Grace Cathedral is the eponymous "cathedral on a hill" in San Francisco. It's located on Nob Hill, and many of us have been there to see the beautiful Keith Haring altar at the AIDS Chapel, or to walk the labyrinth inside the church.

What I didn't know until recently is that Grace Cathedral hosts a Forum program each week before the Sunday service, and that the program is often focused on current news makers or people of interest.

The Forum, which is available in a podcast archive, often focuses on food issues and I have enjoyed the past season of speakers for that reason. It's a worthwhile podcast to subscribe to even if you pick and choose which speakers pertain to your interests.

In October, I went to Grace Cathedral to hear Dr. Jane Goodall speak. While Goodall is known foremost as a champion of animals and a teacher of the ways of primates, she is also an advocate for conscious eating and published a book called Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. At the Forum, Dr. Goodall spoke to the importance of food choices in the overall health of the planet, and I found her message challenging and inspiring at the same time. Dr. Goodall implored the audience to become vegetarian or at least eat free-range meat, saying "It's not widely known the extent to which the intensive farming of animals is damaging the environment. People don't want to know about the suffering and the cruelty that goes on within the intensive farms. "

A month or two later, Mollie Katzen visited the Forum. Katzen is the author of the Moosewood Cookbook and one of the founders of the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York. She writes about vegetarian cooking and is credited with helping make vegetarianism a mainstream eating practice. Her interview was compelling due to her ties to the Bay Area, and the fact that she's a great speaker. Surprisingly, Katzen is not a strict vegetarian. She eats some meat, but her cooking is inspired by a fierce love for all things vegetable.

Last week, Michael Pollan visited The Forum. He is currently on book tour for his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. This was an informative hour, and it serves as an excellent overview of his book and his outlook on eating.

As an aside, my friend and colleague Bonnie Powell of Ethicurean will be interviewing Michael Pollan in a Slow Food event in Vacaville on February 7. You can find more information on the Ethicurean site.

The Grace Cathedral Forum schedule can be found on the cathedral website. You can attend the forum sessions in person for free on Sundays or can download them from the Internet. You can also listen over the Internet in real-time and email your questions to the moderator.

The Forum with Jane Goodall
The Forum with Mollie Katzen
the Forum with Michael Pollan

Hungry Planet takes a look at what the world eats, country by country, family by family. Photos show 30 different families posing with a typical week's worth of food, and details include how much they spend on food, the breakdown by types of food, a family recipe and an essay about the family and their relationship to food. Author Peter Menzel also includes field notes which are a bit like personal journal entries. The countries he visited for the book include places like Bhutan, Mali and Cuba and more than one family in places like China, the US and Japan.

Hungry Planet won a prestigious James Beard award in 2006 and is now out in paperback. If you haven't seen a copy of the book, you can see the photographs over at Time.com. But it's well worth getting a copy. While the photos are most impressive, the book also includes essays by noted writers such as Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan and Corby Kummer. The essays and photos will shock, dismay, encourage and enlighten.

I recently reread the statistic that in America we spend only 10% of our income on food. I don't know what percentage of income each of the families from the 24 countries featured spends on food, but it is interesting all the same to see just what they eat and how much it costs. Often it seems from the pictures that people in the more industrialized nations are not eating as well as those in the "developing" world. It will be interesting to see if the families featured will be revisited to see if and how their diets change over time.

Family Recipe--Great Britain

Mark Bainton's Cheese and Potato Pie

Ingredients
12 oz mashed potatoes per person
9 leaves basil, finely torn (save half leaf for garnish)
3 sprigs parsley, finely chopped (save 1 leaf for garnish)
8-12 oz Cheddar cheese

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Combine mashed potatoes, basil, and parsley (or other herb of your choice)
3. Cover the bottom of an ovenproof casserole about 1" thick in mashed potatoes; cover with sliced cheese. Repeat, finishing with slices of cheese, so that all the mashed potatoes are covered.
4. Bake until golden brown, 20-25 minutes. Serve with garnish.

Reprinted from Material World Books and Ten Speed Press, Hungry Planet, 2007

Those expecting a brawl got more of a lovefest when Whole Foods CEO John Mackey met with Michael Pollan author of The Omnivore's Dilemma at UC Berkeley last night. The feud, if you can call it that, goes to back to a time shortly after the publication of the book when Mackey took issue with the quality of Pollan's research, his criticism of Whole Foods and what he called "industrial organic". Over the months that passed a series of letters were made public in which each seemed to take the other to task. Those letters can be found here:

Letter 1: Mackey to Pollan
Letter 1 Response: Pollan to Mackey
Letter 2: Mackey to Pollan
Letter 2 Response: Pollan to Mackey

Mackey complained that he wasn't contacted by Pollan before the book was published and tried to argue that all "industrial organic" is not bad. Pollan challenged Mackey on the authenticity of the storytelling present in the store, and on how much produce was truly "local".

