The Vision of Virginia Farmer Joel Salatin: This week you can see him speak in person, next week you can watch him in Fresh. And you should! Photo courtesy Fresh.
Today marks the kick-off of a whole week of events around Ana Sofia Joanes’s movie Fresh, a big little flick about the farmers and others in the food industry who are doing their best to change the way this country eats. For the sustainbly, locally, seasonally, healthfully and community-minded better, that is. (Check out the trailer at the end of this post!)
Fresh will be screening next week (at Tribeca Cinema on the 7th for a big Whole Foods-sponsored opening night and at Quad Cinemas from April 9 to 15th) and if you hit any of the workshops, lectures and farm-to-table dinners planned before then you get a voucher to see the film for free. But hey, that’s not the only reason to attend any of them.
Tonight’s shindigs, for example, are a carbon-neutral wine–bring your own glass!–and cheese tasting with Joanes on hand at the Invisible Dog art gallery in Brooklyn as well as an Edible-sponsored lecture on climate change in Manhattan. And then on Saturday there’s even a city chicken-keeping 101 at a community farm in the Bronx. (Get the whole list of happenings and buy tickets right here.)
But the big can’t-miss Freshtastic events are probably the two lectures by famous and forward-thinking Virginia farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, one of the main characters (literally, as the man is quite the personality) in the movie. He’ll be speaking this Sunday evening at 5 and 7 pm at Columbia University’s Teachers College and his two topics will be a) addressing charges of elitism when it comes to sustainable farming and food production and whether that kind of model can actually feed the world and b) why it’s so damn fun to him to do what he does, meaning a contrast and comparison of his old-school/new-school manner of farming with mainstream agriculture.
As readers of this blog, YOU, Edible Manhattan fans, get a 20% discount on tickets if you use the promotional code FRESHpromo. And if you go, you’ll get that voucher to see Fresh, to boot. Though if you’re like us, you’d gladly pay anyway.
