Meet the Author: Craig McNamara
2023-02-12 13:00 - 15:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Relish Culinary Adventures, 14 Matheson St, Healdsburg, CA, 95448, United States
Please come to meet author and farmer Craig McNamara, in conversation with Slow Food leader Michael Dimock, over a family-style lunch.

Slow Food Sonoma County North invites you to lunch and conversation with Craig McNamara, son of President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, now an organic walnut farmer and former president of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture. Craig will read from his book and engage in conversation with Michael Dimock, former Chair of Slow Food USA. Their topic will be the healing power of agriculture as reflected in Craig’s recent book Because Our Fathers Lied. Craig will sign books at the event.
Lunch includes appetizer, lasagna, local green salad, Quail and Condor bread, and dessert, accompanied by wines from the region. The starter and dessert will feature Craig’s Sierra Orchard walnuts.
Packages of shelled and cracked walnuts ($12) and extra virgin olive oil ($20/bottle) from Sierra Orchard’s 160-year-old trees will available for purchase at the event. Credit card payments for products will be accepted.
Individual tickets include a copy of Craig’s book; couple tickets include one book per couple. TICKET SALES WILL END ON FEBRUARY 9, 7:00 PM.
$55 for Slow Food Members, $65 for non-members
$85 for Slow Food couples, $95 for non-member couples
Tickets
Craig McNamara is the president and owner of Sierra Orchards, a diversified farming operation producing primarily organic walnuts.
By connecting people, policy and agricultural best practices, Craig works to protect the land that feeds us, to promote social justice and support the next generation of farmers.
In that capacity, he serves as the founder of the Center for Land-Based Learning, an innovative program that helps high school students build greater social and human capital in their communities. He also created the California Farm Academy that is training the next generation of California farmers.
He is past President of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture and served on the University of California President’s Advisory Commission on Agriculture and Natural Resources. He has served as a board member of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute, the American Farmland Trust, Roots of Change, and the Public Policy Institute of California. He currently is a board member of the Edible Schoolyard Project.
He is the recipient of several awards including CAFF Climate Smart Farmer of the Year, California Agriculturalist of the Year 2014, James Irving Leadership Award, Leopold Conservation Award, the California Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award, the UC Davis Award of Distinction and Outstanding Alumnus Award.
He is passionate about sharing his knowledge in sustainable agriculture and leadership with the world around him. Together with his wife and three children he lives in Winters, California.
Michael R. Dimock, Founder and President of Roots of Change (ROC), is a national food movement organizer and thought leader on food and farming systems needed for the 21st Century. He is a regular contributor to the blog sites Civil Eats and Huffington Post, and was featured in feature Everyday Heroes: 50 Americans Changing The World (Fried, 2012).
Michael has focused on agriculture and food since 1989. He was a marketing executive in Europe for agribusiness, farmed organically for three years in Sonoma County, and in 1992 founded Ag Innovations Network, where he began his work on consensus building and strategic planning to create healthier food and agriculture. From 2002 to 2007, he was Chairman of Slow Food USA and a member of Slow Food International’s board of directors.
Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today
Craig McNamara came of age in the political tumult and upheaval of the late 60s. While Craig McNamara would grow up to take part in anti-war demonstrations, his father, Robert McNamara, served as John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense and the architect of the Vietnam War. This searching and revealing memoir offers an intimate picture of one father and son at pivotal periods in American history. Because Our Fathers Lied is more than a family story—it is a story about America.
Before Robert McNamara joined Kennedy’s cabinet, he was an executive who helped turn around Ford Motor Company. Known for his tremendous competence and professionalism, McNamara came to symbolize “the best and the brightest.” Craig, his youngest child and only son, struggled in his father’s shadow. When he ultimately fails his draft board physical, Craig decides to travel by motorcycle across Central and South America, learning more about the art of agriculture and making what he defines as an honest living. By the book’s conclusion, Craig McNamara is farming walnuts in Northern California and coming to terms with his father’s legacy. (Amazon)

Slow Cookbooks: Focus on Lidia Bastianich’s cookbooks.
2023-02-28 16:00 - 18:00
More informaton coming soon.

