Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he teaches courses on the Renaissance and Reformation, Food History and the History of Medicine. He is the author of many books on food history including Eating Right in the Renaissance (University of California Press, 2002), Food in Early Modern Europe (Greenwood Press, 2003), Cooking in Europe 1250-1650 (Greenwood Press, 2005), The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2007), Beans: A History (winner of the 2008 International Society of Culinary Professionals Jane Grigson Award and the Cordon D’Or award for Food History/Literature), Pancake (Reaktion Press, 2008), and the forthcoming World Cuisines written with the Culinary Institute of America (Wiley Publishers). He is also editor of three food series for Greenwood Press with 27 volumes in print. For Greenwood he is also now editing a 4-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia. Albala has been book reviews editor of the journal Food Culture and Society for the past 6 years, and has taken over as co-editor of the journal. He is currently researching a history of theological controversies surrounding fasting in the Reformation Era, and is editing two collected volumes of essays one on the Renaissance for Berg and the other on Food and Faith for Columbia University Press. He has also co-authored a cookbook for Penguin /Perigee entitled The Lost Art of Real Cooking.
Albala has worked in various libraries across Europe, the Vatican Library, the British Library and Wellcome Institute, The Herzog August Bibliotek in Wolfenbuttel, Germany and many archives in the US. He also regularly attends meetings of the Oxford Symposium, The International Association of Culinary Professionals and the Association for the Study of Food and Society of which he is a board member. In his spare time Albala makes functional pottery in his own studio, cooks as often as possible, plays the piano and is now studying the guitar. He has two boys, one wife and three cats.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Antonia Allegra is the founder and director of the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at The Greenbrier as well as the founder of the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley. She has been a professional writing and career coach for more than a decade, with over one hundred cookbooks and other food-related books resulting from her work with writers. She has practiced the arts of culinary teaching, non-fiction writing, and launching cooking schools and magazines since 1974. She is author of Napa Valley: The Ultimate Winery Guide (Chronicle) and other books. She served as member of the IACP Board of Directors from 1991-1999, and as president of the Board 1997-98.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Foodwriter Gary Allen's work regularly appears in Roll Magazine, at Leitesculinaria <http://leitesculinaria.com> (where he's Food History Editor) and on his own blog, Just Served <http://onthetable.us>.He has written The Resource Guide for Food Writers (1999), The Herbalist in the Kitchen (2007), and contributed articles to Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (2003), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2004), Culinary Biographies (2006), The Concise Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2007), and Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl: An Encyclopedia (2008). He edited Remarkable Service for The Culinary Institute of America (2001). He also co-edited -- with historian Ken Albala -- The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries (2007) and an anthology of writings about cannibalism, Human Cuisine (2008).
Occasionally, he writes for magazines, e-zines, and speaks at symposia, including that of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP). He has also published, for nearly a decade, a monthly electronic newsletter about online resources for food writers. In his spare time, he teaches food writing, plus various courses on food history and culture, at Empire State College (part of the State University of New York).
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●Elissa Altman is the founder of the critically-acclaimed blog Poor Man's Feast, the award-winning author of Big Food, and has written about food, culture, and publishing for The Huffington Post since 2007. A longtime editor at HarperCollins and Clarkson Potter, her print work has appeared in publications running the gamut from Saveur and the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and beyond. She was the first non-principal cookbook buyer at the original Dean & Deluca, and in her free time, has worked as a personal chef, a restaurant critic for a major national newspaper, and a celebrity chef ghostwriter. A regular commentator on the evolution of recipe platform and the veracity of digitalia as it applies to the food world, Altman has straddled the digital/print divide for nearly ten years both as author and editor; she firmly believes that the two forms are not mutually exclusive, especially where recipe creation is concerned.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Monica Bhide writes about food and culture and its effect on our lives. Born in India, Monica moved to the United States in 1991. She has an engineering degree from Bangalore University and two masters: one in information systems technology from George Washington University and the other in Industrial Systems management from Lynchburg College. She currently resides in the Washington, DC metro area, with her husband and young sons.Her highly praised first cookbook, The Spice Is Right: Easy Indian Cooking for Today (Callawind Publications, 2001) is a collection of mouth-watering menus tempered with her up-to-date touches on classic Indian recipes. Monica's second cookbook, The Everything Indian Cookbook: 300 Tantalizing Recipes--From Sizzling Tandoori Chicken to Fiery Lamb Vindaloo (Everything Series) was released in May 2004. She has just released her third book: Modern Spice (Simon & Schuster, 2009 with a foreword by Mark Bittman) full of contemporary Indian-inspired recipes and food essays. Within weeks of release, the book went into reprint.Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Food & Wine, Town & Country, Parents, Real Simple, NPR’s Kitchen Window and many more national and international publications. She is a frequent guest on NPR. Monica was the recipient of the Susan B. Langhorne Scholarship for Food Writers at the Symposium for Professional Food Writers in 2004 and the runner up for the 2005 award. One of her essays was included in the Best Food Writing 2005. In 2008, her work was nominated for IACP’s Bert Green Award. One of the essays from her new book was also just selected for Best Food Writing 2009. And Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi picked her book Modern Spice as one of her “BEST.BOOKS.EVER” for Newsweek -- http://www.newsweek.com/id/204052. Monica has been teaching a course on introduction to food writing for several years to sold out online classes. In addition to her writing, Monica owns and operates her own cooking school, which has been featured in Bon Appetit.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●Jane Black is a staff writer at the Washington Post Food section where she covers food policy as well as restaurant and cooking news and trends. Before joining the Post in 2007, she was the food editor at Boston Magazine. She has also written for Food & Wine, Chow and the New York Times. Jane has won several awards for her writing at the Post and her writing has been included in the 2008 and 2009 collection of Best New Food Writing.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Sylvia Carter writes the "a la Carter" column for Newsday. She was the founder and first columnist for "Eats" at Newsday, and she founded Newsday's Kidsday section "for kids and by kids, mostly." Carter grew up on a 360-acre farm in northeast Missouri, 15 miles west of the Mississippi. There, she hoed the garden and carried in wood for the cook stove and well water. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She worked at the Quincy (Ill.) Herald-Whig, the Detroit (Mich.) Free Press (where she won about 1/54 of a staff Pulitzer for covering the 1967 riots) and the New York Daily News before she went to Newsday, first as a general assignment reporter and later as a feature writer and an editor. She has written for national publications such as Family Circle, Good Housekeeping and Lear's, and she wrote two books of restaurant reviews. She is a trustee of the Anne O'Hare McCormick scholarship fund, named for the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, and is on the board of directors of The Art Institute of New York. She is listed in Who's Who in America.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Irena Chalmers is recognized as the pioneer of the single subject cookbook. Her many engaging books have won numerous awards; the most recent, the Gourmand World Cookbook Award - Best Book for Food Professionals in the World for FOOD JOBS: 150 Great Jobs for Culinary Students, Career Changers and Food Lovers.
A James Beard Foundation "Who's Who" of Food and Beverage in America, Irena has delighted and captivated audiences and readers with her wit and commentary on food trends and the food world. She is a past president and founding member of the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) and Les Dames d'Escoffier. Irena also is a member of the faculty of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, a national food essayist and Chef magazine columnist.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Melissa Clark writes about cuisine and other products of appetite. After brief forays working as a cook in a restaurant kitchen, and as a professional caterer out of her fifth floor walk-up, Clark decided upon a more sedentary path. She earned an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University, and began a freelance food writing career. Currently, she writes for such publications as the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Delta Sky Magazine, and Martha Stewart. She is also working on a cookbook/memoir based on her popular New York Times Dining section column, A Good Appetite. In addition, Clark has written 26 cookbooks, many of them in collaboration with some of New York’s most celebrated chefs including Daniel Boulud (Braise), David Bouley (East of Paris), Claudia Fleming (The Last Course), and Bruce and Eric Bromberg (The Blue Ribbon Cookbook, forthcoming, 2010). She just completed a book of desserts with White House pastry chef Bill Yosses to be published this spring. Her collaboration with chef Peter Berley, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, received both a James Beard award and Julia Child Cookbook award in 2000. Clark was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives with her husband, Daniel Gercke, their infant daughter Dahlia, and their formerly cosseted cat.● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Kathleen Collins has studied and written about television, media history, popular culture and food. She is the author most recently of Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows (Continuum, 2009). Her work has also appeared in Working Woman, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, Library Journal, FlowTV, Communication Booknotes Quarterly and in the anthology Secrets & Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women’s Friendships (Seal Press: 2004). She has also written encyclopedia entries on a variety of media history topics. She has a Master’s degree in journalism with a specialization in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University and a Master’s degree in library science from Long Island University. For the past ten years, she has worked as an editorial researcher for a variety of publications including Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal and National Law Journal. She is now an academic librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Jennifer Crewe is Associate Director and Editorial Director at Columbia University Press, where she has acquired books in various fields in the humanities—including