During the third week of June I got a call from my friends at City Harvest (see: https://muckville.com/2013/12/02/city-harvest-once-again/ and https://muckville.com/2013/10/05/city-harvest/). It seems the BBC was interested in doing a series on food waste and the various solutions to that very large and important problem. My friend at City Harvest asked if I would like to be interviewed for the story.

As you probably guessed, they didn’t have to twist my arm.

I had been on BBC Radio before (see: https://muckville.com/2014/01/11/a-tour-for-princeton-students-and-a-little-bit-of-family-history-about-my-great-grandparents-frank-julia-pawelski/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p013hg1c … fast forward to the 26:30 mark to hear the segment. I speak about 6 minutes or so after the story starts) but this would be a first time on BBC television. An hour or so after City Harvest called me the BBC producer, based out of their NYC offices, called me. her name is Gianna Palmer. After I immediately agreed to be interviewed we went back and forth on dates (based on their shooting schedule, my farm schedule, and the weather) and agreed on June 25th.

Prior to the interview I sent her a wealth of materials (okay, I probably, as usual, overwhelmed her, lol) on food recovery and farming information, including the link to my Farmroot website and my proposal (based on an existing City Harvest program) to connect fresh vegetable and fruit farmers to food recovery programs and food insecure people, called the “Farmer to Food Pantry Block Grant Program” (see: http://www.farmroot.org/farmroot_issues.html).

Fortunately the weather was quite nice the day they came! They arrived a bit later than scheduled (missed their exit off the NYS Thruway) but ended up being on the farm for about 3 hours. The correspondent was business reporter Michelle Fleury (see: https://twitter.com/BizFleury) and I have to see Michelle, Gianna and cinematographer Andrew were 3 of the most pleasant and nicest people to interview me (not that the myriad of others that have are otherwise, lol). It was just an overall fun experience. Caleb, who is working on the farm this summer, took a ton of pictures and below you can see them all.

What was also interesting was the fact that BBC Radio quite often uses material from tv pieces for stories as well. So, the tv crews will frequently record additional material for radio in case they want to do a story. In this instance they did want to do a story and an audio version of the piece ran on BBC radio (link below). So now I have been on BBC radio 3 times!

After the interview with me they head to rush down to Union Square Market to interview my friend Rory Treat from City Harvest. As they were interviewing me though I told them all about the world famous Quaker Creek Store (see: http://www.quakercreekstore.com) which is literally right next door to me. They were beyond intrigued. Well … before they left they asked about it and I drove them there and introduced them to my friends who own and operate it. I thought they were going to maybe order some of their world class smoked Polish Kielbasy vacuum sealed to go. But instead they wanted some of the farmer’s cheese pirogues with some fried onions and they proceeded to sit down and each enjoy a plate right then and there! That was awesome!

This link takes you to the BBC website which more fully describes the piece on food waste I was in and contains some text of things I said which did not actually air:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28092034

This link is just for the teaser for the story (it actually has an alternate standup to what actually aired):

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28097912

Here is the link for the full story that aired on the BBC in the UK and internationally that I uploaded to YouTube:

Here is the link for the version of the same story as it aired over BBC America:

here is the link for the audio version of the story that aired on BBC World Business Report (fast forward to the 18:15 point).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p021g1rj

Below are the pics! Enjoy!