24 Women Food and Agriculture Reporters You Should Know About

Naomi Starkman is a Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Civil Eats. She is a food policy consultant to Consumers Union and others, as well as a founding board member and the Strategic Communications Advisor to the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Naomi served as the Director of Communications & Policy at Slow Food Nation ’08 and has worked as a media consultant at The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and WIRED magazines. She was previously a senior publicist at Newsweek magazine and was the Director of Communications for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). After graduating from law school, she served as the Deputy Executive Director of the City of San Francisco’s Ethics Commission. Naomi works with various clients on food policy and advocacy and is an avid organic gardener, having worked on several farms. Women are the backbone of today’s food media. Take a look at our site and you’ll not only see that most of our contributors are women, but many of our featured stories are focused on female food movement leaders and projects spearheaded by women. And yet, the women reporting on this issue area don’t always get the attention they deserve. Even before Jill Abramson was asked to leave the New York Times this week for inquiring about the salaries of her male co-workers, Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor, wrote about a recent Women’s Media Center study that found a continued gender imbalance in journalism. Sullivan wrote: