Building Sustainability, Ethics & Justice in the Food System: Symposium Nov. 13

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From left, Lyndon Estes, lecturer at Princeton Environmental Institute and associate research scholar, Woodrow Wilson School-STEP; Rob Socolow, emeritus professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and senior research scholar; and Tim Searchinger, co-founder of Princeton Studies Food, lecturer at Princeton Environmental Institute and Research Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School-STEP at last year's conference.

At last year’s conference, from left, Lyndon Estes, lecturer at Princeton Environmental Institute and associate research scholar, Woodrow Wilson School-STEP; Rob Socolow, emeritus professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and senior research scholar; and Tim Searchinger, co-founder of Princeton Studies Food, lecturer at Princeton Environmental Institute and Research Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School-STEP.

The Princeton Studies Food conference last fall proved standing-room-only interest in all things food at Princeton University and seeded creation of our umbrella group of the same name.

Now, it’s time to get to work. In this second conference, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Nov. 13 at Wallace 300 (with an uncommonly delicious lunch provided!), we plan to organize and prioritize Princeton’s areas of expertise and programs and the University focus – in the service of all nations – for maximum leverage in addressing problems in the global food system critical to the welfare of our societies, humanity and the planet.  And we aim to do this with full awareness that preparing and eating food sits at the core of our humanity – it connects us to each other and to the world around us.

General topics:

Scope & Scale of the Problem & Our Role in Solutions

Preparing and eating food sits at the core of our humanity and is the livelihoods of millions. But humanity is rapidly approaching Earth’s natural resource boundaries and our food system is imperfect. What is the University’s highest and best use?

Society, Culture & Ethics

How can our strengths in humanities and social science address our unequal food system, with its roots in how we think, what we value and the kind of world we want to leave for the next generation? What changes to individual, social and cultural norms and systems will  contribute to these solutions?

Finance & Entrepreneurship

Business as usual has made companies sustainable but has imperiled humanity and the environment. But how we make and spend our money reflects our thinking and values. What are ideas and startups from entrepreneurial alumni that reflect the prerequisites of a sustainable food system and/or the funding for it?

Politics & Policy

With food, water, agriculture and energy, politics and campaign contributions create policy. What effect can our strengths in policy, politics, economics, operations research and financial engineering have in shifting this framework toward the good of the commons – more equal distribution of natural resources? What arguments resonate with our polarized electorate?

Nature & Technology

We haven’t yet managed a truly sustainable food system. What gaps can Princeton strengths address, across disciplines? What new data, new tools, and new understandings do we need to develop to address global food issues? What part can our community or other institutions play?

Please mark your calendar and clear your schedule; the agenda and registration will be available in the coming days and there’s no time to waste.

 

Global Food Initiative at UC’s 10 campuses

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Janet Napolitano, University of California president, together with UC’s 10 campus chancellors, launched the UC Global Food Initiative in 2014. The latest project of the program brings Mark Bittman, food op-ed writer for The New York Times, in to lead a series of explorations on food issues. Here’s the youtube channel.

Background, from the website:

The University of California Global Food Initiative addresses one of the critical issues of our time: how to sustainably and nutritiously feed a world population expected to reach eight billion by 2025. The initiative aligns the university’s research, outreach and operations in a sustained effort to develop, demonstrate and export solutions — throughout California, the United States and the world — for food security, health and sustainability.

…Building on existing efforts and creating new collaborations among UC’s 10 campuses, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and UC’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the initiative draws on UC’s leadership in the fields of agriculture, medicine, nutrition, climate science, public policy, social science, biological science, humanities, arts and law, among others. Its focus is both external, such as how UC translates research into policy and helps communities eat more sustainably, and internal, such as how UC leverages its collective buying power and dining practices to create desirable policies and outcomes.”

 

More than 20 subcommittees and multicampus working groups are drawing on the efforts of faculty, students and staff, as well as engagement with the community for matters of curriculum, operations, policy, research and service.

Exploring food & America’s racial dynamic

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Neopolitan-style pizza: From left, Chelsea Johnson, Class of 2018; Alexander Schindele-Murayama, Class of 2016; Dominique Ibekwe, Class of 2016; and Cordelia Orillac, Class of 2015, get a lesson in making traditional Neapolitan pizza dough from Chef Rick Piancone in the kitchen of Rockefeller and Mathey colleges. "We wanted to do pizza because it's a familiar comfort food that has been very commercialized. The chefs taught us how the art and craft in traditional Neapolitan pizza compares with the U.S. version and how the taste changes," said Ibekwe.

