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[Click the "Play" button to hear Gene Baur]

Editor's note: Animal activist/author Gene Baur is coming to Telluride for Mountainfilm's Moving Mountains Symposium about food.  Listen to his podcast to learn more about his Farm Sanctuary and how the one-time McDonald's talking head wound up rescuing and providing refuge for farm animals.

Gene-1 Fido au gratin? Perish the thought. For activist/author Gene Baur of the Farm Sanctuary, dining on Babe is no different.

The cover of his best-seller, "Farm Sanctuary, Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food" says it all: there's Babe, alive and well. On the back cover, you will find an image of The Man cuddling up to a Holstein. The endorsement by Dr. Jane Goodall (the gorilla lady) is the final nail in the coffin: "Filled with hope, this book is written for all who strive for a more compassionate world. I highly recommend it." Who doesn't want to be considered compassionate, especially when it comes to our four-legged friends? The package is enough to make a person swear off bacon cheeseburgers forever.  And that's Gene's point.

19 May, 2009 /

[Editor's note: Click the "play" button to listen to Telluride Mountainfilm guest Chef Ann Cooper talk about why she thinks the National School Lunch Program needs major tweaking and what she and others are doing to address the challenge.]

Chef_ann_aboutphoto What's wrong with this picture?

While legions of parents are obsessing about whether their offspring are getting enough vitamins or consuming too much sugar and salt, as they are trying in growing numbers to encourage healthy eating habits, at school millions of kids are consuming French fries, processed chicken nuggets and syrupy fruit salad, standard fare on the average commodity-driven lunch menu.

According to Chef Ann Cooper, aka  "Renegade Lunch Lady," the National School Lunch Program is an antique – it was launched in 1946 as a public safety net – in dire need of recycling. She contends  we won't have much hope for future generations of healthy kids unless we begin teaching them what good food really is.

16 May, 2009 /

[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with Kimberly Rose] The adjective "hairy" has two distinct meanings. Telluride locals seek out hairy moments in the mountains: hazardous and frightening are turn ons. Hairy also means "having or covered with,...

13 May, 2009 /

Spring may be my favorite time of the year in Telluride, though you may want to check with me on this in late September. In any case, this morning was Sus' and my first hike with Gina the Dog since we returned from our off-season...

13 May, 2009 /

Listing41 As anxious as we were to get home to Telluride, we dawdled leaving the Hastings' home in Indianapolis. It was just too pleasant to rush out. So we had a short drive on Saturday and decided to stop for the night in Kansas City. We often do not make hard plans in our travels, and, true to form, we had no reservations when we arrived. That flexibility has occasionally meant we had to accept less than we had hoped, but not this time.

We found the Q Hotel and Spa, which bills itself "Kansas City's 'Green Hotel'" and found ourselves surrounded with quiet luxury and a staff who, to a person, could not do enough for us. Susan spent quite a while with the reception folks, and came up with what turned out to be a great dinner reservation.

11 May, 2009 /

DSC_2264.cover.6x4 copy Lots of things were broken in the early 1990s: the economy and my arm. The country turned to the Man from Hope to fix the economic downturn. (Clinton did.) To fix the arm, the result of a horseback riding accident, I turned to a part-time Telluride local, world renowned hand and arm surgeon Dr. Hill Hastings of the Indiana Hand Center/Shoulder & Elbow Institute, our Indianapolis connection.

Meeting HIll was yet another in the endless variations on the theme of six degrees of separation: a friend of a friend, he happened to be in residence at his Telluride Ski Ranches home just three weeks before I was scheduled for surgery in New York. The man's genius was apparent after our first meeting: he had created architectural drawings of my arm, complete with moving parts to illustrate what needed to happen. He generously offered to participate in a conference call with my New York doc. Clint and I decided to jump ship and have him do the surgery.

10 May, 2009 /

[Press the "Play" button to hear Telluride's ChefBud ]

ChefBud's new program, Books and Cooks, premieres at Wilkinson Public Library at noon, Tuesday, May 5.

