Inkberry Books: July 31st at 7:00 PM

Through storytelling from decades of research and field work at Colorado State University, Ecologist Mark Easter's award-winning capstone work, The Blue Plate: A Food Lover's Guide to Climate Chaos, offers a detailed picture of the climate impact of the foods you love, with concrete, simple approaches to reducing, and even erasing, those impacts. The book's rich, accessible writing elevated The Blue Plate to become a 2025 James Beard and Colorado Book Award finalist, and an IMDB Gold Medal Winner.
Organized by the ingredients of a typical dinner party, including seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and fruit pie with ice cream, each chapter examines the food through the lens of the climate crisis. Not a cookbook, but instead, gathered like guests around the table, you will find the stories of these foods: The soil that grew the lettuce; the farmers, ranchers and orchardists who steward the land; the grocers and workers at dairies and farms who labor to bring food to the table. Each chapter reveals the causes and effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the social and environmental impacts of the demand for out-of-season and far-from-home foods.
What can you do to eat more sustainably, and feel good about your daily meals? For each food group, Easter offers not recipes but low-carbon, in-season alternatives that make your favorite foods both more sustainable, and delicious. The first steps are in understanding of how food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped. In stories both personal and entertaining, the author offers a full understanding of what's for dinner.

Mark is an ecologist and greenhouse gas accountant who has researched the carbon emissions from food, forestry, fiber and water in academia and private industry for more than twenty-five years. He spent much of his career working with farmers, ranchers, foresters and scientists around the world, researching how historical and modern agriculture contributed to the warming climate, and identifying both new and old farming and ranching methods that not only reduce the dangerous climate emissions behind our daily plates of food, but reverse those emissions wherever possible by drawing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into the Earth's ecosystems.
Mark is a long-time resident of Fort Collins, CO and spent most of his work career at Colorado State University until retiring in 2023, where he continues working as an affiliate scientist. He loves to read, work in his garden, cook, hike, backcountry ski, and spend time with his family.