Organic ─ Farmers and Chefs of the Hudson Valley

The Hudson Valley, New York has become an epicenter for the local, organic, sustainable food movement. With its rich agricultural land, the awareness for sustainable living, and the growing demand for local, organic food, the farm-to-table, locavore movement has become a way of life in the Hudson Valley. Organic spotlights the Hudson Valley as a region at the forefront of this movement and features the portraits and words of the dedicated farmers who are committed to growing and producing food using sustainable methods, and the chefs who echo their beliefs and pay homage to the food they produce, including such notables as:

* Amy Hepworth of Hepworth Farms, works on a 7th-generation, family-owned farm
* Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns was named one of the world's most influential people in 2009 in Time's annual "Time 100"
* Zakary Pelaccio, owner of Fish & Game, is famous for building Brooklyn's first gastropub and pioneering NYC's nose-to-tail culinary movement
* Ken Greene at the Hudson Valley Seed Library provides many local producers with heirloom and open-pollinated garden seeds and protects 15,000 years of agricultural history!
* Steffen Schneider at the 400-acre biodynamic Hawthorne Valley Farm has helped educate over 13,000 kids since 1972 as part of the farm's Visiting Students Program

The over 100 portraits of the farmers and chefs of the Hudson Valley were photographed using the wet-plate collodion process, a technique developed in the 1850s when the art of photography was in its infancy. With the use of large wooden cameras and brass lenses, glass plates are hand coated to produce one-of-a-kind ambrotype images. The amber toned images remind us of a time when the cultivation of land was a manual process that linked the farmer directly to the soil. "Organic" is one of the most misunderstood and often misused words describing food today. In narrating their own stories, the farmers and chefs share their philosophy about what it means to grow and live organically and sustainably.

Francesco Mastalia has traveled the world, photographing tribal, religious, spiritual, and indigenous peoples. His book Dreads, published by Workman Artisan, is a photo documentary on the history of dreadlocks. The book is now in its eighth printing, sold worldwide in four languages, and includes an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker.

Joan Dye Gussow, PhD, is known as the matriarch of the organic, locavore, small-farm movement. She is a mentor to today's leading food activists. She has wielded considerable influence in academia (as a nutrition and education professor at Columbia University), in government (as a member of the National Organics Standards Board), and in the advocacy world (serving on the Center for Food Safety's Advisory Board). She has written extensively, including, most recently, Growing Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Growing Vegetables (Chelsea Green, 2010). She makes her home in the Hudson Valley.