IMG_5521smaller You won't find Telluride's Bud Thomas stranded on some high horse when it comes to preparing food. The talented young chef believes in keeping it fresh and keeping it simple.

5-5 BooksCooksPoster A McKinsey study of the last recession (1990-1991) found companies that remained market leaders or became serious contenders were the ones that invested in R & D and stayed in the public eye. ChefBud's response to the current downturn was to turn up the heat on a new venture. He teamed up with web wonk Dennis Lankes of TellurideWorldWide.Com to market himself and his business by creating a live cooking show, chefbud.com, now with viewers from London to the Far East.

Programs for chefbud.com are shot Wednesday at 2 p.m. at venues around town. In March, Bud and his wife Jenna, a talented amateur chef, were cooking up peanut butter and jelly crepes for a rapt group of local first-graders in the kid's section of the Wilkinson Public Library, when program director Scott Doser approached with another one of his great ideas.

03 May, 2009 /

IMGP0280 In Germantown, New York, we visited friends Jane Taylor and Frederic Ohringer, newly transplanted Telluride locals. Their new home is a newly renovated farmhouse from the 1800s. Their no-nonsense aesthetic features white walls and white floors that act as a giant canvas brightened for the whimsical iconography of their lives. The colorful, minimialist whole amounts to a beautifully executed inside joke between two artists – she a painter; he, a photograher-turned- farmer,  have almost always bucked prevailing trends with aplomb and a wink.

IMGP0285 In sharp contrast to the tasteful restraint of our friends' home, on a hilltop above the nearby town of Hudson sits the Persian inspired mansion of American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. It is one of those grand houses with a name: Olana. The best we can say about the place is that the views of the Hudson River and the Catskills are magnificent. Olana itself is chockablock with the kind of maximalist flourishes and really bad art (faux old masters Church purchased in Italy to wow his dinner guests) that are especially out of favor now in this economic meltdown.

It was on to Hackensack, New Jersey to visit my parents, where we can sit on their balcony and look out at Manhattan like kids hanging over a  fence, mouths watering as they witness a BBQ in their neighbor's backyard.

01 May, 2009 /

IMG_0346 After a brief stop at home in Telluride after our visits to West Coast family, Sus and I left on the next phase of our Spring travels on Friday, 17 April. For those of you who were watching Colorado weather during that time, you know it probably wasn't the most auspicious departure date. But, ever optimistic, we left anyway.

The webcams on Monarch Pass looked nasty, so we chose to go on I-70. That looked like a good decision until just short of Vail. With an electronic sign showing that Vail Pass was closed, we turned off at Minturn, drove in rain/snow mix for a few miles, then in heavy snow. At Leadville, we found that Fremont Pass was closed, and learned that Denver was getting hammered. We had planned to spend the night with friends in Denver- oops!, change in plan. A welcome beer (or two) and a burger at Rosie's in Leadville, then a little time to make a new plan, and time for bed.

27 April, 2009 /

(editor's note: Quiet offseason in Telluride? Let's shake things a bit with Dr. Susannah Smith's next installment of Shrink Rap: Sex and Marriage.)

by Dr. Susannah Smith

Most comedy routines eventually target marriage and sex.  The joke usually goes like this: if you want a good sexual relationship, don’t get married. The bare naked truth is we all know married couples who complain  they never have sex, and one partner who wants more sex than the other. So, what’s going on?
The human sexual response is a complex one, especially when love and intimacy enters the equation. Erica Jong wrote that, for many, including the heroine of Fear of Flying, it is easier to have sex with someone we barely know than with our own mate.  The sexual response requires a degree of abandon and emotional freedom that familiarity often belies: with our mates, unresolved emotional issues build walls.

Women in particular have been raised to believe having sex when feeling distant from their spouses puts them in the position of being untrue to themselves, compromised, or forced.  Women (not always – sometimes it is the male in a relationship) believe that they must be communicating and emotionally close for sexual intimacy to feel appropriate and good.

26 April, 2009 /