|
"Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health." Vandana Shiva
All human beings live in a fundamental metabolic relationship with the natural world. Food—its acquisition, distribution and ingestion— comprises the most universal aspect of human civilizations. Global political fault lines of gender, class, race, nation and ecology run across our dinner tables connecting and dividing us simultaneously. The production and preparation of food remains a space of domesticity and invisibility for women, immigrants and the poor and simultaneously a route to celebrity, wealth and power for professional chefs, restaurateurs, critics, scientists, corporate agribusiness and fast food conglomerates. Channeling Betty Crocker and Betty Friedan alike, the lectures and other events in this series will explore the nexus of food, gender, and social justice.
Schedule of Events
October 19
Psyche Williams-Forson*
"When the 'World on a Plate' Visits Your Table:
Culinary Conundrums of Gender, Nationality, Memory and Marriage,"
7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: The World on a Plate is a phrase that has often been used to discuss the amalgamated ways that American food culture has evolved. In particular, when we think about African American culinary history it is necessary to consider the various cultures and histories that have influenced its existence. Building off these historical discussions, Psyche Williams-Forson turns to the contemporary moment to detail some of the ways in which African/African American food cultures have intermingled. In this talk she describes the meeting of African American and Ghanaian cultures and cuisines inside her household and the complex gender issues at play as she and her Ghanaian husband negotiate culinary practices. By reflecting on the tensions involved when other women cook for her husband, Williams-Forson uses theory and auto-ethnography to question how the broad sociopolitical forces of gender, race, class, and Diaspora play out around meals in her home.
Bio: Psyche Williams-Forson is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park and an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies and African American Studies departments and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She is an Associate Editor of Food and Foodways journal and author of the award-winning book (American Folklore Society), Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006), which examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. Her new research explores class, entrepreneurship, consumption, and citizenship among African Americans by examining domestic interiors from the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century.
She is the author of several articles and book chapters and the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Winterthur Museum and Library.
November 16
Public Screening and Discussion of The Garden (2008 Film, Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy).
7:00-9 pm, Sanford Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Film Synopsis: The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.
The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers:
Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public?
And the powers-that-be have the same response: "The garden is wonderful, but there is nothing more we can do."
If everyone told you nothing more could be done, would you give up?
The Garden has the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country's largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord. The film explores and exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us. (from the Film Website-- http://www.thegardenmovie.com/about-the-film/
February 15
Carole Counihan*
"Gender and Food Activism in Italy"
7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: This talk will ponder whether and how gender plays a role in contemporary Italian food activism. The literature on food and gender suggests several forces that may affect men's and women's participation in food activism, for example, women's identification with feeding; the male-female division of food labor; gendered sensory, corporeal, and emotional relations to food; and gendered meanings surrounding food. This talk uses ethnographic interviews conducted in 2009 with leaders of several Italian Slow Food chapters and in 2011 with a range of food activists in Cagliari, Italy, to ask how their gendered experiences with food in Italian culture might contribute to or detract from efforts to make the food system more just, more sustainable, more responsive to local communities, and of higher quality.
Bio: Carole Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She has a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (University of Texas Press, 2009), which is based on food-centered life histories collected from Hispanic women in the town of Antonito, Colorado. Counihan is also author of Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Routledge, 2004) and The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of Food in the USA: A Reader (Routledge 2002), with Penny Van Esterik, of Food and Culture: A Reader (Routledge 1997, 2008), and with Psyche Williams-Forson of Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World (Routledge 2011). She is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways. Counihan has been a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy since 2005, and she has also been a visiting professor at Boston University and the University of Cagliari (Sardinia), Italy.
March 14
Film Screening and Discussion with Lucia Berliner, William Smith '12 and the Fisher Center's 2011 Woodworth Fellow
7:00-9 pm, Sanford Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Film Synopsis: Berliner's film will investigate the basic means for survival—food. By focusing on the creation, actualization, and beneficiaries of Healthy Food for All, a unique program initiated by Remembrance Farm and the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the film will demonstrate demand and compassionate supply create by a network of small businesses and individuals vested in making a difference.
Bio: Outside of the classroom, Media & Society / Psychology major Lucia Berliner '12, plans socially conscious events and programs on campus such as ArtFest, a Japan relief fundraiser, and EcoFusion, a free after school program designed to connect middle school children to various facets of environmental stewardship. A lifelong Hudson River activist, Berliner was born and raised in the Hudson Valley where she has always been fortunate enough to have access to healthy local foods, a goal she hopes to help make a reality for all people.
April 11
Julie Guthman*
"Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Reflections on the Origins and Character of Contemporary Food Activism,"
7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: In this talk I will reflect upon how food activism has become "feel good politics". Drawing on nearly a decade's work with students who enrolled in the food and agriculture track in UC Santa Cruz's Community Studies major, I have found that most contemporary food activism in the US consists of teaching others how to eat and grow food rather than contesting state or corporate practices. This, I argue, is a convergence of neoliberalism's politics of the possible, the governmentality of healthism, and the desire for connection. While such activism affords those enrolled the pleasures of doing good by eating well, it largely neglects the deep social injustices propagated in the production and consumption of food.
Bio: Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she teaches courses primarily in global political economy and the politics of food and agriculture. Since receiving her PhD in 2000 in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley, she has published extensively on contemporary efforts to transform the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed, with a particular focus on voluntary food labels, community food security, farm-to-school programs, and the race and class politics of "alternative food." Her first book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California, (University of California, 2004), won the Frederick H. Buttel Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the Rural Sociological Society and the Donald Q. Innis Award from the Rural Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. Her new book, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (University of California, 2011) challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the so-called obesity epidemic, including that it can be addressed by exposing people to the "right" food.
*These three events (Forson-Williams, Counihan and Guthman) feature a Thursday morning roundtable discussion at 9-10 am, The Fisher Center for the Study of Women and Men, Demarest 212
|
