2009-2010 Richmond Forum Subscriptions Now On Sale!

A limited number of seats are now available to new subscribers for The Richmond Forum's exciting 2009-2010 season. Subscribe online now, or call The Forum offices at (804) 330-3993. Seats are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, and we expect seats to sell out quickly!

The 2009-2010 Richmond Forum season includes speakers you won't want to miss, such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Steve Forbes, editor of Forbes Magazine, Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, David Plouffe, campaign manager for Barack Obama, and the host of PBS's NOVA ScienceNow series, astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Click here for more details about our 2009-2010 speakers.

Forum subscribers enjoy the following benefits:

• Guaranteed Seating - subscribers have a reserved seat for each program.
• Season Discount - save up to 30% off of 2009-2010 single ticket prices.
• Priority Seating - opportunity to renew and improve your seats each season.

Putting the Seating Puzzle Together

Bill snapped this photo of me today working on seating assignments for renewing subscribers for next season. I'm smiling because we're just about done! Often people think that we have a computerized seating system, but as you can see from the huge seating chart on my lap and the nub of a pencil in my hand, we still do things the old-fashioned way. Keeping the system in-house and simple in this way has helped us avoid passing along Ticketmaster fees and surcharges to our subscribers over the years, which could add as much as 8% to 10% to ticket prices.

Subscribers renewing their same seats go right onto the seating chart and into our database as orders are received. We hold the renewal forms from subscribers requesting seat changes until after the renewal deadline so we can look for the best available open seats. We do read and take into consideration every single seat change request that comes in, and in most cases, we are able to move people at least a little bit each season.

By far the most numerous requests are for aisle seats, front row seats, and centrally located seats, so those are the hardest to come by and see the least turnover each year, but please don't ever think we have just ignored your change requests! Our goal is always to get subscribers in the best possible seats we can, so we nudge and shift and pencil in and erase, working towards seating current subscribers in the best available seats before we open up subscriptions to new subscribers on May 1st.

If you are a current subscriber who has renewed for next season, thank you so much for your continued support. It is truly your participation and commitment that make our programs possible. If you are not a subscriber yet but would like to be, join our e-mail list today. On May 1st, subscriptions will become available to new subscribers and we would love to have you join us.

Trinity Students Work and Play Green

Trinity Episcopal School students play an important role on Forum program nights, helping with greeting, seating and the collection of audience questions at intermission. I learned on a recent visit to Trinity that students there have started a garden on campus! What a perfect example of the types of action that Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle noted people are taking to begin to make changes to our food culture.

Here is an excerpt from an article about the garden and other environmental activities in which Trinity students participate that appeared in Trinity's magazine, Titan Trail:

Environmentally-conscious students at Trinity find that their passion for the natural world permeates their time outside the classroom as well as in it. Spending time on the river, working outside, or contributing to the green practices on campus is more like play than work. Students for Environmental Action, known as the SEA club, find that their volunteer work provides a rewarding sense of purpose. SEA club members can be found emptying classroom recycling receptacles weekly.

They’ve built a vegetable garden between the Academic Building and the Science Discovery Center, to be nourished with compost pile and irrigated with rainwater collected in barrels. The compost pile is growing daily with apple cores and banana peels from student lunches (no meat or dairy products allowed). The club plans to grow salad greens and flowers this spring.

Plants were just starting to pop up when I was at the school last week, but we hope the students have a burgeoning garden as the weather continues to get warmer!

What Did You Buy At The Farmers' Market?

Living salad bowls, homemade cherry and pear butter, heirloom seeds, organic herb plants and bison meat were just a few of the things I heard people buzzing about! Hundreds of people attending last night's Forum program featuring Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle made time to visit the Farmers' Market in the Landmark Ballroom, sponsored by Virginia Grown, an initiative of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services designed to help Virginians learn how easy and beneficial it can be to buy from local farmers, producers and food processors. Among the shoppers were Pollan and Nestle themselves! We saw Michael Pollan buying some seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, while Marion Nestle seemed particularly interested in the Wild T Bison Farm tent.

The market was a perfect complement to the program content. If you were at the program last night, are you looking at your cereal box a little more skeptically this morning, wondering what it might really be saying to you, aside from "snap, crackle, pop"? I am!

Setting aside the fact that the breakfast cereals we buy at the grocery store are highly processed, with lengthy ingredients lists that often contain unpronounceable or unrecognizable items, we learned last night that even choices we might consider healthy are at least worth a closer look.

For example, my breakfast today was a bowl of Kashi Go Lean High Protein & High Fiber Cereal, with sliced organic strawberries, topped off with organic milk. That sounds pretty good, right? Looking more closely at the labels and packaging, my breakfast cereal is not making dramatic and dubious health claims that it can save my life or prevent disease, so that's good, but, there are three sugars included in the relatively short ingredients list, and the cereal is presented as a "functional food," with extra protein and fiber to give it nutritional value beyond what the ingredients might have in their unaltered states. My organic strawberries were shipped up from Mexico, adding a huge fossil fuel factor to my consumption of them, and my organic milk also had to travel pretty far from the cow it came from to make its way into my cereal bowl!

