New York City, NY—Miriam Pensac and Frank Gaddy have never met. It’s likely they never will.

Ms. Pensac is a freshman at Columbia University pursuing a double major in theatre and philosophy. She grew up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and was on a competitive ski team until she was 14 years old.

Mr. Gaddy is a recovered crack addict who was once homeless and served 20 years in jail for a litany of crimes, including selling drugs and a gang-related homicide.

But on a recent grey day in Morningside Heights, about a mile apart, these two people share something fundamental: their food.

What allows this logistical marvel to happen is a food-recycling program that gathers leftovers from the main dining hall on Columbia’s campus and serves them to homeless people at a nearby soup kitchen.

Every Friday, City Harvest, a non-profit organization that distributes donated food throughout the city, picks up, on average, more than 300 pounds of excess food from the University cafeteria where Pensac usually eats and delivers it around the neighborhood. The majority of the University’s leftovers go to Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, where it becomes part of Mr. Gaddy’s Saturday meal.

With the economic downturn settling in for the winter and the brunt of the cold weather approaching, food pantries and soup kitchens across the city are struggling to meet demand. City Harvest reports 15% longer lines, according to Erin Hoover, senior manager of communications.

And at Metropolitan Baptist Church, which runs a soup kitchen on 138th and 7th Ave. that receives the Ivy League leftovers, it’s standing room only. “The economy is bringing more people out on the street—new faces, young faces, mothers with children. You can’t sit down in here,” Mr. Gaddy said. “The joint is packed.”

In a city where homelessness is part of the landscape, each neighborhood must fend for itself. On the Upper West Side, this operation between such unlikely partners—an Ivy-League University and a homeless shelter—is helping to feed the Harlem locals.

The man who brokered the odd-couple team wasn’t a university administrator or a non-profit executive. Rather, it was a man who knew both worlds.

Don Weems, a chef the university’s main dining hall, used to be on the receiving end of a free meal. After losing his job for «doing a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to,»

Mr. Weems lived in the streets for a year, visiting soup kitchens for the warm company and the hot food.

“I was sleeping on the train every night, and going to soup kitchens,” he said, his jolly demeanor belying his rough past. He’s a youthful 62-years-old and proudly wears a Kelly-green apron and matching chef’s hat—part of a colorful show-off wardrobe that his staff loves to tease him about.

During Christmas holidays they call him «Reindeer Don». In late October, the nickname is «Halloween Don.» Chef Weems doesn’t mind the extra attention—he keeps a yellowed copy of a school neighborhood newsletter write-up with this picture taped to the main office window.

Once back on his feet and employed at the school, he couldn’t help but notice a lost opportunity. “A lot of the food would be disposed of and it really bothered me,» he said. «It took me back to standing in line for hours.» He took the initiative to contact City Harvest and arrange for the leftover food to be picked up once a week. The kitchen staff was supportive, but not so inclined to take on the extra work that saving food requires—packing, labeling, storing. “No one wanted to pack the food because they were doing their job, so I took on that responsibility.”

The additional chores add about 30 minutes to Mr. Weems’ already hectic schedule of helping to prepare over 2000 meals per day. The kitchen staff of 40 cooks two meals—a brunch/lunch combo and dinner—seven days a week, constantly utilizing hundreds of pots and pans and six ovens. Forming part of the perimeter around the kitchen area are designated rooms for practically every variety of ingredient: produce, canned-goods, meat, dairy.

Students like Ms. Penzac, of course, rarely get to glimpse what’s behind the curtain. They file directly into the dining hall—a cavernous room with dark-oak paneling, floor-to-ceiling windows, and chandeliers—and then eat.

The former competitive skier called it quits once the 4 a.m. wake-up calls for practice became too much. “For any competitive sport you have to be a competitive person, and I’m not,” she said, resembling more of a pink-cheeked cherub than a chiseled downhill racer. She traded the skis lessons for singing lessons and is now studying acting—in the classroom and on the silver screen. To prepare for her thespian career, she has seen the classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, «about a million times.»

Ms. Pensac managed to tap into a competitive mode, though, when it came to academics, helping to secure her a spot at the university: she made straight A’s in high school and scored in the 99 percentile of the ACT, a standardized test required by admissions offices.

Now, shuffling between classes and acting lessons, the freshman grabs a bite at the dining hall. Awaiting her and her peers are infamous “Freshman 15” temptations (the extra weight new students put on by “eating with their eyes”): freshly prepared hot food buffet, complete with gluten-free and vegan options; pizza and sandwich bar; make-your-own waffle station; made-to-order burgers and hot dogs; and a dessert area showcasing cakes, cookies and frozen yogurt with all the toppings.

Most students have an idea of where the excess food ends up. “I was aware, to a degree, that they were packaging this food for homeless shelters, but that’s the extent of what I knew,” said Ms. Penzac, snacking on a salad of tofu, beets and spinach.

