Margit Mondavi described it as “opening the doors on a brave new world view.”

Taste3, an annual conference hosted by the Robert Mondavi Winery at Copia in Napa, is an eclectic lineup of speakers presenting on everything from the future of bees to the restaurant of the future, from Sikh communal dining customs to the origins of fortune cookies. The two full days of lectures are  augmented by fields trips, winery dinners and after-hours parties at Cuvée restaurant in Napa.

“This is a gathering of certifiably insane people,” said Dickson Despommier, “here to present hope in an increasingly dismal world.”

Despommier, a professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia, was there to present plans created by him and his graduate students for vertical gardens where people increasingly live, in cities.

“We’re on the verge of the third green revolution,” Despommier said. “The first was learning to grow food. The second was learning to grow food where (and how) we shouldn’t.”

Despommier was one of the speakers who share, perhaps, a common notion that if we are tettering on an abyss, largely of our own making, hope remains in the small steps individuals can make.

Others sharing their pursuits:

• David Hoffman, a tea merchant turned champion of earthworms, (do you know what an oligochaetologist is?) who noted “I started growing earthworms in 1971 and they became my teacher.”

• Bruce Gutlove, who left his work as a winemaker in the Napa Valley to become director of the Coco Farm and Winery where mentally challenged Japanese people make wine in their own winery.

• Baker Peter Reinhart,   founder of Brother Juniper’s Bakery and author of “Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Bread: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavors,” who asked “What is it about bread?” He also answered it: “Bread is transformational food, it goes from alive to dead to alive again.” “After 40 years of knowing whole grains are good for you, we’re actually trying to eat them,” he said, as he shared a loaf of his own recipe, and he left with the baker’s blessing: “May your crust always be crisp and your bread always rise.”

• Barry Schuler discussing genome research, who quoted DNA researcher James Watson: “Are we playing God? Someone has to,”

• Jennifer 8 Lee, a New  York Times reporter who set out on a cross country study of Chinese food and asked the audience, “If apple pie is the benchmark for American food, how often do you eat apple pie versus how many times you eat Chinese food?”

• Dara Goldstein, editor of  Gastronomica, who has just returned from working on a project to bring people in the Mideast together over food. “If you break bread with someone,” she noted, “you can never be enemies.”

• Serge Hochar, a Lebanese winemaker, who described making wine at his Chateau Musaf throughout the Lebanese civil war. “I will try to share with you something which for me has been a reason to live,” he told the audience. “I don’t make wine,” he observed. “It makes itself. It just needs me to take care of it.”

• Christine Carroll, who founded CulinaryCorps, to bring chefs to volunteer in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Carroll noted that on a trip to volunteer, she observed what a lousy job a group of chefs wanting to help did at painting buildings and decided maybe chefs going to New Orleans should do what they do best, cook.

• René Koster, director of “The Restaurant of the Future” in Holland, where they study what people really think about the foods they eat as compared to what they say.

• Photographer Laura Letinsky, chairman of the department of visual arts at the University of Chicago, who made a project of shooting leftovers from meals.

• Michael Rakowitz, an artist and professor at Northwestern University, who made a project of trying to import dates from Iraq and described a saga that created an unforgettable image of modern times.

From the opening, in which photographer Chris Jordan shared his efforts to make the incomprehensible visual — showing by photoshopped images of paper bags, tin cans, Barbies and jet tracks what the inhabitants of the planet consume in a hour or six — to the end, in which poet Rives and comic Tom Reilly re-invented the proceedings with a comic twist, whatever Taste3 is, it’s not your ordinary conference.

“We’re in this amazingly dramatic moment,” said Andrew Kimbrell, a lawyer and director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington, DC, and the editor of “Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture.” “The food crisis is a profoundly moral crisis.”

Kimbrell also added, “Martin Luther King never said ‘I have a nightmare,’ I believe we will choose the dream and not the nightmare.”

Words of hope, indeed, and from a lawyer at that.

Because the content of the lectures was more on how to feed the planet than what to cook, the question of what recipes to include this week was something of a puzzle for Pierce Carson, Betty Teller and me — we all sat through the lectures, and then met at breaks in the lobby to sample exotic chocolates, hibiscus blossom cocktails, and various teas, coffees and yogurts, along with sustenance provided by Whole Foods.

We decided the best choice: one of the excellent drinks served at Cuvée after hours, which aided considerably in digesting all the information we’d been gathering during the day. In addition, we’ve included recipes from past and present participants who contributed to “Taste3 2008” recipe collection.