Thanks so much for your interest in Ripe for the Picking. Our lunch tickets are sold out, but please do join us at Robertson Hall on Friday, Feb 23. We ask that you first sign in at our lobby table, then you are welcome to take any available seat; we will also have a simulcast downstairs for our overflow crowd.

Our conference, sponsored by Princeton Studies Food, WWS-STEP, the Keller Center, Career Services, Princeton Environmental Institute, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and Anthropology, is a day of solutions-oriented discussions on how to repurpose wasted resources in our food/ag system to deliciously nourish ourselves while protecting our Earth and its finite resources.

Panel discussions will explore the dire consequences of wasted food, the vital importance of quality on the plate, efforts to extend shelf life of produce, the compost at the end of the EPA Food Recovery Hierarchy, the way forward for an artisan cheesemaker and his spring piglets, practicing restoration agriculture with a young apple orchard and mushroom spores, and repurposing and honoring human capital throughout in an effort to transform the linear system to circular.

Morning panelists will first examine ways to measure and reduce the quantities of wasted resources, then will discuss and debate solutions and innovations in place and on the horizon, in government, in the supply chain and in the lab. Audience Q&A will follow.

We will wrap up as we have in years past, with a reception at the e-Hub on Chambers Street, thanks to that wonderful partnership with those there and with the Keller Center and Career Services.

The conference is open to all.