Dining hall administrators have been well aware of the social responsibilities of food recycling. Recently, they implemented green initiatives as well. Trays were eliminated in 2007 to reduce food waste, which had an immediate affect on resources. “Dining Services is able to save 3,000 gallons of water waste each day and at least 50 lbs of food waste,” according to the Dining Services website.

Students took action, too. Early in the semester student Eco-Reps, an environmentally-minded group of undergraduates, chose to educate the incoming class with a more literal demonstration. Every day for a week, the group stood by the dirty-dish conveyor belt and collected food scraps before they were thrown out. Total weight of wasted food in September? 160 pounds.

To underscore the waste-not message, a large sign hangs over the drop-off station: “What Did You Waste Today? You hold the Power to Prevent Waste!”

Meanwhile, down below in the basement kitchen, the staff noticed a difference, especially Chef Weems since he started in 1996. “They don’t eat like they used to,” he said.

At the end of the week, a City Harvest truck makes the rounds around the Upper West Side. When it eventually pulls up to the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, about 30 minutes later, disheveled men stream out of the basement and form an assembly line, patiently passing each aluminum tin of food to the next guy. The soup kitchen serves one free meal six days a week to approximately 75-100 people, all from donated food delivered by City Harvest.

Metal fold-up chairs and tables fill this stark-white dining hall. A Proverb’s Bible verse framed on the wall reads “Fathers Save your Sons. Mothers Save your Daughters. God Save Us All.” A few boxes of browning bananas and limes are near the front, which a few people snack on. One woman inhales four bananas under five minutes, then returns to her crouched position, hugging her knees. Piles of bread are stacked on tables and in shopping charts.

Everyone is welcome here; no questions asked. “We serve the homeless, destitute, people just hungry and smell it off the street,” said John Hayes, a volunteer who re-heats the donated food. “We’re just like a family.”

Mr. Gaddy, known as ‘Slim’ around the center, is grateful to be part of that family because for nearly two decades, he was part of an each-man-for-himself type family—jail. “Rounded off, I did about 20 years. I have four felonies and 14 misdemeanors,” he said, including petty larceny, narcotic sales and “one body”—street talk for homicide.

During that time in his life, he’d do just about anything to support his habit. “If I could sell your ass, I’d sell it to get me a bag of dope,” he said curtly.

And when Mr. Gaddy tired of that “hustle,” he was often tempted to commit another crime just so he could get locked-up again where there was food and a place to sleep. “I thought about it plenty of times. I’d think I’d take a garbage can and go down on 34th street and throw it in Macy’s front window and stand there and wait for the police.”

To fill his empty stomach, he’d show-up for a free meal at the soup kitchen. He didn’t know where the food came from, and he didn’t care. “We don’t know nothin’ about where the food comes from or who it’s donated from. Only thing we know it comes here,” he said, “and given out to people who need it.”

Now Mr. Gaddy is clean and has an apartment in the Bronx. Along with the other volunteers, he helps to run the soup kitchen. His official role is distributing numbered tickets to people as they file in. His unofficial role is as proof of hope. He offers a hug and gentle word of encouragement to those who look like they’re having an especially rough morning because he knows he’s just one bad decision away from reverting to that life.

A few subway stops to the south, Ms. Pensac, the student who aspires to become a theatre actress, will most likely never know Mr. Gaddy. She’ll probably never meet Chef Weems either. But in a large city grappling with a large hunger problem, three strangers on the Upper West Side are more connected than they think.

Untitled from Laura Dodd on Vimeo.

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Although the view’s intensity waxed and waned depending on the season, one aspect of the landscape remained constant: the daily arrival of the stooped old herdsman and his shepherd dog from behind a flock of wooly-backed sheep, and the tinkling of their bells as they paraded by. Now my days in Sicily are limited to fleeting vacations, as I live full-time in New York, where my view is of a closed-in courtyard, and the tinkling of sheep’s bells has been replaced by the honking of car horns. I can only dream of that timeless Mediterranean view.

But with a rise in availability of “local” pasture-raised livestock, I have started to feel as if I’m hearing the delicate ringing of those bells from my apartment window, especially when the intense tang of the lamb on my dinner plate now recalls the taste of the meat I used to get from my Sicilian cousin Filippo, the butcher. The bells have never been ringing so close to my home in the Big Apple.

Over the last decade, a handful of chefs cooking at so-called farm-to-table restaurants introduced New Yorkers to the delights of eating local meats, vegetables, cheeses and delicacies. Eateries such as Blue Hill, Savoy and Gramercy Tavern made a name for themselves by offering the cream of the crop from the farmers’ market on their menus. But those local bites, albeit succulent, came at a steep price and were geared to an elite clientele.

Thanks to the growth of the greenmarkets and the introduction of community-sponsored agriculture—a program which fosters participants to become minor shareholders in local farms in return for a weekly bag of seasonal produce—legions of urban dwellers are eating more locally grown fruits and vegetables.