Neopolitan-style pizza: From left, Chelsea Johnson, Class of 2018; Alexander Schindele-Murayama, Class of 2016; Dominique Ibekwe, Class of 2016; and Cordelia Orillac, Class of 2015, get a lesson in making traditional Neapolitan pizza dough from Chef Rick Piancone in the kitchen of Rockefeller and Mathey colleges. “We wanted to do pizza because it’s a familiar comfort food that has been very commercialized, said Ibekwe. “The chefs taught us how the art and craft in traditional Neapolitan pizza compares with the U.S. version and how the taste changes.” – Photo by Danielle Alio, Office of Communications

Professor Anne Cheng '85

Professor Anne Cheng ’85

With “Literature, Food, and the American Racial Diet,” in the spring 2015 semester, Professor Anne Cheng ’85 encouraged her 133 students to research the relationship between food and America’s racial dynamic across society, culture and history, but the students’ final projects weren’t limited to research papers. They also included a food lesson and a tasting.

As Jamie Saxon from the Office of Communications writes:

“Assignments included writing analytical essays, experimenting with food writing, and conducting research into the history of food, which, noted Cheng, is often a history of imperialism and colonization. For their final project, students went food shopping, rolled up their sleeves and created dishes that illustrated some aspect of how food interacts with racial identity.

Divided into 30 small teams, the students discussed readings and shared their own experiences with culture and food. As part of a new Campus Dining initiative led by Executive Director Smitha Haneef to support students’ academic experience, each team was paired with a chef who advised them on food ingredients, preparation and presentation. The dishes were presented and tasted at the “Princeton Feast” held April 30 in the Frist Campus Center.”

See the Princeton Alumni Weekly feature here and Campus Dining’s account here.

 

Hostos Food Studies program in South Bronx

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A growing movement of students and faculty have fueled the evolution of what’s now a Food Studies degree at Hostos, a community college of the City University of New York in South Bronx. The program, which started from a single writing course about food, offers its first official class in Fall 2015. Read The Atlantic story here.

When the program starts in the the fall, it will be the first of its kind in the country. Kristin Reynolds, who will be teaching two sections of Intro to Food Studies and leads similar courses at The New School in Manhattan, surveyed existing offerings across the country to help Hostos design the program. Community colleges, including Hostos often have programs that are more vocational in nature, focusing on fields such as hospitality, agriculture, and the culinary arts. Though a number of four-year institutions have launched similar programs, Reynolds found no other two-year institutions taking a liberal arts approach to food studies.

From The New York Times story (read the complete piece here).

 Hostos’s program is intended to train a new generation of professionals in the food industry and empower them to address longstanding socioeconomic issues involving food in their communities. At a time when the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, faces a growing health crisis from diabetes and obesity-related illnesses, many residents say they do not have convenient or affordable access to fresh fruits and vegetables….

Hostos’s dean of academic programs, Felix Cardona, said that the idea for the food studies program grew out of faculty and staff discussions about the importance of food to the Bronx’s future. In 2013, the college started offering a certificate program in how to run a green market. This spring, it will offer a similar program in the culinary arts.

“It was a glaring gap in our curriculum and I think we needed to be responsive to that,” Professor Cardona said.

 

The curriculum includes four tracks of study: Food Policy, Social Issues in Food, Health & Nutrition, and Environment & Sustainability. Click here for a link to the college.

Stanford adds cooking classes to curriculum

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From an NPR piece:

With the help of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, Stanford University in January 2015 launched the Teaching Kitchen @ Stanford, a program designed to teach students the basics of choosing groceries, cooking and eating healthfully.

The goal is to help young people with limited time and limited budgets maintain healthful diets — both while they’re at school, and after they graduate.

The chefs at Stanford’s dining program are working with Oliver’s nonprofit Food Foundation to create a full curriculum by the Fall 2015 semester. The Teaching Kitchen is also working with Stanford researchers to develop a set of parameters to track the eating habits of students enrolled in the program, to see if the cooking classes can change the way people think about food.