Philip Ackerman-Leist, author of Rebuilding the Foodshed and Up Tunket Road , is a professor at Green Mountain College, where he established the college's farm and sustainable agriculture curriculum and is director of the Green Mountain College Farm & Food Project. He also founded and directs the college's Masters in Sustainable Food Systems (MSFS), the nation's first online graduate program in food systems, featuring applied comparative research of students' home bioregions. He and his wife, Erin, farmed in the South Tirol region of the Alps and North Carolina before beginning their sixteen-year homesteading and farming venture in Pawlet, Vermont. With more than two decades of "field… experience" working on farms, in the classroom, and with regional food systems collaborators, Philip's work is focused on examining and reshaping local and regional food systems from the ground up.
Deborah Madison grew up in Davis, California and later attended the University of California. Madison worked in the kitchen at the Zen Center in San Francisco then left to cook at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Later, she returned to Zen Center to become the first chef at The Greens in Fort Mason. Madison has contributed articles to Saveur, Fine Cooking, Gourmet, Eating Well, and the Time-Life Cookbook Series. She has written "The Greens Cookbook" and "The Savory Way," which won the Cookbook of the Year Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Madison has also received the M. F. K. Fisher Mid-Career Award.