Meet the Author: Jim DeMartini with Sophia DeMartini
2023-03-26 15:00 - 17:00 | Cloverdale Druids Hall, 111 N. Cloverdale Boulevard, Cloverdale, CA, 95425, United States
Please join us for an afternoon with Cloverdale author–and forager–Jim DeMartini and his illustrator daughter, Sophia! Jim will read from his book, The Cloverdale Forager, and they will discuss the art of foraging and the creation of the book.
Cloverdale Druids Hall, 111 N. Cloverdale Boulevard
Appetizers and wine will be served.
Tickets
$35 for Slow Food members, and $45 for non-members.
The book will be available for purchase (cash, check, credit).

The Cloverdale Forager: Your Guidebook for Gathering, Preparing, and Savoring Wild Food
by Jim DeMartini and Sophia DeMartini

If it’s in the wild – and allowed to be hunted, picked, or collected in Northern California – chances are good that longtime forager, Jim DeMartini, has a story to tell and advice to give. From a lifetime of experience crawling around on all fours looking for the perfect mushrooms, to wading through the surf and capturing succulent surf smelt, to bribing 10-year-olds to gather hard-to-find banana slugs, to fishing in the pristine waters of Clear Lake, California for black bass, DeMartini shares humorous and informative reflections, stories, and recipes.
The Cloverdale Forager provides ideas and recommendations for the best ways to capture wild food, while inviting you to sink your teeth into:
▸ Learning how to identify, capture, and collect the tastiest, most flavorful wild animals, fish, birds, and plants;
▸ Savoring the amazing taste that is unique to food that’s been prepared literally minutes after bagging it;
▸ DeMartini’s extensive repertoire of recipes and food preparation tips;
▸ Forging a deeper connection with nature, the creatures that inhabit it, and the socially conscious foraging community.
From acorns, spring mix, and blackberries, to quail, abalone, and surf smelt, The Cloverdale Forager is the essential guide for both veteran and new foragers alike. Discover the fun, amazing, and exquisite taste experience that only foraging can provide!

Slow Books, Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, by Yasmin Khan
2023-04-24 18:00 - 19:30 | Cloverdale
Slow Books is currently full, but we are currently reading Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, by Yasmin Khan.

Slow Cookbooks: Focus on Deborah Madison
2023-05-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Cloverdale
Please join us for the next meet-up of Slow Cookbooks!
Deborah Madison is the author of 14 cookbooks and countless articles on food, cooking, and farming. She is revered for bringing vegetarian cooking to a wide audience, including non-vegetarians, via Greens restaurant in San Francisco and her cookbooks. A bestselling and award-winning author, her first cookbook was The Greens Cookbook.
Please join us on May 17 to share food from her cookbooks, and discuss her philosophy of food and cooking, what she has contributed to the world of food, and your critique of her cookbooks.
To participate, select a recipe from one of Deborah Madison’s books and prepare small bites to share with the group. We will let you know how many people will be attending. Please also bring a beverage.
There is no charge for the meeting, but please sign up now because space is limited.
Register Here
What Is Slow Cookbooks?
Slow Cookbooks is an informal group that will gather 4 times a year in someone’s home to discuss the book(s) chosen for that meeting and share food each participant prepares from the book. Each meeting will have a different food theme or cookbook, selected by participants, and is open to everyone who wants to explore that focus.

Slow Books: California Soul by Tanya Holland
2023-06-05 18:00
The Slow Book group is currently full, but we are reading California Soul by Tanya Holland.

Slow Books: The Cooking Gene
2023-09-05 18:00 - 20:00
Slow Books: The Cooking Gene

We have two places open for the next meeting of Slow Books. Please join us!
Tuesday, September 5, 6-8 pm
Cloverdale
For this meeting, we are reading The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael Twitty.
Our meetings include a discussion of the book and a meal. Everyone makes a dish from a recipe in the book. Just select a dish you’d like to bring and let the group know by email.
There is no charge for the meeting, but please sign up now because there are only two places available.

Register Here

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael Twitty.
A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom.
Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who “owns” it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine.
From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia.
As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. (Amazon)

©2023 Slow Food Sonoma County North | P.O. Box 1494 | Healdsburg CA | 95448

Slow Books: The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World
2024-02-19 18:00 - 20:00
Although the Slow Books meet-up is currently full, you can join us in reading this month’s selection.
The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World by Amanda Little
In the fascinating story of the sustainable food revolution, an environmental journalist and professor asks the question: Is the future of food looking bleak – or better than ever?
Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?
Amanda Little, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an award-winning journalist, spent three years traveling through a dozen countries and as many US states in search of answers to this question.Through her interviews and adventures with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers, Little tells the fascinating story of human innovation and explores new and old approaches to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale.
Throughout her journey, Little finds and shares a deeper understanding of the threats of climate change and encounters a sense of awe and optimism about the lessons of our past and the scope of human ingenuity. (Amazon)

Slow Books: The World Central Kitchen Cookbook by Jose Andres
2024-05-13
Although the Slow Books meet-up is currently full, you can join us in reading this month’s selection.

Slow Books: How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
2024-06-24
Although the Slow Books meet-up is currently full, you can join us in reading this month’s selection.
Written to inspire courage in those daunted by wartime shortages, How to Cook a Wolf continues to rally cooks during times of plenty, reminding them that providing sustenance requires more than putting food on the table.
M. F. K. Fisher knew that the last thing hungry people needed were hints on cutting back and making do. Instead, she gives her readers license to dream, to experiment, to construct adventurous and delicious meals as a bulwark against a dreary, meager present. Her fine prose provides reason in itself to draw our chairs close to the hearth; we can still enjoy her company and her exhortations to celebrate life by eating well.

Slow Books: Endangered Eating: America's Vanishing Foods, by Sarah Lohman
2024-08-05
Slow Books is an ongoing activity of our chapter. The group meets every 6 weeks to discuss a food-related book and enjoy a potluck dinner based on the book. We meet in people’s homes which can usually only accommodate up to 8 people. For this reason, we are usually unable to invite others than our core group of participants.
But we’re learning a lot from the books we’ve read, and thought you might want to enjoy the books as well. We will therefore let you know what we’re reading each meeting through the newsletter and our website.
August Selection
Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods, by Sarah Lohman
In Endangered Eating, culinary historian Sarah Lohman draws inspiration from the Ark of Taste, a list compiled by Slow Food International that catalogues important regional foods. Lohman travels the country learning about the distinct ingredients at risk of being lost. Readers follow Lohman to Hawaii, as she walks alongside farmers to learn the stories behind heirloom sugarcane. In the Navajo Nation, she assists in the traditional butchering of a Navajo Churro ram. Lohman heads to the Upper Midwest, to harvest wild rice; to the Pacific Northwest, to spend a day wild salmon reefnet fishing; to the Gulf Coast, to devour gumbo made thick and green with filé powder; and to the Lowcountry of South Carolina, to taste America’s oldest peanut—long thought to be extinct. Lohman learns from those who love these rare ingredients: shepherds, fishers, and farmers; scientists, historians, and activists. And she tries her hand at raising these crops and preparing these dishes. Each chapter includes two recipes, so readers can be a part of saving these ingredients by purchasing and preparing them.

Animated by stories yet grounded in historical research, Endangered Eating gives readers the tools to support community food organizations and producers that work to preserve local culinary traditions and rare, cherished foods—before it’s too late. (Amazon)

Slow Books: The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia, by Laura Tillman
2024-09-16
Slow Books: The Migrant Chef, The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia

We have 3 places available at our next Slow Books meeting, and invite you to join us for a potluck dinner and discussion of the book, The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia,by Laura Tillman.

