The sixth annual Empty Bowls benefit for Urban Ministries of Durham is today from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the Durham Armory.

Eleven restaurants are providing soup for the event and soup contest, including Thrills from the Grill and Mad Hatter Cafe and Bakeshop. There will also be bread and donated desserts.

This year, Empty Bowls' first after-party will take place at Fullsteam brewery, with area food trucks donating 10 percent of their profits.

Ticket prices to the Armory are $15 for a meal only and $30 for a meal and handcrafted bowl. Children six and under eat free.

UMD hopes to raise more than $30,000 for its Community Cafe, which provides free meals for more than 600 people every day.

A full list of participating restaurants and food trucks can be found at the Empty Bowls page on UMD's website. Tickets can be purchased either online or at the event.

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A food symposium runs the risk of becoming a mawkish gathering of foodie intelligentsia basking in the glow of the locavore's paradise that is here in Durham and Chapel Hill.

Except on the first day of Shared Tables: A Triangle Symposium on Global and Local Food Studies, sitting in UNC-Chapel Hill's Hyde Hall listening to a lecture on food and fuel, I heard this from a professor on the distinguished panel:

"We have a food system that sucks."

And then I heard it again, coming from the moderator.

These people are serious.

The bold approach to food issues began around Jacqueline Olich's kitchen table. As Associate Director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at UNC (CSEES), she was looking for a way to use a Title VI U.S. Department of Education grant awarded to the center for four years of Interdisciplinary Symposia on Sustainability & Innovation in Global Contexts. She thought of the impact of food on global economy and culture and settled on her topic.

Then, she learned that Triangle University Food Studies (TUFS), an organization comprised of members from N.C. State, UNC and Duke, had already scheduled nationally acclaimed urban agronomist and community organizer Will Allen to come speak. It was then that she invited members of TUFS, CSEES and the Kenan-Flagler Center for Sustainable Enterprise to meet around her own kitchen table and collaborate on a two-day event at both UNC and Duke. Why?

"Our brazen challenge or question was: How can we feed the world?"

Today's theme focused on global perspective, kicking off with a panel discussion on food issues, politics and farming in the European Union, a region tangled in economic turmoil. An example of Polish farmers taking the reins of small agriculture and pushing for change proved particularly inspiring among students, professors, researchers and local professionals in the lecture room.

The next panel, titled "Food Security, Sustainable Food Systems, and Global Change," began with a list of harrowing global statistics, such as the fact that by 2050, our global population will reach 9 billion. Currently one-seventh of the world's population (925 million people) experiences chronic hunger. Food production will need to increase by 70 percent by 2050 in order to make sure that number doesn't rise. L. George Wilson of N.C. State provided the statistics, also highlighting food waste and his efforts with U.S. Aid's Feed the Future program to implement programs in developing nations that help preserve the quality of their food in the time it takes to travel from the harvest to the market.

Meanwhile, nutritionist, professor and author Suzanne Havala Hobbs presented the "the global problem of over-nutrition," stating plainly that the United States is "the fattest country in the world," with 30 percent of our citizens listed as obese. "Obesity is a national security issue, in my opinion," she stated.

UNC Department of African and Afro-American Studies Chair Eunice Sahle intrigued the audience with her research on development in Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya, where she said "African countries are forced to destroy their own agriculture in order to export commodities."

The outspoken honesty in these statements carried over to the audience. One woman, a student studying public health, stood up and asked, "As an American consumer and inherent capitalist, what can I do?"

"Your American citizenship, you can use that," Sahle said. "It has a lot of normative power in shaping agrarian policy."

While the after-lunch panel focused on food and fuel, the power of consumer choice in a first-world nation remained a bold theme. We learned that in 2008, the depreciation of the dollar coupled with the rise of the cost of grain increased global food prices by 20 percent. Grain is an energy drain, too, as the crop that uses the most fertilizer.

