Straight from the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology:

April 28, 2010
7:30-9:00 p.m.
U. C. Berkeley

Factory farms and patented, bioengineered seeds: these two juggernauts of modern agriculture strive to apply industrial uniformity and assembly line control to non-uniform living systems. In the last 30 years, agribusiness firms have developed, then orchestrated, the adoption of technologies--with dubious benefits and long term dangers both unknown and unknowable. How did this culture of technology-gone-wrong come to be in American agriculture, and how do we plot a course back to a sane future, where we use sensible technology for feeding ourselves? Join Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop, and Claire Hope Cummings, author of Uncertain Peril, in conversation, as they discuss these questions and more.

Nicolette Hahn Niman is an attorney and livestock rancher. She was the Senior Attorney for the environmental organization Waterkeeper Alliance, where she was in charge of the organization's campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry. Much of Nicolette's time is spent speaking and writing about the problems resulting from industrialized livestock production. She has written on the subject for the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Food Channel, Huffington Post, and CHOW. Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms is Nicolette's first book.

Claire Hope Cummings is an environmental lawyer, journalist, and the author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds. Claire's stories focus on the environmental and political implications of how we eat, and how food and farming reconnect us to each other and to the places where we live. She has farmed in California and in Vietnam, where she had an organic farm on the Mekong Delta. For four years, she was an attorney for the United States Department of Agriculture's Office of General Counsel. For the last 15 years, Claire has been active in the local food and farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, including helping to found the Marin County Food Policy Council.