The availability of meat from local farmers remained limited until farmers’ markets introduced such meat into the city, where it is sold directly to the public. Now, two butchers, Dickson’s Farm Stand Meats in Chelsea Market and The Meat Hook in Brooklyn, offer meat exclusively from local farmers. Not only is the meat more economical than the locally produced meat offered at farmer’s markets, but it is sold fresh, not frozen.

Dickson’s Farm Stand Meats is run by 30-year-old Jake Dickson, who is usually clad in a spotless butcher coat and a vintage shirt and tie. New York State-raised pork, beef, lamb and poultry are sold at the white-tiled shop, which has quickly become a fixture among Chelsea Market’s gourmet shops.

I was hooked after tasting the full gamut of Dickson’s local delicacies. Making meatballs with the shop’s ground beef or lamb is a culinary delight.  Like the meat from Sicily, its flavor is prominent and it remains moist. It’s not the first time I’ve cooked with meat from pasture-raised animals, but this local meat is far superior. Dickson is adamant that his local meat tastes better because of the breed of the animals, their diet and their humane lifestyle. But just how local is local?

In the vernacular of the locavore, when referring to fruits and vegetables “local” means food that travels no more than 100 miles from farm to fork. Food that travels in excess of 100 miles is considered “regional,“ not local. Local food is considered eco-friendly because it leaves a smaller carbon footprint. When it comes to meat, however, the word “local” takes on new meaning. Even livestock that is raised within a 100-mile radius must detour to the slaughterhouse and butcher before arriving in the city. Hence, there is no fixed mileage count for meats to be considered “local.”  Dickson’s “local” meat travels no more than 400 miles from farm to fork.

All of Dickson’s lamb and beef comes from upstate New York farms, such as Stony Brook Farm, located nearly 200 miles outside of the city on the outskirts of a quaint town called Schoharie. Stony Brook is run by 36-year-old Bob Comis and his wife. Disgusted by the stomach-churning practices of the industrial farm industry, Comis became a vegan; five years ago, he and his wife moved to the Schoharie Valley, where they humanely raise their own animals.

Photo by: Zach Phillips

Among other breeds, Comis raises Icelandic sheep, a centuries-old breed that he says “has not been ‘improved’ by the introduction of genetics from other breeds.” While he claims that many other breeds produce meat just as good, the Icelandic sheep are stronger and take care of their offspring. Bob’s sheep—which are fenced into the largest open areas around the grassiest parts of the pasture and rotated—are grass-fed, meaning their diet consists of fresh grass and hay, which contains nutrient rich clover and alfalfa.

Less than 20 miles from his farm, Bob has found a slaughterhouse that handles the sheep gently to reduce the animal’s suffering. “If the sheep I raise are treated poorly at the slaughterhouse, then I have failed in my effort to raise sheep according to the highest welfare standards,” says Bob. Interestingly, meat sold at the greenmarket travels a greater distance than when sold at Dickson’s, because after going to the slaughterhouse, the meat is sent to the butcher, then back to the farm and then to the greenmarket. Comis’ meat is delivered directly to Jake Dickson’s store from the slaughterhouse.

According to Jo Robinson, author of “Pasture Perfect,” a book about the benefits of grass-fed livestock, the difference between meat from pasture-raised animals and mainstream meat is “like night and day.” Supermarket meat tends to come from industrial meat-producing factory farms, where animals are kept in prison-like pens with little room to move.

Beyond the living conditions, the difference between such factory farm and pasture-raised animals lies in the diet. Most beef found in American grocery stores and eateries comes from livestock raised in factories, where they are injected with hormones and fed corn and other grains in order to fatten them up quickly. Since cattle are ruminants, meaning their three-tiered stomachs are built to digest grass, a grain-rich diet can be harmful. In most cases, the animals require antibiotics to stay alive until they are slaughtered.

Pasture raised animals are almost exclusively grass-fed, although some are fed grain for the last weeks of their lives in order to boost the marble or fat that collects in their meat. This more natural diet requires little to no use of antibiotics. Grass-fed animals are not only healthier, but according to Robinson, “their meat is significantly more nutritious for humans than feed-lot meat, containing higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.”

However, Robinson does not make a distinction between the nutritional value or taste of grass-fed meat that is raised locally and that which comes from father distances. “It’s about how they are raised and what they are fed, not just the fact that they are closer to you,” says Robinson, adding, “Surely, I tasted grass-fed meat that I didn’t like.”

Riccardo Buitoni, chef and owner of Nolita’s Emporio, serves a N.Y. strip steak on his menu that comes from a breed of cow called Piedmontese, which has evolved in the Alpine regions of Italy since the Stone Age. This is the only breed that has a documented genetic tenderness that produces “uniquely lean and tender” meat.

