Please do join us at Robertson Hall (map) at 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb 23, for a day of panel discussions on how to repurpose wasted resources in our food/ag system, ensuring that we deliciously nourish ourselves while protecting our Earth and its finite resources. The conference is free and open to all though tickets for lunch are sold out. We’ll have a separate sign-in sheet in the lobby for walk-ins and you are welcome to take any available seat; we will have a simulcast downstairs for overflow. It also can be viewed live here, beginning at 9 a.m.
https://mediacentrallive.princeton.edu

For parking information and for a map, click here. Bring an umbrella – rain with a high of 43 degrees — is forecast.

Princeton Studies Food is deeply grateful to co-sponsors for this interdisciplinary conference: WWS-STEP, Keller Center, Career Services, Princeton Environmental Institute, Andlinger Center for Energy & the Environment, and Anthropology.

Panel discussions (see agenda here and see panelist biographies here) will explore the dire consequences of wasted food, the vital importance of quality on the plate, efforts to extend shelf life of produce, the compost at the end of the EPA Food Recovery Hierarchy, the way forward for a cheesemaker and his spring piglets, practicing restoration agriculture with a young apple orchard and mushroom spores, and repurposing and honoring human capital throughout in an effort to transform the linear system to circular.

Morning panelists will first examine ways to measure and reduce the quantities of wasted resources, then will discuss and debate solutions and innovations in place and on the horizon, in government, in the supply chain and in the lab. Audience Q&A will follow. After the conference lunch (free, but register – see the menu by Chef Jerry Luz and his team at Campus Dining Services here), our afternoon panelists, before audience Q&A, will examine wasted food reduction efforts, recovery and innovations under way on Garden State farms and in local food-based businesses. The final panel will examine governmental and corporate origins of our current linear food/ag system, its false externalities that bring the prices down at checkout, and human costs, including low wages throughout, chronic diet-related disease and lack of connection to each other and to the land.

We will wrap up as we have in years past, with a reception featuring Cool Vines wine, Newark Cider and Bobolink Dairy and Bakehouse breads and cheeses at the e-Hub on Chambers Street, thanks to the Keller Center and to Career Services.

For map, directions and parking, click here. For reference, our registration page is here.