Monday, September 16, 6 pm, Cloverdale

There is no charge for the meeting, but we must know who is coming. Please sign up here and we will confirm your attendance: slowfoodsonomacountynorth@gmail.com. The address and details about the meeting will be sent upon confirmation.

The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia, by Laura Tillman A chef’s gripping quest to reconcile his childhood experiences as a migrant farmworker with the rarefied world of fine dining. Born in rural Mexico, Eduardo “Lalo” García Guzmán and his family left for the United States when he was a child, picking fruits and vegetables on the migrant route from Florida to Michigan. He worked in Atlanta restaurants as a teenager before being convicted of a robbery, incarcerated, and eventually deported. Lalo landed in Mexico City as a new generation of chefs was questioning the hierarchies that had historically privileged European cuisine in elite spaces. At his acclaimed restaurant, Máximo Bistrot, he began to craft food that narrated his memories and hopes. Mexico City–based journalist Laura Tillman spent five years immersively reporting on Lalo’s story: from Máximo’s kitchen to the onion fields of Vidalia, Georgia, to Dubai’s first high-end Mexican restaurant, to Lalo’s hometown of San José de las Pilas. What emerges is a moving portrait of Lalo’s struggle to find authenticity in an industry built on the very inequalities that drove his family to leave their home, and of the artistic process as Lalo calls on the experiences of his life to create transcendent cuisine. The Migrant Chef offers an unforgettable window into a family’s border-eclipsing dreams, Mexico’s culinary heritage, and the making of a chef. (Amazon)

Slow Books: The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading
2024-10-28 17:30 - 19:00 | Sebastopol
Slow Books is an ongoing activity of our chapter. The group meets every 6 weeks to discuss a food-related book and enjoy a potluck dinner based on the book. We meet in people’s homes which can usually only accommodate up to 8 people. For this reason, we are usually unable to invite others than our core group of participants.
But we’re learning a lot from the books we’ve read, and thought you might want to enjoy the books as well.

OCTOBER SELECTION: The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading, by Dwight Garner

Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner’s Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.

Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and about his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking leftover frog legs to school in her lunch box”), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more. (Amazon)

Slow Books: Invitation to A Banquet, by Fuchsia Dunlop
2024-12-02 17:30 - 19:30 | Healdsburg
Our Slow Boods group is currently full, but please enjoy reading along with us.
DECEMBER SELECTION: Invitation to A Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, by Fuchsia Dunlop

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication—but today that is beginning to change.

In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine.

Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland. (Amazon)

Slow Books: Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir, by Padma Lakshmi
2025-06-23 17:30 - 19:00
Slow Books is an ongoing activity of our chapter. The group meets every 6 weeks to discuss a food-related book and enjoy a potluck dinner based on the book. We meet in people’s homes which can usually only accommodate up to 8 people. For this reason, we are usually unable to invite others than our core group of participants.

But we’re learning a lot from the books we’ve read, and thought you might want to enjoy the books as well.

JUNE SELECTION: Slow Books: Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir, by Padma Lakshmi

A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Ate traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn
Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home—and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.
Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies. Amazon

Slow Books: Epitaph for a Peach, David Mas Masumoto
2025-08-04 17:30 - 19:00
Slow Books is an ongoing activity of our chapter. The group meets every 6 weeks to discuss a food-related book and enjoy a potluck dinner based on the book. We meet in people’s homes which can usually only accommodate up to 8 people. For this reason, we are usually unable to invite others than our core group of participants.

But we’re learning a lot from the books we’ve read, and thought you might want to enjoy the books as well.

JUNE SELECTION: Slow Books: Epitaph for a Peach, David Mas Masumoto
A lyrical, sensuous and thoroughly engrossing memoir of one critical year in the life of an organic peach farmer, Epitaph for a Peach is “a delightful narrative . . . with poetic flair and a sense of humor” (Library Journal). Line drawings. Amazon