The problem is and was, that Pollan and Mackey agree more than they disagree. While Mackey got his chance to explain his philosophy and to announce several new praiseworthy initiatives that deal with fair trade, animal welfare, support for local "food artisans" and loans for farmers and food producers, he admitted that criticism was good, and that it spurred a reexamination of their practices and a rethinking of their approach. Pollan in turn praised Mackey for the new initiatives and for being willing to so thoroughly engage his critics, something few CEO's are willing to do.

It was surprising how unpolished and passionate Mackey was compared to the almost slick and sometimes snide Pollan. Mackey even went so far as to say the backlash against his company and the concept of organic has actually been good in some ways. Still Mackey doesn't like being compared with Wal-Mart, and his philosophy of a more enlightened capitalism and movement towards a post industrial age he calls the "ecological era" puts him on the forefront of progressive businesses.

For his part, Pollan kept the conversation to a discussion more about the future than the present or the past in the discussion part of the program which was entitled "The Past, The Present, The Future of Food". Pollan even envisioned a kiosk in a grocery store that would allow shoppers to scan items and see what was happening back on the farm for a kind of nanny-cam meets corporate transparency, a vision that Mackey seemed to embrace. Perhaps both Mackey and Pollan are ready to put down the gloves and make peace with the past and present (in addition to each other) and to make more room for a focus on the future.

Between my vacation and a work trip to Southern California, my time in the Bay Area lately has been sporadic. The first thing I try and do when I return home to San Francisco is to visit a farmers' market. Farmers' markets ground me. Seeing the fruits and vegetables that are in season reminds where I am in the year, how much time has passed, and how the farmers are doing. The main thing that I took away from this week's trip to the Sunday San Rafael Farmers' Market is that SPRING IS COMING.

Though our produce is still heavily into kale, butternut squash, and root vegetables, the turning of the season has begun. Look hard and you will see tiny little green onions and green garlic. Green garlic looks a little like green onion with a small garlic nub at the end that gradually gets larger and harder as the season goes on. I use green garlic for everything that you'd use garlic for, but you'll learn your own favorite ways to try out this subtle, delicious vegetable.

Asparagus has started to make an appearance, foreshadowing our wonderful asparagus months of March and April. This week, I only saw asparagus at the Zuckerman's Farm booth, but it will soon be available through other vendors as well. Get your risotto recipes ready! If you look hard, you will also start to see glimpses of strawberries at different markets throughout the area.

The young greens throughout the market at the moment are stunning. Just perusing the market on Sunday, I noticed nettles, spring mix, baby chard, baby arugula, rapini and other greens. As we move further along in the year, these greens will be in even more abundance.

I was gone during much of the citrus freeze last month, and expected when I returned that I would not find any citrus products in the market. The opposite is true. While many farmers lost a lot of their crop, citrus is still widely available. According to Julie Cummins, the Director of Education at CUESA, many of the citrus growers were able to pick in advance of the freeze and are now selling their pre-picked fruit. Because the farms who attend our Bay Area markets are fairly small, they were able to mobilize enough workers on very short notice to save a lot of their crop, where the large farms were left with worker shortages and seemed to lose a larger percentage of their crop. This week I could choose from mandarins, pomelos, kumquats, Buddha's hand, blood oranges, and lemons.

Will Brokaw from Brokaw Nursery says that they lost a small percentage of their avocado crop due to this year's weather. Where we'll really notice the lack of avocados, says Brokaw, is next year in the late fall and winter. While we normally could expect Gwen avocados at that time from the nursery's northernmost orchard in Soledad, all those avocados "are toast" and we'll have several months without avocados and will have to wait until January or February 2008 when we can see the Haas avocado crop. Brokaw's guavas and cherimoyas from the Soldedad farm also were harmed, but we can look foward to kumquats, other citrus, and many more months of avocados from Brokaw Nursery.

I was surprised this week to see that Dave Little still has some potatoes from the fall crop. He has a couple weeks more of potatoes to sell, and then will take some time off to plant, returning in the late spring with a new crop. Be sure to check out Dave's cooking demonstration this Saturday at the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market, where he will demonstrate that even sprouted potatoes are good for cooking and taste delicious.

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Mariquita Farm is a popular vendor at the Saturday Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market. Julia and Andy, the farmers, put out a fantastic newsletter each week with essays by Andy and farm news. Mariquita has taken a big step technologically and Julia and Andy are now publishing a blog: The Ladybug Letter. If you are an RSS-geek like me, then The Ladybug Letter is going to be a worthwhile addition to your feeds.

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The hottest ticket in town tonight is the John Mackey and Michael Pollan event at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Those of us who follow food politics watched with interest last summer as The Omnivore's Dilemma kicked off a series of letters between the author, Michael Pollan, and John Mackey -- the CEO of Whole Foods. The event is sold out, but you can watch the live webcast courtesy of UC Berkeley. With the number of bloggers who are planning to attend, you will surely be reading posts about the event this week.

Letter 1: Mackey to Pollan
Letter 1 Response: Pollan to Mackey
Letter 2: Mackey to Pollan
Letter 2 Response: Pollan to Mackey