Thursday, December 11, 2003

Annual holiday dinner features writer Michael Pollan

Please join your fellow NCSWAns and their guests on December 11 for our annual holiday dinner. We have lined up one of the country's hottest science writers to speak to us at an elegant venue in downtown San Francisco. The food will be dynamite, NCSWA is kicking in significant funding to make it affordable, and with the largest crowd of the year expected, this will be a great chance to connect with colleagues old and new -- including writers from other Bay Area professional organizations. This is the one NCSWA event you won't want to miss, so be sure to reserve your spot before Thanksgiving.

The festivities start at 6 p.m. at Yank Sing Restaurant, one of the city's best Chinese restaurants. Here are the evening's details:

Our speaker, Michael Pollan, is a journalist, best-selling author, and teaches science writing at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Pollan finds science stories that have been hiding right under our collective noses. One trademark of a Pollan story is an attempt to answer a simple question – when we eat beef, what are we eating? – and the discovery that our way of life has surprising, hidden implications.

In a seminal piece of journalism for the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Pollan raised a steer, following it from birth through the feedlot to slaughter. A man who likes his beef, Pollan wanted to find out how a steak is produced by the modern factory farm. What he discovered – the dismaying bounty of oil necessary to make fertilizer to grow corn feed, the role of antibiotics in sustaining a grass-eating ruminant so that it can digest corn, and the extensive environmental damage caused by runoff from cattle operations – was eye-opening. So much so that the article has had a still growing ripple effect since its March 2002 publication. When you notice the sudden availability of "grass-fed beef" at your meat market or on your restaurant menu, think Michael Pollan.

A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Pollan is a former executive editor of Harper's Magazine. Awards for his work include the Borders Original Voice Award for the best non-fiction of 2001 for "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World," the John Burroughs prize for the best natural history essay in 1997, and the Reuters-World Conservation Union Global Award for Environmental Journalism for reporting about genetic engineering.

The John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Journalism at UC Berkeley, Pollan has said that science journalism today is where political journalism was before Watergate - "not nearly independent or investigative enough, and too reliant on scientists and their journals to determine what constitutes 'news' in the field."

OTHER FESTIVITIES
It wouldn't be a NCSWA holiday affair without a few treats. Here's what we have in mind:

• Our annual door-prize giveaway, with fun science-related gifts from the Exploratorium and other Bay Area institutions.
• The first NCSWA Book Exchange Table. Would you like to lessen the load on that science bookshelf at home? Did you receive books to review and didn't quite get around to it? Bring one or two science books for a first-come, first-serve exchange.
• Mingle with new members of NCSWA and invited guests from the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and national reporters covering the American Geophysical Union meeting.

DINNER:
Yank Sing Restaurant, One Rincon Center, 101 Spear St. (at Mission), San Francisco
(415-957-9300)

Thursday, Dec. 11
6:00 to 7:30 p.m. schmoozing
7:30 dinner
8:30 Michael Pollan talk, with the evening wrapping up by 10 p.m.

Yank Sing is one of San Francisco's most popular deem sum restaurants, ranked by the San Francisco Chronicle among the Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants and by USA Today as one of the ten best places to ring in the Chinese New Year. We're taking over their Rincon Center restaurant for a Chinese banquet that includes traditional deem sum plus classic Chinese entrees. The buffet - a $40 spread we're subsidizing to lower member costs to $25 - includes meat, fish and vegetarian dishes:

Deem sum:
Goldfish shaped shrimp dumpling
Chicken and mushroom siu mye
Mushroom fun gwor
Petite spring rolls
Potstickers
Phoenix tail prawn

Entrees:
Chicken with scallion ginger
Mixed seasonal vegetable
Mongolian beef
Vegetarian chow mein
Chicken fried rice

Desserts:
Egg custard tart
Sesame ball

Tea (no coffee)

DIRECTIONS
Yank Sing's Rincon Center restaurant is in San Francisco's South of Market area, an easy walk from the Embarcadero BART station. If you are driving, check out Yank Sing's Web site for directions and a map.

PARKING
Yank Sing offers free validated parking in the Rincon Center garage. The garage entrance is on Spear St., midway between Mission and Howard Streets. Bring your ticket into the restaurant and ask a waiter to validate it for you.

COST
NCSWA members are $25. Members (including student members) may bring one guest at the price of $25. Additional guests pay the non-member price of $35. Student members are $20. And non-members are $35.

Mail your check, made out to "NCSWA," by Dec. 1 to:

Bob Sanders
1512 Holly St.
Berkeley, CA 94703

CARPOOLING
For those interested in carpooling to the dinner, Karen Street again will play transportation matchmaker, matching up those of you wanting a ride with those who are driving.

Contact her at karen_street@sbcglobal.net. She will mail out information as she receives it. Many thanks to all those who have offered rides in the past, enabling people to attend.