Mary Engel, a former health and medical writer for the Los Angeles Times, and Nolan Hester, a longtime environmental reporter, file dispatches on the food revolution from their home in Portland, Ore., and throughout the American West.

Mary has worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and for newspapers in New Mexico and Alaska. At the Times, she wrote the editorials that accompanied a series on racial injustice at a public hospital, for which the newspaper was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Other honors include a 2005-2006 MIT Science Journalism Fellowship, which allowed her to spend an academic year in Cambridge, Mass., studying global health, infectious diseases, climate change and bioethics at MIT and at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Mary and Nolan met in New Mexico over green chile enchiladas long before local food was a movement. They spent three years in Alaska, savoring Copper River salmon, wild blueberries and the occasional road-killed moose, and a decade in California.

Nolan Hester is a longtime environmental writer, editor and photojournalist. He has reported on many of the West’s perennial issues, including its lack of water, its abundance of cows, and its persistent booms and busts. He blew the whistle on Interior Department plans to hunt mountain lions in a national park. Another story led New Mexico to ban the short-handled hoe, which kept workers literally stooped in the fields to assure their bosses that no one loafed. His story on how weapons scientists view their work won a Science in Society award from the National Assn. of Science Writers and an Olive Branch award from New York University’s Center for War, Peace and the News Media. He helped edit the Albuquerque Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of illnesses linked to the food supplement L-tryptophan, prompting a national recall. His work has been published in the Washington Post, Outside, View Camera, Arizona Highways and New Mexico Magazine.