This week, as we’re Savoring Sonoma, we get to visit for the hour with Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott of Solar Punk Farms, sitting just outside of Guerneville, on Armstrong Woods Road. They’ve founded and are growing a new kind of effort to offer positive, regenerative and uplifting options for living and community, not the sort of nihilistic, apocalyptic visions of those other punks, slam and steam. They’ve spent three years bringing the land back to life and now, with fiscal oversite sponsorship secured, are planning new efforts and events and brining folks to this beautiful nine plus acres that wander past the planted farm garden, across a meadow and up into the redwoods. It’s a lively and uplifting conversation.
This time on Savoring Sonoma: The Hour host Clark Wolf speak with two of the very special local folks who will be honored on March 30th at the Second Annual NorCal Public Media Food and Wine Awards. First up is the indefatigable June Michaels, founder and powerhouse of Sonoma Food Runners. Their motto is Feed Bellies, Not Landfill. Here’s seems to be to eliminate waste while feeding, caring for and sharing with everyone.
Then it’s Hector Alvarez of Hector’s Honey who shares his fascinating story of growing up farming, learning from his father, bee keeping, growing, surviving fire and drought and other natural surprises to bring us an extremely broad range of thoughtfully raised and delicious foods right out of our own precious earth.
From the new public garden behind the Phillip Johnson designed landmark 550 Madison Avenue in the middle of Manhattan, host Clark Wolf speaks with Wissam Kahi, co-founder of Eat Offbeat, a group that trains, employs and learns foodways with refugees and immigrants from all over the world. They sell those foods from a kiosk in that garden and a stall in Chelsea Market further downtown and have authored a collection of recipes in their book The Kitchen Without Borders. It’s a timely and powerful conversation.
Then it’s a Zoom call with award winning author Anya von Bremzen about her new book National Dish: Around the World In Search Of Food , History and the Meaning of Home, a day after her return from across the world, as she continues her deep and thoughtful search for personal identity. From Paris to Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca, Istanbul and her early life in Moscow, she takes us through how special foods become symbols, social forces and intrinsic to our identities.
Rounding out our episode, we revisit a conversation with Betsy Fischer, SRJC Culinary Department Chair, who guides and builds careers for students of all ages, backgrounds, cultures, and socioeconomic levels, helping them to achieve the next step in their lives through food. It's an inspiration.
Christopher Herrera is a seventh generation Sonoma County farmer who learned a great deal of what he knows about farming, not from his parents but from YouTube! What he learned and the methods he employs are both completely modern and extremely ancient. The amount he and his brother Andrew, with the help of family and friends, has accomplished on the new property they’re working since February of this year is significant. Their Deep Roots Farm is by the side of our County’s third busiest road, where folks can see it and find it and come shop and support it. This modern model of next generation family farming, so crucial to our future, is the center of this conversation with host Clark Wolf.
This Sunday evening host Clark Wolf welcomes Chef and Culinary Instructor Dan Kedan who, with his wife Marianna Gardenhire, owned the beloved Backyard restaurant in Forestville for nearly a decade. These days he is a tenured professor at the Culinary Institute of America at the St. Helena Greystone property and working on local and national programs on sustainability and true farm to table practices. 
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