literary studies, film, and Asian humanities --for over 20 years. In 1999 she published Food: A Culinary History by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari in her European Perspectives series—a series of translated works by leading European intellectuals. The success of that book made her realize that there was a strong market for scholarly books on food and culinary history, so she invited Albert Sonnenfeld, who edited the English language edition of the Flandrin-Montanari book, to work with her on a series called Arts and Traditions of the Table. The series now includes some 15 books with more in the works.Jennifer has served on the Board of Directors of the Association of American University Presses, and currently serves on the AAP’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division’s books committee. She is also a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●James Beard Foundation Vice President Mitchell Davis recently received his Ph.D. in Food Studies from NYU with a dissertation on the topic of restaurant reviewing and its impact on taste. Davis has reviewed restaurants for national rating programs, guidebooks, and national magazines. For five years in the 1990s he was the director of restaurant inspections for the Mobil Travel Guides. Davis has also written four cookbooks and numerous articles on restaurants, food, and travel. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Cara De Silva is an award-winning journalist, Beard Award Nominee, and food historian.. For over a decade, she was a writer for Newsday/New York Newsday, one of the largest newspapers in the country, where her specialty was ethnic New York. While there she won First Prize for Food Feature Writing in the United States (newspapers over 200,000 circulation), from the Association of Food Journalists. In addition to stories produced for her special beat at New York Newsday, Cara also wrote personal essays, entertainment, travel, weekend cover stories, and general features. [One of the latter involved a Holocaust manuscript with a singular story. Subsequently, Cara, working as an independent scholar, wrote the extensive introduction to, edited, and brought the book version to fruition. Called In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin, it became one of the New York Times Book Review's most noteworthy books of the year. A poignant "memoir" in food, this haunting work, consists in large part of painfully flawed recipes set down by starving women in a Czechoslovakian concentration camp. Through it, a largely unknown genre of Holocaust Literature, the cookbook, or, more precisely, the "dream" cookbook, was brought to the attention of a startled world. It was featured in major newspapers and magazines across the United States, as well as England, Italy, France, Holland, Germany, and Israel. The book also received extensive attention on radio and television, for example, on CNN, NPR, and PBS (the Jim Lehrer show).
Cara’s work can also be found in Gastropolis: Food and New York City (November, 2008), a Columbia University Press book for which she wrote the introduction "Mt Olympus Bagels, Puerto Rican Lasagna, and Beyond"; A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food, an anthology of writings by well-known novelists, poets, food writers, and chefs, emphasizing the personal essay or food memoir (Overlook, 2003; Duckworth, London, 2004); and in Provence: The Collected Traveler: An Inspired Anthology & Travel Resource by Barrie Kerper. (Fodors, 2001). Likewise, she is a contributor to Food and Judaism: Studies in Jewish Civilization 15 (Creighton University Press (2004). And to the Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Food & Culture. (Scribner’s, 2004). In addition to Newsday, New York Newsday, articles of hers have been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, the New York Daily News, Gourmet Magazine, Saveur, Food & Wine, Eating Well, Martha Stewart Living, Cuisine, and Diversion magazines. Writing for the Internet includes the food-and-travel column, A Fork in the Road, which appeared on Starchefs.com, an award-winning website. Beyond writing, which is ongoing, she is an expert editor, and a book consultant, as well as a professional speaker, and frequent presenter at conferences and symposia. At present, her primary research focus is on Italy during the Renaissance.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Geoffrey Drummond is a producer/director of cooking and culinary travel programs for television. His film career began at Time Life Films as a writer of the TV science series, The World We Live In, and he eventually became its producer. He next co-founded and was president of Saga Communications Group, an international film and television production company. Saga produced numerous award-winning films including the cult classic, My Dinner with Andre.
Under his own independent banner, Drummond went on to produce numerous television and home video programs such as Garrison Keillor's The Prairie Home Companion, Disney's concert series Going Home, but mostly, he developed and produced, cooking shows. This includes his long time collaboration with Julia Child, [and Jacques Pepin], as well as Lidia Bastianich, Michael Chiarello, Joanne Weir and most recently, Eric Ripert's [Avec Eric].
Geof has received numerous professional awards and honors for producing: his shows have been awarded a total of 7 National Emmy Awards, six James Beard Awards, an ACE (Cable Excellence) award, two gold medals from the NY Film and TV Festival and a Parents' Choice Award. He graduated from Cornell University and graduate school at Stanford. He has served on the boards of the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital, the American Institute of Wine and Food and the Pilobolus Dance Company. Based in East Hampton, New York, he is President of A La Carte Communications, which he and Nat Katzman founded in 1990.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Barbara Fairchild joined Bon Appétit in 1978 as an editorial assistant, and after rising through the ranks, was promoted to Editor-in-Chief in June 2000.
