Manchester discussion: "Industrial Food - Local Alternatives" February 24, 2005

Contact: Jim Moulton, 802-824-6670

Two Vermont experts will come to Manchester's Riley Center for the Arts on Thursday night, February 24th to discuss the future of food in a program called "Industrial Food - Local Alternatives." The program starts at 7:00pm

Vermont agriculture is at a crossroads. The state can continue to grow more of its foods at home or be drawn down the path of dependence on industrial food production methods, including genetic engineering.

Scholar and author Bill McKibben will discuss his research in local food production and share the healthful, sustainable alternatives to the industrialization of our food sources. Mr. McKibben is the author of nine books on the environment and other topics, including his latest "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age." His first book, "The End of Nature," was the first book for a general audience on global warming and is now available in 20 foreign languages. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, his work appears in Harpers, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and a variety of other national publications. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, Mr. McKibben is the recipient of Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships and the Lannan Prize in Nonfiction Writing.

Author and activist Brian Tokar will share his expertise in the genetically engineered food experiment and his first-hand experience in the Vermont movement to regulate this new technology. Mr. Tokar has been a leading critical voice for ecological activism since the 1970s, and is the Biotechnology Project Director at the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont. He is the author of "The Green Alternative," "Earth for Sale," and was editor of "Redesigning Life?," an international collection on the politics and implications of biotechnology. His latest book, "Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of Hunger," was published in 2004 by Toward Freedom in Burlington, Vermont. Mr. Tokar was the recipient of a 1999 Project Censored award for his investigative history of the Monsanto company and holds concurrent degrees from MIT in biology and physics, and a Masters degree in biophysics from Harvard University.

The Riley Center for the Arts can be found on Seminary Avenue, off Rte 7A in Historic Manchester. The Riley Center is a large brick building on the right just past Dillingham Rd. Park anywhere behind the buildings.

The event is free to the public. For more information, contact Jim Moulton at 802-824-6670 or jmoulton@sover.net