Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection

by Jessica Prentice

In the Press

On the Air

Jessica Prentice on Wisconsin Public Radio

July 28, 2006
Jessica Prentice spends an hour with Wisconsin Public Radio's Joy Cardin talking about her book Full Moon Feast and about eating locally-grown seasonal foods.

Articles

Full Moon Rising

Jessica Prentice shows it's possible to eat like a king without leaving the kingdom

East Bay Monthly
By Angela Hunnicutt
July 2006

It's the night of the full Milk Moon and Jessica Prentice is immersed in her creamy salad dressing, vigorously blending crème fraîche and Point Reyes Blue Cheese in a huge bowl as more and more diners meander into the church hall.

"Let's get some more chairs," she instructs a volunteer, continuing to stir and privately hoping there is enough green garlic flan for everyone.

With about 90 guests, this dinner at St. Francis Lutheran Church (near the Castro District in San Francisco) will turn out to be Prentice's largest Full Moon Feast yet—one of the gourmet supper-club-style events the Richmond chef and food activist has offered at least ten times during the past three years. As much as possible, Prentice's meals celebrate locally grown seasonal foods, linked to the cycles of the moon, but incorporate some imported foods. All ingredients for this feast, however, which celebrates her "Eat Local Challenge" month, are found within a 100-mile radius of San Francisco (except salt and pepper).

Leslie Harlib's Social Scene: Festive fund raising, organically

Marin Independent Journal
Staff Report
July 4, 2006

Owned by East Bay resident Jessica Prentice cooperatively with several other partners, Three Stone Hearth (TSH), based in North Berkeley, is a community-supported kitchen structured to deliver organic and sustainable prepared foods to your home, in the way that community-supported agriculture cooperatives deliver produce.

"We're trying to create a new model of business," said Prentice, formerly Marin Headlands chef for four years and author of a just-released, unusual cookbook, "Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection," (Chelsea Green, 2006).

What TSH doing is fascinating. Take her rose ale. Prentice used rose hydrosols created by Janet Brown of Allstar Organics in Nicasio, as the base of a pale pink, home-brewed lightly effervescent drink that had only faint floral notes along with a citrus tang and a whisper of alcohol. It was delicious. Normally I hate anything flavored with rose; it makes me think I'm eating cosmetics. But this was unique, and would blow just about any pink lemonade out of the water.

The Lure of the 100-Mile Diet

Time
By MARGOT ROOSEVELT
Jun 11, 2006

If you live in the town of Athens in southeastern Ohio, there are politically correct reasons not to eat a California strawberry. Think of the pollution and the global warming caused by its transport. Think of the ascendancy of corporate agribusiness over family farms. Think of the loss of nutrients during a weeklong journey from soil to supermarket. But to Barbara Fisher, an Athens cooking teacher, there's a more primal motive for choosing a homegrown variety over the "beautiful, flavorless, plastic" kind shipped from California: "When people bite into ripe strawberries from a local farmer and the sweet juice bursts into their mouths, their eyes roll back into their heads, and they moan."

Fisher is one of more than 1,000 "locavores," self-styled concerned culinary adventurers, who took the pledge last month to eat nothing--or almost nothing--but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home. The movement began last year when four San Francisco-- area foodies designated August 2005 as the first Eat Local Challenge and launched a website, Locavores.com They were inspired by the book Coming Home to Eat, ecologist Gary Paul Nabham's account of his yearlong effort to restrict himself to native foods near his Arizona home. Soon some 60 bloggers had joined the 100-mile diet, inaugurating their own website, EatLocalChallenge.com This year they upped the ante, moving the test to the less bounteous month of May. "With gas prices spiking, people are concerned about our dependence on petroleum," says Locavores co-founder Jessica Prentice. "Why import apples from New Zealand when we can grow them nearby?"

Local diner

You can keep your global economy. Locavore Jessica Prentice says eating locally makes a lot more sense.

San Francisco magazine
By Karen Solomon
May 2006

Despite her passion about the topic, "I don't expect people to eat 100 percent locally all the time," says the high-energy Prentice, who's been a food activist since she went to culinary school. For us, that would mean giving up bananas forever, since none grow in the Bay. But the 100-mile challenge reminds us just how well we can eat right here. The trick is thinking seasonally: "Everyone loves stone fruit and tomatoes," says Prentice of last year's August event. "This year, we're upping the ante by trying a spring month. Next year, who knows—maybe January?"

They recommend enjoying spring's slow start

Chicago Tribune
By Bill Daley
April 12, 2006

At this time of year, the "Hunger Moon" holds sway, at least climatically.

This term, used by indigenous people, refers to the season when there is little locally grown food to eat, writes Jessica Prentice, a food activist and chef in her new book, "Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection" (Chelsea Green, $25).

More than 150 years of advances in agriculture and shipping has dimmed the Hunger Moon and turned the United States into an envied land of seasonless abundance for all but its poorest citizens.

Increasingly, though, many other likeminded Americans are questioning the price of year-round accessibility to foods from far and wide. The cost is being tallied from a number of angles, including taste or the lack thereof in foods, the impact on the environment of modern agricultural practices and the toll on one's own health, both physically and spiritually.

"There's no sense . . . of the year having a time of abundance or scarcity. We only experience the seasons through how they impede our travel," Prentice said in a telephone interview from her home in Richmond, California. Of course, spring in Illinois is not for the dainty.

"I think, just like with any type of seasonal eating, we're a bit confined because of where we live," said Mari Coyne, whose job as farm forager is to root out farmers willing to feed Chicago's growing demand for local products. "Take joy in the slow warm-up," Coyne advised.

She said that consumers should celebrate produce when it comes into season, such as spring asparagus, baby greens, wild ramps and rhubarb. "The slow start helps to get people excited about what is coming."

Environment in Focus

Diet for a sustainable planet
The challenge: Eat Locally for a month (you can start now)

The San Francisco Chronicle
Olivia Wu, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 1, 2005

As World Environmental Day opens in San Francisco, with 100 mayors brainstorming about environmental problems worldwide, four Northern California women are viewing the issues through the prism of their own kitchens.

Calling themselves the Locavores, the women -- Lia McKinney, Jessica Prentice, Dede Sampson and Sage Van Wing -- are passionate about eating locally and have devised a way to show others how to do that, too.

With San Francisco as the center, they have drawn a circle with a 100- mile radius from the city, and are urging people to buy, cook and eat from within that "foodshed" -- or their own foodshed, based on where they live -- in a monthlong challenge in August called "Celebrate Your Foodshed: Eat Locally."

Eating within a foodshed, they say, is the best way to support the environment.

. . .

For the Locavores and others who believe in eating locally, doing so affects the planet's top three problems: the fact that we're on the downhill side of the supply of oil and other fossil fuels, environmental deterioration and economic issues, all of which will be addressed by World Environmental Day meetings this week.

Eating locally is the best way to promote sustainability, say those who are passionate about the practice.

Sustainability in its most general sense means eating in a way that maintains and promotes the health of the planet, the food supply and the people who steward it.

Serving monkfish, which is an endangered species, or snacking on South American cherries in December are not sustainable practices, but eating California-caught Dungeness crab during the November-May season, and buying Central Valley cherries in summer are.

"Our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our tables," says one of the Locavores, Sage Van Wing, of Point Reyes. The process imperils "our environment, our health, our communities and our taste buds."

Sustainable food comes from sustainable agriculture, which does not rely on heavy use of petroleum on the farm or in distribution. Besides conserving oil, sustainable agriculture reduces carbon emissions, which are linked to global climate change and poor health. Finally, supporting local agriculture sustains the local economy.