A prominent leader in the epicurean world, Barbara was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s “Who’s Who in American Food and Beverage” in May 2000. She has been a frequent guest on numerous Food Network and Fox series and appears regularly on international and US TV shows.
Barbara divides her time between the Bon Appétit offices in New York and Los Angeles, where the magazine’s editorial staff and test kitchens are based.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
James Beard Award winning wine writer, Alice Feiring started this leg of her career in 1990, and since then has written for most ever major newspaper and glossie. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Departures, Saveur, Food and Wine, and Wine & Spirits. She, the country’s leading wine writer focusing on ‘natural wines,’ is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal Magazine and past wine and travel columnist for Time magazine. Her eponymous blog, Alicefeiring.com has been a Beard nominee and cited by both Forbes and Food and Wine as amongst the top. Feiring’s The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World From Parkerization, (Houghton Harcourt) was named as one of Wine & Spirits magazines top books of 2008, which also received a New York Times review, and several New York Times’ accolades, including a quote from its past chief dining critic, Frank Bruni who described her as, “A deeply knowledgeable and passionate wine writer.” A frequent guest lecturer on wine and terroir worldwide, her most recent book Living With Wine: Passionate Collectors, Sophisticated Cellars and Other Rooms for Entertaining, Enjoying and Imbibing was published by Clarkson Potter in October, 2009. Feiring lives in New York City, and has made the tub in her kitchen famous in various essays for the New York Times.
click here to watch From Websites to Blogs to Facebook Food writing has progressed from tiny triangular marks impressed in clay tablets, stored in heaps in Mesopotamia, to much tinier magnetic impressions stored somewhere "out there" in cyberspace. Changes in the medium may change the message, but the goal is the same: writers want readers to experience their work—what's different is that readers get to respond to writers more directly than ever before. Like it or not, food writing is not likely to change back to the one-directional medium it once was. Gary Allen, chair Irena Chalmers Mitchell Davis Bret Thorn Laura Weiss 
click here to watch TV and Beyond: The Future of Food and Cooking in Broadcast Media Beginning with home economist-hosted programs in the 1940s, cooking on television has evolved over the last sixty plus years into a phenomenal industry and pastime. What does the future of food media look like and where/how will we view it? Who will be our guides? What will we be taught and how and what will we learn? Kathleen Collins, chair Geof Drummond Joe Langhan Dana Polan Krishnendu Ray 
click here to watch The Future of Food Writing on the Internet This panel will explore how the continually changing, ever-evolving world of Internet technology is impacting food writers. Will technology make it easier--or harder--for writers to make a living? Will there come a time when a writer can completely sidestep traditional media and become successful, financially and critically? How will developing technologies impact--positively and negatively--the industry David Leite, chair Elissa Altman Joe Langhan Bonnie Tandy Leblang Renee Schletter Blogs with Tweet Sauce: The Future of Recipes (coming tomorrow) 
click here to watch Powerful Potables Calling all cork dorks and coffee geeks! How is the increasingly specialized world of beverage writing evolving? How have platforms like Wine 2.0 changed the playing field? If you already write about food, what tools & training do you need to expand into writing about wine and other potables. Kara Newman, chair Alice Feiring Alan Kropf Nora Maynard 
click here to watch Good-Bye Gourmet, Hello Yelp!: The Changing Role of the Restaurant Critic However much the media landscape has changed, people still want to know where to eat. This panel on restaurant reviewing will touch on the past, current, and future of restaurant reviewing. Emphasis will be placed on changes in the relationship between the reviewer and diners, the reviewer and media outlets, and the reviewer and the restaurant industry. The craft of reviewing restaurants will be explored in the context of other forms of cultural criticism. Mitchell Davis, chair Gabriella Gershenson Irene Sax Robert Sietsema 
click here to watch Food for Thought: The Future of Academic Food Writing Recent years have witnessed an explosion in academic food writing. Food series have rolled off university presses and specialized and cross-disciplinary journals abound, all to sate the growing appetite for classroom materials and scholarly investigation. This panel unites distinguished authors and editors in the academic world to assess where we are and where we might be going in this hot pot of academe. Cathy Kaufman, chair Ken Albala Jennifer Crewe Bruce Kraig Marion Nestle Andrew F. Smith
Live Video streaming by Ustream LIVE from tape