The following article summarizes the original event which is listed below the summary.
Integrating traditional knowledge with the latest science for ensuring healthy foods and sustainable farming
UMRA’s September 2025 Forum featured Beth Dooley, award-winning food writer, columnist, prolific cookbook author, and emerging voice for agricultural sustainability. She shared her own journey in thinking about food, drawing from her forthcoming book, In Summer’s Kitchen. Her focus has evolved over time, as she has integrated traditional knowledge—often from indigenous communities—with the latest science for ensuring healthy foods and sustainable farming.
Dooley highlighted her work with the University’s Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (where she held an endowed chair) and the Forever Green Initiative, bringing together diverse expertise to address the complex systems and incentives in food production. She underscored the urgency for our regional farmlands, damaged by significant loss of topsoil washed down the Mississippi River.
Regenerative farm practices seek to redress the negative impacts of corporate agriculture through investments in new crops and practices that are both restorative and profitable. Dooley’s 2021 cookbook, The Perennial Kitchen, provides a useful guide to crops that the Forever Green Initiative is developing with Minnesota farmers, as well as organizations that advance sustainable practices.
Dooley’s presentation and the subsequent question and answer session surfaced the public interest in addressing disincentives for new agricultural practices (for example, farm subsidies for specific crops) and realigning our food delivery systems to support a more sustainable future. Through Dooley’s writing and educational programs, she is also promoting efforts to address “food sovereignty”—helping communities facing food insecurity to gain control over their food sources through projects such as urban gardens.
The September forum also offered attendees an opportunity to engage in table conversations about the forum topic, facilitated by UMRA members. Nearly half of the attendees participated, with positive response. The UMRA Program Committee will evaluate this new option for engagement, including the potential for conversation tables at forums in spring 2026.
The forum presentation and lively table conversations reflected a hunger to know about sustainable food systems. Dooley drove home an important message: We can all make a difference through our choices and sources of foods.
—Wendy Pradt Lougee, UMRA Program Committee
Observations on our food system … and why cooking matters!
Tue, September 30, 2025, at 11am
Beth Dooley
Cookbook author and columnist
Minnesota Star Tribune
Midland Hills Country Club
2001 Fulham Street
Roseville, MN 55113
If you have watched the musical Oliver! on stage or screen, you will recall the song “Food, Glorious Food.” The title says it all: food is one of the essentials of our lives, providing necessary fuel, nutrition, and often critical social connection. But before food reaches our tables, a large and complex chain of events unfolds, from origins in agriculture to distribution markets and, finally, our kitchens.
UMRA’s luncheon forum on Tuesday, September 30, is all about food. The program will feature Beth Dooley, James Beard Award-winning food writer, Minnesota Star Tribune columnist, and prolific cookbook author. Her association with the University has included an endowed chair at the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, and teaching cooking classes at the Arboretum.
Dooley’s cookbooks are a staple for many, and The Perennial Kitchen: Simple Recipes for a Healthy Future, published in 2021 by University of Minnesota Press, goes beyond recipes to explore the origins and sourcing of food.
A writer in the kitchen
This UMRA forum will tap Dooley’s rich experiences in a program entitled “A writer in the kitchen: Personal and professional observations of our local, sustainable, regenerative food system … and why cooking matters!”
New this fall
This forum will include a pilot opportunity to engage UMRA members in focused discussion over lunch, prior to the program, around the topic of our food systems. Tables designated for discussion instead of simply casual conversation will be identified, and members can elect to join one of these discussion tables when they register.
Signups for this event are through the UMRA Member Portal. Be sure to create your login (if you haven’t already) before you try to sign up for this event. Don’t have the instructions? Look for an email from [email protected]. It may have gone to your spam folder.
Register online. Send questions on registration/cancellations to the reservationist. Saturday, September 20 is the last day to register.
Please let us know if your plans change and you are unable to attend. Cancellations can be done in your online Profile, at UMRA Member Portal > My Profile > My event registrations.
Join us for a nourishing conversation, lunch, and presentation.
—Wendy Pradt Lougee, UMRA Program Committee