About

Staci Strauss and Craig McCord have been a creative team since 1996. Together they have produced and directed numerous television commercials, music videos, long form promotional videos and short form documentaries.

While working on a documentary in France about a jazz musician from New Orleans they experienced the sights, sounds, and excitement of market day. As they traveled to various villages in Provence to shoot the band’s performances, they met many artisan food producers working in the “small batch, handmade” style.

As luck would have it, the idea of doing stories about food people happened over lunch. After visiting the Wednesday market in St. Remy de Provence, they hit upon the idea of using their film-making skills to create small videos to communicate the benefits of the market-driven, Slow Food approach to eating; and the first incarnation of HandPicked Nation was born as The People Who Feed Us.

As a result of her experiences in the Provençal markets, Staci became an avid shopper of the farmers markets in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Ms. Strauss says:

“I would say that we know the producers of about 80% of what we eat at home in the summer months, the wonderful people who bring their goods to the markets each week. For me, it is very satisfying to personally know the people who feed us. It is my goal to be a mouthpiece for local foods.”

Craig, who grew up eating from fresh produce from his family’s garden, had this to say:

“The purpose of this site is to bring awareness to the choices we make about what we eat. There are folks out there producing really good stuff to eat. We all need to support small, local farmers.”

Staci and Craig live happily in Woodstock, New York.

Staci and Craig are joined in the Nation by Tomiko Peirano, a native Oregonian living in Brooklyn who serves as Director of Content and Site Management. Tomiko brings a lifetime of experience in the food world to the HandPicked party. Working her way from prep kitchens to cheese counters to the online world of food, Tomiko is as comfortable with a chef's knife as she with HTML.

Crucial to our efforts is Katey Parker. She’s the Social Media Manager for HandPicked Nation. If you saw us on Facebook or Twitter, more than likely it’s because of Katey. She lives in Boston.

Something like twenty years ago, Craig met James Cannon Boyce at The Richards Group in Dallas. Ironically, they both had shorter hair back then. Darker, too. They even worked on television commercials in Mexico together. These days, James is a Digital Strategist who has worked on among other things, the creation of the Huffington Post, the building of Product (RED), John Kerry and Bill
Richardson's Presidential Campaigns and more. James and his team at Common Sense New Media Strategies have helped guide the process and show the HandPicked crew the ins and outs of the digital world. You can learn more about James et al here.

If you want to build a rocking website, call King Design in Philadelphia. As you cruise the landscape that is HandPicked Nation, remember, they built it! Check out their luscious work here.