Nestle and Pollan laid out the complexity of the challenges we face to do something as simple as eat a healthy diet in our day to day lives--when figuring out what to buy at the grocery store, when considering and crafting agricultural policy and farming methods, and when determining how our food system will be regulated and marketed. However, they both also offered some pretty simple steps that we can all take starting today: seek out minimally processed foods with short ingredients lists, buy locally produced foods, and cut back on portion sizes, or, as Michael Pollan puts it succinctly, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

What were your impressions of last night's program?

A Few Tickets Left For The Michael Pollan & Marion Nestle Program!

I can’t wait for the program tomorrow night.

I've always been so grateful that several years ago a friend suggested that I read The Omnivore's Dilemma. At that point, I had already begun shopping and eating more consciously, but Pollan's work inspired me to read even more on the subject, and ultimately helped me realize how worth my time it would be to take the few extra steps involved with eating more locally and thereby more healthfully.

Already a shopper at area farmers' markets and Ellwood Thompson's, after a year on the waiting list I was able to join the Victory Farms CSA last year and have thoroughly enjoyed the access to the wide variety of ultra-fresh locally grown veggies that our area CSAs offer. My family also started getting most of our meat and eggs through the Richmond buying club for Polyface Farm, the Virginia farm featured prominently in The Omnivore's Dilemma, and have enjoyed learning about and sampling meats from the numerous other local farmers that offer meats, eggs, and cheeses in central Virginia. So far, I haven't purchased a cow share (which is what you have to do in Virginia to legally have truly fresh milk), but that is next on my list to consider!

You can imagine my delight when Michael Pollan's name began showing up as a requested speaker on our surveys. The response we have received to this program, right from the moment we announced it, has been overwhelming. It couldn't be more timely. Food and food safety has been a huge news topic this year, from lows like the scary stories about salmonella in American dietary staples like peanut butter and spinach to highs like the inspirational stories about the planting of the White House garden and the rise in the numbers of farmers' markets and backyard kitchen gardens popping up in our communities across the country.

In the program on Saturday, Marion Nestle is going to help us read through food labeling and marketing so we can really understand the nutritional value of our purchases. Her book, What to Eat? is an invaluable aide to anyone trying to understand what to buy and what not to buy at the grocery store. Michael Pollan is going to help us understand how politics and agricultural policy have shaped the food choices that are widely available to us in this country, and how the food choices that we make going forward can affect the health of our bodies, our environment, and our culture.

We will be selling the few tickets we still have available until 2pm Saturday, so call The Forum office at (804) 330-3993 if you are interested in attending this program!

Reza Aslan's New Book To Be Released On Tuesday.

Islam expert, Reza Aslan's new book, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, is scheduled for release this Tuesday, April 21st. Aslan was a speaker at The Richmond Forum earlier this season, along with Newsweek editor, Jon Meacham.

So what is a "cosmic war?" Aslan equates it to a "ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens."

A review of the book can be found at Slate.com.

Michael Pollan interviewed in today's Style Weekly

Speaking about his appearance at The Richmond Forum this Saturday with Marion Nestle, Pollan says:

"I look forward to engaging with her about the food industry and how it might be part of the solution. We’re at this very interesting moment where we have a government that seems sympathetic to the food movement. There are opportunities for reform, so we’ll talk about the state of the food movement and whether we stand at a moment where we can change the system."

Read the entire interview here.

Allow Time to Visit the Farmers' Market in the Landmark Ballroom on April 18th!

We're excited that in conjunction with our program In Search of Real Food, featuring Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle, a farmers' market will be open in the Ballroom this Saturday night, downstairs at the Landmark Theater! The Forum has been working closely with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to make this market possible for Forum attendees on program night.

Theater doors will open a little early on Saturday, beginning at 6:30pm, so you can explore the market, or you can visit the market at intermission and after the program.

Please bring cash or checks for purchases. Vendors will hold your purchases for pick-up after the program.

Ten local growers will be selling their products at the theater, including:

Croftburn Farm Meats
Dave and Dee's Mushrooms
Fall Line Farms
Homestead Creamery
Lavender Fields Herb Farm
Manakintowne Specialty Growers
Red Rake Organic Farm
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Victory Farms, Inc.
Wild T. Bison Farm

If you don't have tickets yet, it's worth a call to the Forum office (804-330-3993) at the end of this week to see if any subscribers have released tickets for this sold-out program, in which case the seats will be available for sale on a first-come, first-served basis. (The farmer's market will only be open to program ticket holders.)

Past Forum Speaker, Queen Noor, Knights Stephen Colbert

It happened just this week when Queen Noor of Jordan appeared on The Colbert Report and asked Stephen to sign the Global Zero declaration to reduce the world's nuclear stockpiles to zero. Colbert agreed to sign on, as the leader of the Colbert Nation, if Queen Noor would agree to knight him, which she did. Watch below.

Queen Noor addressed The Richmond Forum, along with Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan in February 2003. (Anybody remember the weather that night?)