This event is currently sold out! Thank you for your interest in our outdoor lecture/talk series, and we hope to see you at another event this summer!

Join Castle Hill for a discussion between Chef and Author Mark Bittman and Author and Columnist John “Doc“ Willoughby focusing on Bittman’s new book, “Animal, Vegetable, Junk“. This event will be held outdoors at our Edgewood Farm Campus.

Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal tells the story of humans through the lens of food, offering a view of how the need to eat has driven human history to slavery, colonialism, famine, and genocide. It brings us to the present, in which industrial agriculture has become a public health menace that exacerbates climate change and otherwise poisons the planet. The battle isn’t lost, of course, and Bittman attempts to reveal not only how food has shaped our past, but how we can reclaim our future.

Mark Bittman is the author of 20 acclaimed books, including the How to Cook Everything series, the award-winning Food Matters, and The New York Times number-one bestseller, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00.

For more than two decades his popular and compelling stories appeared in the Times, where he was ultimately the lead food writer for the Sunday Magazine and became the country’s first food-focused Op-Ed columnist for a major news publication. Bittman has starred in four television series, including Showtime’s Emmy-winning Years of Living Dangerously. He has written for nearly every major newspaper in the United States and many magazines, and has spoken at dozens of universities and conferences; his 2007 TED talk has more than a million views. He was a distinguished fellow at the University of California (Berkeley) and a fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists; he is a member of the faculty of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Throughout his career Bittman has strived for the same goal: to make the food, in all its aspects, understandable.

John "Doc" Willoughby has been writing and teaching about food since 1989. He has co-authored eleven cookbooks as well as a monthly column for the New York Times Dining section. He has also been Executive Editor of Cooks Illustrated, Executive Editor of Gourmet magazine, and Editorial Director of America’s Test Kitchen. In 1990, he won a James Beard Award for “Thrill of the Grill,” a book he co-wrote with Chris Schlesinger.