News & Events
Jul /20/2010
Value [the] Meal Advisory Board
Meet our panel of expert advisors to Value [the] Meal:
Ronnie Cummins
Ronnie Cummins is founder and Director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), a non-profit, U.S. based network of 850,000 consumers, dedicated to safeguarding organic standards and promoting a healthy, just, and sustainable system of agriculture and commerce. The OCA’s primary strategy is to work on national and global campaigns promoting health, justice, and sustainability that integrate public education, marketplace pressure, media work, litigation, and grassroots lobbying. Cummins’ most recent book is Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers (Second Revised Edition Marlowe & Company 2004).
David L. Katz MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP
David L. Katz is an internationally renowned authority on nutrition, weight management, and the prevention of chronic disease, and an internationally recognized leader in integrative medicine and patient-centered care. He is a board certified specialist in both Internal Medicine, and Preventive Medicine/Public Health, and Associate Professor (adjunct) in Public Health Practice at the Yale University School of Medicine. Katz is the Director and founder of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, and founder and president of the non-profit Turn the Tide Foundation. He was formerly the Director of Medical Studies in Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine for eight years. Dr. Katz is the nutrition columnist to ‘O,’ the Oprah Magazine and health columnist to the New York Times Syndicate, Katz has twice been recognized by the Consumers Research Council of America as one of America’s top physicians in Preventive Medicine. In 2009, Dr. Katz was nominated for the position of U.S. Surgeon General.
Frances Moore Lappé
Frances Moore Lappé is a democracy advocate and world food and hunger expert who has authored or co-authored 16 books. She is the co-founder of three organizations, including Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy and, more recently, Small Planet Institute, which she leads with her daughter Anna Lappé. She is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (aka the “Alternative Nobel,”) and her first book, Diet for a Small Planet, sold three million copies and is considered “the blueprint for eating with a small carbon footprint since long before the term was coined." [JM Hirsch, Associated Press] Her most recent book Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad, was awarded the Nautilus Gold/“Best in Small Press” award.
Susan Linn, EdD
Susan Linn, is co-founder and director of The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and a psychologist at Judge Baker Children’s Center and Harvard Medical School. An award-winning producer, writer, and puppeteer, she is the author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World, and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood and lectures internationally on reclaiming childhood from corporate marketers.
Alan Meyers, MD, MPH
Alan Meyers is a primary care physician at Boston Medical Center and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine. He is a staff physician with the BMC weight management program for children and youth, Nutrition and Fitness for Life, and is co-chair of the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Obesity Committee.
www.bmc.org/pediatrics/services/Specialty/Nutrition/Clinic.html
Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH
Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health (the department she chaired from 1988-2003) and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Her award-winning books include Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002) and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (2003), both from University of California Press. Her book, What to Eat, was published by North Point Press/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2006). Her most recent book is Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, published by University of California Press in 2008. She is currently working on a book about pet food.
Raj Patel, PhD
Raj Patel is a writer, activist and academic. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO and been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against them. He’s currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, and a forthcoming work on how to fix the failures of the free-market - The Value of Nothing.
Scot Quaranda
Scot Quaranda is presently the Campaign Director for Dogwood Alliance, a network of over 70 organizations working to engender broad-based support to end unsustainable forestry practices in the Southern United States, the largest paper-producing region in the world. The organization is currently engaged with the fast food industry focused on the impact of its paper packaging on the forests of the Southern US. Prior to serving as Campaign Director, he was the Field and Organizing Director and has over 10 years of experience in grassroots organizing and power building.
Michele Simon, JD, MPH
Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been working as a nutrition advocate since 1996, specializing in legal strategies and food industry tactics. She is the author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, which Library Journal calls an essential purchase and recommends as a follow-up to Fast Food Nation and Food Politics. Michele is currently the Research and Policy Director for the Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog.
Judy Wicks
Judy is the founder of Philadelphia’s 26-year-old White Dog Cafe, and an international leader in the local, living economies movement, as well as a tireless crusader for small business, family farms, fair trade, and social equity. She is co-founder and Chair of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia and Fair Food, a non-profit dedicated to building a local food system in the Philadelphia region, and has received countless awards for both her business success and her social action.
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