Raised on a farm in Montana, the meat reminds Riccardo of the meat from his native Italy, and he says it “downright tastes better.” While many of the items on the rest of Riccardo’s menu are locally produced, the meat is not. At home, Riccardo and his wife espouse a local food diet. In the restaurant, he incorporates this personal philosophy “whenever possible” saying, “Italian food tastes best when local fresh ingredients are used.” However, he justifies purchasing the Piedmontese beef because of its unique texture and flavor and closeness to the “real Italian taste.”

Locavores choose local food over other food in order to lower the impact on the environment, boost the local economy, and simply because local food is often fresher and tastier. Locavores, like the famed Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma, continue to speak out about the damaging effects that livestock factory farms have on the environment. Livestock are responsible for a high percentage of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. While some environmentalists promote vegetarianism in order to reduce such emissions, others like Pollan support eating locally raised pasture-fed animals rather than giving up meat altogether.

Brent Young, a butcher at Brooklyn’s newly-opened The Meat Hook, says that the environmental justification for eating locally raised animals is “a selling point.” While he acknowledges the “smaller carbon footprint” of eating local meat, Young believes “it really comes down to the [meat's] superior taste.” His response to the environmental impact of the meat industry is to “eat less meat,” an ironic statement, coming from a butcher.

The idea of eating less meat harkens back to my Sicilian roots. In Sicily and other Mediterranean cultures, meat is not usually the main dish. Rather, it serves as an ingredient in other dishes, and is usually eaten only on special occasions. My cousin, Filippo, the butcher, sums it up succinctly, saying, in his deep Sicilian dialect, “With a little meat, you can feed a feast.”

For recipes, maps, interviews with farmers and more, visit: www.wheretomeatinnyc.wordpress.com

Seven new documentaries about the sustainable food movement were previewed last night at the “Hungry Filmmakers” festival, a showcase for the burgeoning crop of films on farming. The recurring theme in all of them: no farms, no food, no future.

One documentary, “What is Organic About Organic?” directed and produced by Shelly Rogers, was highlighted at the event at Anthology Film Archives, along with excerpts of the six others.

While a grad student at New York University, Shelly Rogers took a class on socially relevant documentary filmmaking. For the final project, she produced a fifteen-minute exploratory film about the obstacles facing organic farmers. Although Rogers, a native of rural East Tennessee, had no prior connection to the growing grassroots revolution against conventional farming, she felt “a responsibility to the farmers,” to let their stories be told, not wanting to “let them down.” So she got a grant, raised funds and drove a small crew around the country to produce a full-length version of her project. In the process, she became an advocate in her own right for a healthier and environmentally friendly food system.

Four years after undertaking the project, Rogers’ film is near completion and ready to hit the film festivals. “What’s Organic About Organic?” travels from farm fields to government meetings to industry trade shows, to highlight the negative effects of conventional agriculture and to explain why buying organic food is not only a personal choice but also a social responsibility. Moreover, the film illustrates that our health and the health of the planet are interrelated.

Organizers of the sold-old event include Ms. Rogers and Jimmy Carbone, the owner of an East Village eatery and bar, Jimmy’s No. 43, which supports the sustainable food community. Cathy Erway, author of the well-known blog, “Not Eating Out in New York,” curated the films, and Anna Lappé, a best-selling author of works on sustainability and food politics, moderated a panel discussion. The audience had an opportunity to continue the conversation and mingle with filmmakers at an after party hosted at a jam-packed Jimmy’s No. 43, where local food producers presented an array of gratuitous local delicacies.

Documentaries about the food industry are coming out in groves, which is why the organizers have already scheduled another Hungry Filmmakers event to take place on 23 February 2010. Mascha Poppenk, a co-producer of another of the event’s featured films, “Grown in Detroit,” looks upon the onslaught of food industry related films as a way to spread the word about the grassroots movement. She says, “what’s great about documentaries is there’s no competition, we are all helping each other.”

For most of the filmmakers present, these films are their first attempt at filmmaking as advocacy for the food movement. However, one of the films, “Big River,” produced by Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, is a sequel to the filmmakers’ 2006 documentary, “King Corn,” which explores the magnitude of health problems that result from the American corn industry. “Big River” takes the viewer on a journey down the Mississippi River, from the American heartland to the Gulf of Mexico to trace the damaging effects of corn production on our water system and on the environment as a whole, aspects of the industry that the first film did not touch upon.

“Big River” co-producer, Ian Cheney, says “often documentary filmmakers blow all their energy on the filmmaking process,” and are unable to find the energy to promote their films for advocacy.

Just Food, a New York based not-for-profit organization, which connects local farmers and urban dwellers, is in the planning stage for using these and other food related films as “visual advocacy” in the near future, says Jacquie Berger, Just Food’s Executive Director.

