04/23 Kelsey Timmerman, Where am I Eating, Chef Claud Beltran, Noir Food & Wine

Kelsey Timmerman – Author of Where am I Eating

Kelsey's grandfather was a farmer and his dad grew up farming, but as an adult Kelsey couldn't even make a box of Mac 'n Cheese. In 2009 the US government began to require Country of Origin labels on most foods and Kelsey set out on a journey to discover where his food came from.  He followed his Starbucks coffee to Felipe, a Colombian coffee farmer and father of three who faced falling coffee prices and the dangerous mountainside where the coffee grew.  He followed his Dole banana to Costa Rica where he got up at 4am and biked into Dole's banana jungle in a monsoon alongside Juan. He followed his chocolate bar to the Ivory Coast where he met a 20-year-old slave on a cocoa farm who left his parents in Ghana without saying goodbye.

•    What our reliance on imported food means for us, and for the people who produce our food
•    The practices (good and bad) of major companies like Starbucks and Dole
•    How consumers can make small changes that will have a huge impact on the lives of farmers around the world

Kelsey’s writing has appeared in publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Condé Nast Portfolio and has aired on NPR.  His extensive travels have given him an understanding of environmental issues and the relationship between man and land that perhaps only his grandpa would recognize. 



CHEF CLAUD BELTRAN - Co-owner/Chef of Noir Food & Wine, Pasadena

LA TIMES: Pasadena, while delightful in so many other ways, has never been long on plausible adult restaurants, dining rooms where the cooking was serious, the noise level was reasonable and the wine list extended to more than a few dozen usual suspects. And a pretty high percentage of those restaurants over the past decade or so, places where you wouldn’t mind dragging a foodie after a movie or a public lecture at Caltech, have turned out to have something to do with Claud Beltran, a slightly odd chef trained under Thomas Keller.