Biography

Nina Kahori Fallenbaum is a freelance writer and the Food and Agriculture Editor for Hyphen magazine, a print and online publication profiling the arts and politics of Asian America. Her writing has been published in Nikkei Heritage, Nichi Bei Times, and Civil Eats. She served as director of programs for Kids First Oakland and the University of California at Berkeley’s Achievement Award Scholarship Fund, where she launched cooking programs and led outreach efforts to rural, new immigrant, and Asian American communities. She lived for four years in rural and urban Japan, where she studied school lunch programs, trade policy with Asia, and the Japanese environmental and food justice movements. She helped establish Yukkuri-dou ("Slow Road") publishing house in Tokyo, and ran a social venture apparel company for three years. She entered federal government as a legislative fellow in the U.S. Senate in 2008. From 2009-2011, she assisted the Obama administration's local and regional food initiatives at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Her family has been in the cut flower and greenhouse business in northern California since 1905, and she sits on the boards of Tule Lake Committee and Japanese American Women Alumnae of UC Berkeley, philanthropic and educational organizations in California.