A big challenge that the filmmakers face is getting these films out of the circle of people who are already aware of these issues. Rogers says “reaching an audience outside of the obvious choir is a challenge that we all face in this circle, not just filmmakers.” These food movement events bring out “the same people over and over,” says Rogers, adding “while it’s great to see old friends,” in order for the films to make a difference, she is “relying on the choir to spread the word.”

Films screened at the “Hungry Filmmakers” event include:

“What’s Organic About Organic?”

By Shelley Rogers

“Big River” and “Truck Farm”

By Curt Ellis & Ian Cheney

“The Greenhorns”

By Severine von Tscarner Fleming

“Grown in Detroit”

By Manfred & Mascha Poppenk

“Faces From the New Farm”

By Liz Thylander, Kat Shiffler & Lara Sheets

[As yet untitled film on climate change and the food system]

By Sara Grady

The next Hungry Filmmakers is scheduled to take place on 23 February 2010.

Check the “Hungry Filmmakers” blog for more info on upcoming events and links to filmmakers websites:

http://hungryfilmmakers.blogspot.com/

Councilman James Gennaro enjoys a Newtown Pippin on the steps of city hall.

As City Councilman James Gennaro took to the microphone at a crowded public hearing last month to argue against natural gas drilling near New York’s upstate water reservoirs, the rowdy auditorium that had just mauled the deputy mayor during his remarks grew quiet. This man they let speak.

The tall, salt-and-pepper-haired Queens native proceeded to read a statement off a printed script, eyeing every word studiously through a pair of thick spectacles he put on just for the occasion.

Shortly after he finished speaking, Gennaro took a seat on a bench in the lobby. There, in between conversations with supporters and journalists, he pored over the speech, marked up with blue ink, and pondered aloud what he could have done better. “What word couldn’t I say?” he thought out loud. “I had to make a change on the fly. ‘Ironic’ worked. ‘Iconic’ was a no go,” he added, concluding: “I did ok.”

The younger James Gennaro might well have disagreed. Both he and his older brother John suffered from a stuttering problem growing up. And though John will freely admit that Jim’s stuttering was much worse, his little brother has nonetheless thrived in a career where public speaking is as important to him as a hammer to a carpenter or a violin to a violinist.

Now in his seventh year as the chairman of the New York City Council Environmental Protection Committee, Gennaro has become an outspoken champion of some of New York’s most important environmental initiatives, including the 2007 act that mandated a 30 percent reduction in the city’s carbon footprint by 2030. He’s done so by campaigning long and hard both in the legislative chambers as well as in the streets to make sure he got every vote he needed. He’s made countless speeches and given innumerable interviews, in each one trying to balance his concern over the patterns of his speech with the passion he feels for the environment.

He hasn’t always succeeded, but the competitive spirit has helped him overcome numerous obstacles just as he has managed to tame his speaking impediment. It’s also landed him in some trouble and caused some who know the geologist-by-training to question his temperament.

Gennaro says he inherrited his competitive nature from his father Lou – a jeweler by trade who also loved baseball and once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He used to play the game with his sons on family outings up in the Catskills. “We were playing for blood. It was really, really serious,” Gennaro recalls. “To go back to the dugout and face him, that was not pretty.”

Renee Lobo, a Queens community activist who challenged him for his seat in 2005, considers him a tough, all-or-nothing competitor. “We sparred,” she says. When she called to congratulate him after losing the primary, she says he asked her, “’How dare you run against me?’”

“I definitely thought he had anger issues at the time,” Lobo recalls. “I think down the road he learned how to manage his anger.”

Lobo says she admires Gennaro’s environmental record and now sees him as a friend and ally. After a long post-election silence, the two met again at a city council hearing in 2008. Lobo then suffered a broken leg while Gennaro was hobbled by a broken ankle. Gennaro recognized her and initiated some small-talk over their injuries, she recalls, and the two bonded and have been on good terms ever since. Lobo even supported him in his ultimately unsuccessful bid to unseat State Senator Frank Padavan (R-Queens), who’s held the 11th senate district seat since before Gennaro was a freshman geology major at Stony Brook University in 1975. The race triggered a recount since only a few hundred votes separated the two men.

“It was courageous to go up against someone like that. And to get that close was nutty,” says his brother John. He credits the near-win to his brother’s all-or-nothing attitude: “He has no ‘plan B.’ He just plans on winning.”

In previous campaigns, his competitive attitude ignited controversy. In 2007 the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board fined Gennaro $2,000 because an aide who volunteered for his 2003 re-election campaign used his government office computer, printer, and paper for the campaign, the board said. Gennaro took responsibility for not having known about it. “The lesson learned is that I am responsible and accountable for everything and anything my people do. The buck stops with me no matter what. This episode etched that credo into my bone marrow,” he wrote in an email.