Another connection with food and energy: meat production. Osei Yeboah, Associate Professor in Agribusiness and Applied Economics and N.C. A&T University, stated that one beef cattle requires 2.5 acres to raise. Duke University law professor Jedediah Purdy, who facetiously prefaced his talk as "unreasonable," said this posed an issue of "the denial of self-satisfaction" for consumers in this country.

"If consumers don't demand those changes in agricultural policy and health," said Yeboah, "it's not going to happen."

The audience left wide-eyed. At Duke tomorrow, they tackle local issues—point-blank.

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution that’s simpler and less taxing than sweating on the elliptical machine, pledge to go meatless each Monday in 2012.

The Meatless Monday Pledge-olution was created by Eleni Vlachos, who co-organized last year’s Bull City Vegan Challenge and hosts the annual Vegan Thanksgiving Record Party.

“We want to do it in a fun way,” she said. “And harness the power of new years and resolutions. And address reasons why resolutions fail.”

Our best intentions fail because we take on too much—thus the one-day-a-week pledge—and we keep them private. Peer pressure has its benefits.

As an incentive, pledges can enter a contest to win a grand prize. That person will receive a gourmet dinner for two at Solas in Raleigh, a copy of the award-winning documentary, Forks Over Knives, two free passes to The Fiction Kitchen vegan brunch, cooking classes, cookbooks and more.

And if you’re already meatless, refer a pledge and you’re eligible to win the Karma prize. And we could all use better karma. The contest runs through Jan. 9. Get more details at trianglemm.com.

On a recent afternoon at Durham’s Piedmont restaurant, I noticed a towering version of a familiar face. George O’Neal, the somewhat proverbial young farmer of Lil’ Farm, was suspended from the ceiling in the form of a powerful and serious 16-inch-by-24-inch rectangular photograph.

His image is part of a row of 15 portraits using local farmers and farmhands as the subjects. The collection is titled BURLAP. Portraits of Piedmont Farmers, the latest exhibit by Raleigh photographer Raymond Goodman. Bull City Arts Collaborative at 401-B1 Foster St. opens the exhibit on Nov. 12, extending the display to the back wall of the farm-to-fork restaurant, the Piedmont, next door.

• Photo courtesy of Raymond Goodman
• Helga and Tim MacAller of Four Leaf Farm in Rougemont

I met Goodman as he snapped photographs this weekend at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s annual Sustainable Agriculture Conference, held this year in Durham. He spent eight weeks photographing at a dozen North Carolina farms, including less traditional organic projects like Raleigh urban farm Part & Parcel and the Refugee Agricultural Project of Carrboro. He chose to hang a sheet of burlap behind the subjects, creating a glowing, Monet-like veil between them and the fields in which they live and work. This technique, combined with the enormous portrait size, urges the locavore-slash-foodie to view a statuesque version of the farmer free from the confines of their work as farmers and vendors.

“I wanted to raise the profile of the farmer,” Goodman told me. “It’s to celebrate the farmer—not the land, not the toil, not the sweat, none of the other stuff. To give a little distance between the field, the farm stand, all those other things. The work I’m most proud of is about other people, and who they are and what they mean to me. There’s a power there. By isolating them in the portrait, you end up with the truth, the reality.”

BURLAP. is curated by Dave Wofford of Horse and Buggy Press. The 12 16-inch-by-24-inch and three 24-inch-by-36-inch portraits are set in locally sourced Ambrosia maple frames designed by William H. Dodge and fabricated by Marc E. Smith.

BCAC hosts an opening reception on Friday, Nov. 18, from 6 to 9 p.m. Additional viewing hours will be during the Durham Artwalk on Saturday, Nov. 19, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 20, from 1 to 5 p.m. The exhibit runs through Jan. 28. Visit www.bullcityarts.org for a full schedule and for the artist’s statement.

