a culinary celebration of farmed and foraged seasonal foods at area restaurants from Friday, May 25 through Monday, May 28. More than two dozen Berkshire Grown restaurants will participate.

Farmed + Foraged participants that have made a commitment to sustainably source local and wild edibles from area farms, forests, and fields and will offer an array of prix fixe menus and a la carte selections to celebrate this dining event. Menus will feature locally grown produce, Berkshire artisan cheeses, heritage breed meats, locally made bread and chocolate, wild edibles and Berkshire-crafted beer and spirits. Dates of participation, menu and a la carte offerings and pricing will vary at each location.

CALL EACH RESTAURANT TO CHECK DATES AND MENUS!

Save the date:

Foraging Walks begin April 28th. Sign up now, here

Farmed + Foraged, Memorial Day Weekend, May 25 – 28th at two dozen restaurants.

Farmers at Community Cooperative Farm, Sheffield.

Make your reservations now! 413-528-0041  More details

Berkshire  Grown hosted a series of lectures “Edible Education: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement” coordinated by author Michael Pollan.

From Atlantic. com:  “This is a very powerful lineup such has never been accumulated for a single class,” Pollan told students in his introduction to the course. If you’re already asking questions about your food, it’s likely your favorite author-activist appears. For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start…

Watch here

THIS SATURDAY   DEC. 17:  10 to 2

Great Barrington and Williamstown

details here

Wednesday December 7th   at 7 pm at the Lecture Center, Bard College at Simon’s Rock      

Videotape of Alice Walters and Robert Reich

Alice Waters, chef, author, and the proprietor of Chez Panisse, is an American pioneer of a culinary philosophy that maintains that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest seasonal ingredients that are produced sustainably and locally. She is a passionate advocate for a food economy that is “good, clean, and fair.”

Over the course of forty years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh ingredients. In 1996, Waters’ commitment to education led to the creation of The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School: a one-acre garden, and adjacent kitchen-classroom at a public middle school. Alice established the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996 to support the Edible Schoolyard and encourage similar programs that use food traditions to teach, nurture, and empower youth. Waters is Vice President of Slow Food International and the author of nine books, including The Art of Simple Food: Notes and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution.

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His “Marketplace” commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. He is also Common Cause’s board chairman.

November 16    7 pm The Lecture Center at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington        

“Feeding the World”

The international food complex has changed significantly over the last twenty years. How does the food economy shape countries’ access to good food?

Videotape of Raj Patel

Raj  Patel is a writer, activist and academic. He has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He’s currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and his latest, The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times best-seller.

October 19th

‘Perspectives on Race, Place, and Food’

ALEGRĺA DE LA CRUZ, Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment; REBECCA FLOURNOY, PolicyLink; YVONNE YEN LIU, Applied Research Center/Colorlines, Inc.

The Lecture Center at

Bard College at Simon’s Rock 7 pm

click here for more details