In the legislative chamber, Gennaro can also be a formidable competitor, doing everything he can to get serious consideration for his bills – no matter how big or small. On a rainy Monday morning in November, for example, he called a news conference to hand out dozens of Newtown Pippins, sour green apples native to Queens, as an effort to urge city council members to pass his resolution naming Pippins the official apple of the “Big Apple.” Boxes of apple muffins destined for the city council also quietly piled up, prompting a reporter to ask whether he is attempting to sweet-talk his colleagues into backing the bill. Gennaro smiled, bit an apple and demurred. But he stuttered a bit when asked why the seemingly innocuous proposition hasn’t passed city hall months after being introduced.

“You know, it’s just there’s a lot of very important business that the city council has to do and something like this is something that is never going to be, you know, [a] front-burner issue,” he answered.

Among the “front-burner” issues was a proposal before City Hall this year to force building owners in New York City to audit and re-fit their buildings for energy efficiency. Also sponsored by Gennaro, the bill faced intense opposition from the city’s real estate industry, which has argued that the measure would force them to make expensive upgrades but not realise any of their benefits. “You want the entity that bears the cost to get the benefit. And in some cases that just wasn’t the case and that’s just patently unfair and we’re not going to pass a bill that’s not fair,” says Gennaro. Ultimately, he stood next to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at a City Hall press conference triumphantly announcing the bill’s passage. But it ostensibly lacked the initial re-fit language.

Despite these setbacks, Gennaro has had more than his fair share of legislative successes. He chuckles as he points out he needs an intern just to compile his record, which includes committing the city to green building principles, the 2030 carbon reduction targets and standing firm against any encroachments on New York’s upstate water supply.

“He really has been in many ways the conscience of the city council on a broad array of environmental issues,” says Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has known Gennaro for 20 years. Most notably, says Goldstein, “he’s really been the ‘Paul Revere’ of drinking water protection in New York.”

The sentiment was echoed by some of those who attended the public hearing at which he spoke last month. As he sat on the bench outside the auditorium, a visitor from West Virginia, a former commissioner of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, and one of Goldstein’s colleagues from the Natural Resources Defense Council all paid Gennaro a visit to thank him for protecting the city’s water resources.

He hesitated over a word here or there. But he did not need a script to keep the lively conversation going well after other city council members had already left.

Carla Gould studies pigeons near Central Park.

On a busy corner of Central Park, shivering tourists clench their overcoats and frantically hail taxis. Seemingly impervious to the cold and commotion, environmentalist Carla Gould sits alone on a bench, her eyes fixed on a cluster of pigeons at the foot of a nearby statue. She’s motionless except for the occasional scribble on her notepad.

Except for a Canadian accent, the 30-year-old is effortlessly New York chic—tall and slim with dark hair and delicate features that show subtle traces of well-applied iridescent make-up—perhaps an unconscious tribute to her subject, the pigeon.

She has come here with one mission: to revitalize the pigeon’s reputation. New York City is her laboratory, and these so-called “rats with wings” are the focus of her thesis: “Re-contextualizing the Pigeon Through Space and Interaction.

Carla Gould

Ms. Gould is a visiting fellow at New York University’s xClinic, a research center that focuses on how health is affected by environmental factors, such as human interaction with pigeons. Instead of advocating pharmaceuticals, the clinic’s research emphasizes action plans – even ostensibly unpopular ones like Ms. Gould’s.

On leave from her undergraduate studies in Toronto, Ms. Gould finds the human-pigeon dynamic to be romantic, despite the bird’s reputation as a pest. “It’s a rich relationship that has been ignored,” she says with conviction.

The first step in her evangelistic action plan is “to change the public perception of the pigeon,” she says. Most people believe that guano, or pigeon excrement, carries disease. Gould strongly disagrees, so she’ll start her mission by “showing how much of a misconception this guano fear is.” In the clinic’s two-room office in Manhattan’s East Village, she has begun writing a handbook about the many virtues of guano, including its use as a fertilizer.

The second step is to inspire an attitude adjustment since many think the pigeon is a nuisance. “We haven’t learned how to properly cohabitate with them,” she says. But given two minutes, she says she can change skeptics’ minds and show that city life and nature are not mutually exclusive.

She usually begins with a story about the pigeon’s work as a revered messenger during World War I. Because of their innate ability to fly long distances, “carrier” pigeons were often dispatched to deliver military intelligence to base camps and were credited with saving lives. “I get teary-eyed when I talk about it,” she says.

She then segues to its journey to America. Early settlers brought pigeons as a sign of affluence and a delicacy to eat. “The story captivates people,” she says. “People will say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s incredible. They’re not just freeloading off my AC unit and shitting on my front door.’”

Natalie Jereminjenko, xClinic’s founder and Ms. Gould’s supervisor, is also pro-pigeon. “The pigeon is a critical tool to understanding urban health,” she says. The two paired up when Dr. Jereminjenko gave a speech at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where Ms. Gould is a student. Afterwards, Ms. Gould approached her and pitched her pigeon project, to which Dr. Jereminjenko responded with an invitation to work at the clinic.

