Jessica Prentice is a chef, author, and founding member of Three Stone Hearth, a community-supported kitchen in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

. She is known for coining the word '' locavore'', which is a movement in which people seek to eat locally grown foods, often defined as those available within a 100-mile radius.

Biography

Prentice starred as Pepper McKenzie on the 1982 children's television show '' Powerhouse'', which aired on

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

and was later rerun by

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (nicknamed Nick) is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of the Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first ca ...

. Her interest in food began when she became a vegetarian at the age of 14, although she subsequently started eating meat again. She worked as director of education programs at the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture in San Francisco. In 1996, she completed the professional Chef's Training at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City.

Food activism

Prentice has become a prominent activist for local eating. She describes her activism as a pragmatic rather than doctrinaire view, seeing it as an educational exercise in "consciousness raising" rather than a necessary or sufficient solution to problems of modern food production and consumption. She co-founded the Three Stone Hearth project in

, which seeks to provide homecooked-style food to subscribers too busy to cook for themselves every day; it has spread to Illinois, New York state, and Minnesota and inspired similar projects in Canada. She is the author of ''Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection'', which combines essays arguing for local eating with recipes for local seasonal recipes matching the 13 lunar months of the year.

Criticism

Food writer John Mariani has claimed that the concept of a locavore diet is nothing new, being similar to the ideas of

Stewart Brand Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the ''Whole Earth Catalog''. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Networ ...

Frances Moore Lappé Frances Moore Lappé (born February 10, 1944) is an American researcher and author in the field of food and democracy policy. She is the author of 20 books including the 2.5-million-copy selling 1971 book '' Diet for a Small Planet'', which the ...

, and others. A study by Christopher Weber found that eating locally as proposed by Prentice made no difference to greenhouse gas emissions—although that may not be the chief aim of locavores. She has also been criticized by vegans for promoting meat eating.

References

External links

Three Stone Hearth community-supported kitchenLocavores
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prentice, Jessica 1968 births Writers from Berkeley, California American chefs Living people