• Photo: Vintage '59 Imports

Cloud is the founder and President of Vintage '59 Imports, which, like Lynch's and Rosenthal's outfits, specializes in small-production, grower-made, predominantly French wine "whose common thread is a respect for the land and a value decidedly placed on vineyard work over cellar wizardry," as Cloud's bio puts it. (I've always had a thing for the wildly aromatic and quite inexpensive white wine, Champ de Roy Blanc, of Coupe Roses, a Minervois producer imported by Vintage '59.) He is in town not only to promote his new book at A Southern Season, but also to lead a tasting of wines in his portfolio from Burgundy's excellent 2009 vintage. Some real studs are included in the $25 tasting, which includes hors d'oeuvres.

As for To Burgundy and Back, although it breaks little new ground either geographically or philosophically—Lynch and Rosenthal are old-school terroirists, champions of family-owned and operated domaines, and have much larger portfolios than Vintage '59—it is written with a distinctly youthful ebullience and sense of purpose. (Cloud harvests an inspirational quote from a 1951 book called The Scottish Himalayan Expedition: "[T]he moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves, too.") When Cloud first went to France to prospect for vignerons, in 1997, he loved wine and knew it well but "had little experience with the intricacies of importing and distributing."

To top it off, he spoke no French. So he took with him his older brother, Joe, who had learned the language while studying abroad years earlier. To Burgundy and Back reads like a sort of Kerouacian, brothers-on-the-autoroute reminiscence—but with wine as the operative dharma.

Yet there is a sobering subplot. Thanks to a geographical coincidence and a freak accident, the Clouds' father lay in a coma in the Burgundian city of Dijon during their trip. On vacation there, Cloud père had gone over the bars while careening downhill on a bicycle. In To Burgundy and Back, his sons arrive, find him still in his coma, and spend the next couple of weeks driving around France in a treasure hunt for wine to import.

The narrative involving their father doesn't really develop—he soon disappears from the book until the epilogue, which reveals him to have emerged largely okay—but it does remind the reader that wine importers in the Cloud/Lynch/Rosenthal mold are, like the winemakers whose product they import, human beings. They have lives, feelings, families and personalities, and their wines reflect their characters and circumstances just as they reflect the grapes, the winemakers and the vagaries of any given vintage. Tuesday's tasting offers a sort of reading of Chapter 2009, Burgundy, in the story of Roy Cloud and Vintage '59.

"A Sit-Down Burgundy Tasting" with Roy Cloud of Vintage '59 is Tuesday, Nov. 8, at 6 p.m. at A Southern Season. The $25 cost includes hors d'oeuvres. Cloud will also sign copies of his book. Call (919) 929-7133 or visit www.southernseason.com.

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This evening from 7-9:30 p.m., meet Brooklyn-based chef Tamar Adler on the occasion of her new book, An Everlasting Meal, inspired by M.F.K. Fisher's classic How to Cook a Wolf. Tonight is Adler's only North Carolina appearance.

This is a book launch party like you may never have seen before: The event will take place on the patio at the former Bickett Market in Raleigh's Five Points. Expect bluegrass and old-time music; sausages on the grill; sides by the new Pullen Place Cafe; beer tastings from super-local Sub-Rosa; wine poured by the Raleigh Wine Shop; and a whole lot of relaxing by the fire pit.

The Patio @ Bickett is a magical, tucked-away courtyard just on the edge of downtown, and tonight is shaping up to be a beautiful evening under the stars.

I'll be onstage with Tamar Adler to discuss the book and talk about her years working in the kitchens of the legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Prune in NYC, then on to dinner and music and mingling.

TICKETS are $35—and get this: 100 percent of all proceeds will be donated to InterFaith Food Shuttle.
Buy online at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/205857 ...or with cash/check at the door.

QUESTIONS?
Contact Adam Mitchell
AnAutumnalEvening@gmail.com

LOCATION:
The Patio @ Bickett Market
219 Bickett Blvd.
Raleigh, NC 27608
United States