Six months later, Ms. Gould moved into a crammed sublet a few blocks from the NYU campus. Her typical day may include her two-minute tutorials on the street, or testing pigeons’ food preferences (breadcrumbs trump French fries).

She’ll spend hours on some afternoons observing a flock of birds. Occasionally, it’ll be an impromptu session, as Chris Denda, her boyfriend, learned on a recent visit from Toronto. “We’ll be walking down the street and she’ll stop without telling me. I turn around and she’s ‘interacting’ with the birds—looking at them, ‘being’ with them,” he says. “I don’t think they even notice her. They probably think, ‘Oh, it’s Carla again.’”

The flock might not notice Ms. Gould because a component of her research involves pretending to be one of them. During a 30-minute “pigeon embodiment exercise,” Ms. Gould and her xClinic colleagues stood in a stairwell near the office, closed their eyes and opened their minds to what it would feel like to be a pigeon. They arched their backs and cocked their necks to impersonate a tail and beak. Extended arms became wings, shifting back and forth as if in flight. The exercise prompted giggles in the beginning, but soon the group fell silent. “We imagined how the legs would be positioned and how to walk accordingly. It was nuts because you’re growing a tail in this peaceful state,” Ms. Gould says.

“Channeling” pigeons is far afield from Ms. Gould’s initial career track. After weathering through academic probation in high school, she and her parents agreed vocational training suited her off-beat nature more so than the formal higher education route. She studied hair and make-up and got a job as a make-up artist on Canadian Idol. Six years later, the show-biz glamour had worn off and she decided to give higher education another shot, enrolling in an industrial design program at her art school in Ontario. This time, it stuck.

Ms. Gould concedes the pigeon is an unlikely muse. “A lot of people laughed, and I thought it was funny at first, too. But I was passionate about this story that was unfolding,” she reflects.

New York is one research stop on an itinerary she hopes will take her around the globe for her studies. She has created a survey designed to compare the pigeon-human interaction in Boston, Vancouver and Hawaii. The 20-point questionnaire will gather scientific data, such as pigeon population sizes and locations, plus photos and anecdotal evidence from her observations.

Surveys aside, the bigger picture is a harmonious human-pigeon living environment, says Ms. Gould. She envisions a scenario where air-conditioning window units are someday used as platforms for pigeon families, and apartment residents collect their guano to fertilize rooftop gardens.

While the goals are conceptual for now, the potential impact is considerable. “This is not just a playful little design project,” says Dr. Jereminjenko, Ms. Gould’s supervisor at the xClinic. “This has real implications to your health, to my health, everyone’s health.”

Her success may be hard to quantify, says her professor and advisor, Carl Hastrich. Ms. Gould’s objective is “not a tangible, sellable result,” he says. Her aim is to increase awareness, but “how do you know when you’ve created a dialogue that’s successful?” he asks. “How you measure success is an open-ended adventure.”

Ms. Gould is not the first pigeon advocate. She freely acknowledges that “a few people” have put pigeons on the map, citing two mainstream books called Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan and Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird Pigeon as required reading.

“I really want to be a part of what happens next,” she says.

Some of her future research is still on ice. Tucked away in her freezer are two birds—a woodpecker and sparrow—awaiting a dissection to compare its wing structure to the pigeons’.

Kelly knows his stuff when it comes to food safety, but moreover is an expert on interpreting the Department of Health’s code. Ambiguous and convoluted, the code can be confusing and open to multiple interpretations. Restaurant operators and chefs are required to take a weeklong certification class on food safety and avoiding violations, but they commonly feel in the dark when it comes to understanding the nature of the violations they receive. Kelly’s knowledge is often a lifesaver for his clients.

Eleven non-compensated physicians and health experts make up the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.  Appointed to six-year terms by the mayor, these board members run the show.  While its mission is to safeguard public health, it is no secret that the department has a history of corruption, its inspectors known for accepting restaurant owners’ bribes.

According to Kelly, bribery is no longer plaguing the system. Nowadays, it is restaurant owners who are suffering from the department’s unfair tactics. He notes that “Nine out of ten restaurants now get cited for the presence of vermin, but some of those restaurants don’t have rodent infestation.” Inspectors are known to move old refrigerators and stoves aside “to search for age-old mouse droppings.” These violations not only exact a financial toll on the restaurants, but, since violations are easily searchable online and discussed on popular food blogs, the bad publicity can severely affect restaurants’ flow of customers.

Kelly, not shy to voice his opinion on the department’s skewed politics, is adamant that “health inspections are not only protecting public health.” He says the department’s fines are “unfortunately just revenue-raisers” for the City, adding that inspectors are “equal to traffic cops.” The vagueness of the code allows inspectors and judges to interpret the law individually. Some judges consider while others are “under pressure from higher up to generate large fines,” says Kelly.

