalize the Minuteman National Park farmland to active agricultural production. Pete, along with his wife Jen Hashley, co-owns and manages Pete and Jen’s Backyard Birds: a grass-based livestock enterprise which raises chickens, eggs, pork, sheep, and rabbit. Prior to living in Massachusetts Pete worked on several large organic farms in other parts of the country and served in the Peace Corps as an agriculture volunteer in the Federated States of Micronesia. Pete and Jen met in 2001 while studying ecological horticulture at the University of Santa Cruz Agro-ecology Program.
Richard Matusow
Richard Matusow is the VP of Business Development at Sambazon Acai, the leading American brand of organic acai. He is originally from Durham, NH and holds a BA from Dartmouth, an MA from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and an MBA from Columbia. In the past, he has worked for Priceline.com, Pfiizer Pharmaceuticals, and as a high school Spanish teacher. After the 9/11 tragedy, he went to Brazil to get away from it all, and he soon became addicted to beach culture, acai, and triathalon training. Richard then joined the early founders of Sambazon. He is inspired by the opportunity to help build a business that is more than just the bottom line of an income statement, and by the impact the product can have on both its producers and consumers. Richard lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Jade Ostner
Jade Ostner is a 2009 Loyola University Maryland graduate who, days after commencement, boarded a plane to Bangkok for a year-long culinary journey through South East Asia’s most intrepid dishes. Her love of fresh, local fare stemmed from a blissful encounter with Slow Foods while backpacking through Italy, and she is equally happy sampling Yak steaks in the Himalaya or volunteering on free-range turkey farms in rural Maryland. Jade is the event coordinator for the Maryland Wineries Association, a non-profit that supports local agriculture and promotes land preservation. She currently resides in Baltimore where she continues to eat—and drink—locally.
Betsy Power
Betsy Power is the co-founder and CEO of Culinary Collective, a specialty food importer that works with small-scale producers of all-natural cultural food from Spain and Latin America. A strong proponent of responsible business, in 2004 Betsy, with Paul Hawken, co-founded Highwater Research — a socially responsible investing research organization in San Francisco. Betsy is trained as an architect with a focus on green design and community-based development, and has worked with communities in Eastern Washington, Mexico, and Ecuador. In 2008, she launched Rooted Foods, a seal of transparency for traditional foods that connects the consumer back to the producer and supports self-sufficient communities worldwide.
Stefan Schachter
Stefan is the founder and president of EcoTeas, a top-selling organic and fair trade U.S. tea brand specializing in yerba mate. Stefan J. Schachter was born in Nyack, NY and received his BA in psychology from Stanford University. He holds a certificate in ecological horticulture from UC Santa Cruz. He serves on the board of directors of the Mederi Foundation and the Rogue Valley Resiliency Fund. Stefan enjoys gardening, writing and playing music, and bicycling around his sweet town of Ashland, OR.
David Steuer
David Steuer is one of the founders of Saatchi & Saatchi S, a leading sustainability consulting company. He has worked extensively with major retailers, including Walmart, where he helped develop the groundbreaking Personal Sustainability Program (PSP) for over 1.2 million Associates, as well as General Mills, Frito Lay, and Procter & Gamble. David currently resides in New York.
Kirsten Tobey
Kirsten Saenz Tobey is co-founder and COO of Revolution Foods, a company that is transforming school lunch by providing healthy, delicious meals and nutrition education to students. Kirsten’s career began as a teacher and educational program coordinator in Massachusetts and Ecuador. She has run children’s gardening programs as well as a public health campaign for Earthjustice. She managed operations for the School for Field Studies in Mexico while studying the impacts of the fishing industry. During graduate school, she worked with the UN Hunger Task Force to evaluate school feeding programs in Ghana and with McDonald’s to incorporate social and environmental responsibility into the supply chain. Kirsten has an AB from Brown and an MBA from UC Berkeley.
Greg Vaughan
Greg Vaughan is an agronomist in the high plains of central Colombia, where he works at the interface of farming and archeology. He runs a fair trade handmade jam business, Manjares Caseros Caro y Greg, with his wife, and organizes cultural tours to Colombia with his company Tesoros de mi Tierra Tours. He maintains a blog called Agrarian Ideas for a Developing World and writes, edits, and translates project proposals, literary works, scientific articles, and essays.
Zak Zaidman
Zak Zaidman is the Co-founder and CEO of Kopali Organics. Raised in Mexico City, Zak’s first company, Gravity Inc., developed virtual reality software for Intel and Disney. Zak’s experience with cancer in his 20’s led him to more purpose driven work. After selling Gravity in 2000, Zak led international/interfaith/peace delegations to India and the Middle East, and helped organize and the Sustainable Solutions Caravan, driving a vegetable-oil-powered bus from California to Central America, promoting sustainability to tens of millions. Zak then moved to the rain forest in Costa Rica, where after receiving basic Permaculture certification, he cofounded Kopali. Zak is also a passionate singer/songwriter. He is currently based in NYC