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Up on the Mountain, Olivier Matthon’s 2021 award-winning documentary, follows Southeast Asian refugees, Latino immigrants, and rural Americans on a year-round migration to harvest wild mushrooms in the American west. Working on foot in public forests, mushroom picking is an accessible path to self-employment. But despite evidence of the sustainability of the harvest, the workers who supply the restaurants of Europe, Japan, and North America are repeatedly denied access to public lands. In the observational documentary tradition, Up on the Mountain exposes race and class inequities in natural resources policies as well as the resourcefulness of disenfranchised communities.
This event will feature a virtual viewing of the documentary prior to the event and an online panel discussion on November 16th, from 6-8 pm, US eastern time.
Registrants will receive a link to view the 99-minute film up to seven days before the event. The online panel discussion on November 16th will feature director Olivier Matthon, Temptress Truffles founder Elan Hagens, and Oregon State University faculty Dr. Eric Jones. The panel is moderated by Fa-Tai Shieh, faculty member in the Food Studies Program at The New School.
Speakers and their full bios listed below.
The event is curated and moderated by Food Studies faculty member Fa-Tai Shieh and Dr. Kristin Reynolds, Chair of Food Studies in the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students within the Schools for Public Engagement at The New School. This event is part of the Food Studies’ “Food, Foraging, and Social Justice” 2023-24 series and co-sponsored by the Tishman Environment and Design Center.
Presented by the Bachelor's Program for Adults and Transfer Students at the Schools of Public Engagement.
By joining this online event, you will be prompted to accept Zoom Terms of Service. If the session is recorded, you acknowledge that by participating, your name, phone number, and profile picture might be visible to the public. You can customize your personal information when creating your Zoom account. The New School may use any recorded material from the event.
The New School’s Bachelor's Program for Adults and Transfer Students reflects the goal of lifelong higher learning articulated by the founders of The New School in 1919. In 1943, The New School began offering a bachelor's degree program for adults to address the educational needs of returning WWII veterans. Today, we continue to dedicate ourselves to that mission in a program that offers exceptional services and an innovative curriculum to nearly 1,000 adult students in New York City and online.
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Olivier Matthon (film director) is a commercial mushroom picker who graduated with a B.A. in Ethnography, Political Ecology, and Nonfiction Writing from the Evergreen State College. His work has been published by Pioneers Press, the UTNE Reader, and High Country News Magazine. He is the director, cinematographer, and editor of Up on the Mountain. He is also the author of Under the Radar: Notes from the Wild Mushroom Trade. He has been picking mushrooms commercially with migrant pickers since 2012. Originally from Québec, he now lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Elan Hagens is a native Oregonian and the founder of Temptress Truffles. Temptress Truffles is all about wild foraging, wildcrafting and connecting people to the outdoors. Elan has served as a vendor at local farmers markets selling her delicious wild harvested edibles and truffle products, while showing the community the many faces of where our wild food comes from. She also teaches classes that connect mushroom foraging to food justice and nature crafting.
Dr. Eric Jones has led many interdisciplinary regional, national, and international research projects. He has worked on wild fungi harvesting sustainability for 30 years and more recently started experiments with cultivating edible mushrooms on Pacific Northwest hardwoods. He is Professor of Practice and Instructor in Oregon State University’s Department of Forest, Ecosystems, and Society, where he teaches a variety of courses on the human dimensions of natural resource use and management including non timber forest products, sustainable natural resource management, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in natural resource management.
Fa-Tai Shieh is a part-time faculty member in the Food Studies program at The New School. He is currently teaching Munching on Mushrooms - Meals, Medicine and Magic. Fa-Tai also works with the City of New York as a Food Procurement Director and sources food for various government agencies including the Department of Corrections and NYPD. He is also the host of a podcast called Budding Taste, which explores food and nutrition from a cultural, historial and culinary perspective.