In a phone conversation with one of Kelly’s longest-running clients, Anne Kakoun, business manager of Le Bilbouquet said, “When I get frantic” after an inspection, “Mike calms me down and takes my worries away.” There is “no way,” she says, she would represent herself at a hearing without Kelly.

Set on the top floor of his Scarsdale, N.Y. ranch, Kelly’s no-frills office is far removed from the hustle and bustle of the Department of Health. Crowded with stacks of paperwork, cozy with its wood-paneled walls and vaulted ceiling, there’s just enough room to fit some desks and office chairs, enough space for Kelly, his assistant, Caren Benveniste, and the family dog, Charlotte.

Kelly’s amiable demeanor darkens only when discussing the questionable politics of the Department of Health, his otherwise distinctively pale face turning beet red. The politics frustrate him, especially when he sees his client’s restaurants get closed for “unfair reasons” such as for “failing to have a spring on the bathroom door or for cracks in their tiles,” while “restaurants full of really hazardous violations remain open.”

Kelly’s firm, which employs two full-time employees and four part-timers, represents close to 1,000 food establishments in the city, from university cafeterias to five-star restaurants, all of which find him strictly via word of mouth. Before starting his business, Kelly was a police officer, experience that provided him with the know-how for dealing with the City’s bureaucracy.

After a serious car accident forced his early retirement, Kelly dabbled in myriad business start-ups and studied accounting. It wasn’t until 1991, when a friend was opening Ferrara’s, a since-closed Upper East Side restaurant, and needed administrative help, that Kelly got involved with the Department of Health. After securing a health permit for Ferarra’s, he realized “Wow, this [process] is really easy!” He started obtaining licenses for other restaurants and, after intensive study of the intricate health code, began to represent businesses at health violation hearings and to consult business owners on how to implement food safety rules.

After building his business from scratch, one customer at a time, Kelly’s reputation is of utmost importance to him. He refuses to represent restaurateurs who neglect to clean up their kitchens. “I don’t waste time with restaurants not changing their style. In the end, it makes me look bad.”

Cenk Fikri, a restaurant consultant at such high-end venues as Gold Bar and Fresh, calls on Kelly’s services for nearly every restaurant he builds. Cenk prefers Kelly over others who do similar work because he knows “that the job will be done thoroughly.”

Kelly insists on training his staff to see things through his eyes. “Everyone is a reflection of me,” he says. Unable to service his client’s health department needs alone, Kelly hired Robert “Bobby” Callahan, a friend and former fellow police officer. Bobby now represents restaurants at hearings and obtains licenses, but it wasn’t until he sat in on over 300 hearings with Kelly that he was given this responsibility. Kelly taught Bobby that, when appearing before the judge, though there is “no set way” to argue the violations, “It’s better to say less than more.”

On a visit to the Department of Health tribunal on John Street with Bobby, a clerk flagged Bobby down among crowds of business owners to personally hand him a judgment for one of the day’s cases. A series of violations against a Manhattan taco restaurant were consolidated into a single violation, lowering the total amount of the fine, because Bobby argued that certain violations overlapped.  Kelly charges an average of $150 to represent a business; the fee is often absorbed by a significant reduction in fines that the restaurant would probably not receive without Kelly’s experience.

Despite Kelly’s exposure to countless stomach-churning kitchen conditions, he continues to frequent restaurants with his wife and teenage daughter. He is surprisingly not turned off by mice or roach infestation, but refuses to enter an establishment that has houseflies. (Not only do “the flies congregate to garbage and feces” and then land on our plates, he explains, but “they regurgitate on the food they eat,” contaminating much more than roaches, which are comparatively sanitary since they “lick themselves clean, just like cats.”)

Back in the office, Kelly’s phone rings incessantly with calls from frenzied restaurant owners. He pauses amid the noise to speculate a bit. Recently, Kelly has noticed that fewer and fewer of his clients are receiving violations from inspectors for sticking knives between equipment, a common violation. His eyes glow as he realizes that his influence might just be making New York’s food – and the people who eat it – safer, throughout the Big Apple.

The newly launched online “Sustainable Seafood Course,” a joint effort of Blue Ocean Institute and Chefs Collaborative, is geared toward, but not limited to, culinary professionals who want to make informed decisions when featuring seafood on their menus.

One sustainable option the course recommends is cooking with farm-raised mussels that grow in ocean water pens. Unlike other farmed species, mussels don’t need to be fed because they consume microorganisms, which they naturally filter from the water they grow in.

After completing the course, I recommend it to all seafood lovers. It is made up of seven sections and took me about three-and-a-half hours to finish. Skip the quizzes and videos of chefs talking, and it can be completed in under two hours.

You won’t learn everything there is to know about marine life, but you will finish the course with a basic knowledge of sustainable seafood that can help you make ocean-friendly choices at your local fish market.

To access the course, follow the link at http://www.oceanfriendlychefs.org/