Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin Madison
Other Events
In Defense of Food panel discussion
As part of the "Go Big Read" initiative on campus, the SociETAS Seminar in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology will host a panel discussion on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, on September 21st from noon until one in the Buttel Conference Room on the 3rd floor of Agriculture Hall. The panelists will include: Jack Kloppenburg, Jill Harrison, and Madeleine Fairbairn.
Jack Kloppenburg has long been interested in development of a sustainable agrifood system. His most recent work is marked by excitement over the emergence of local/regional foodsheds, the growing international movement for food sovereignty, and the possibilities of applying open source principles in the biosciences.
Jill Harrison is a faculty member in the Department of Community & Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison. Her research and teaching focus on issues of social justice in environmental politics, the agrifood system, and immigration and border politics. She is a faculty affiliate of numerous programs at UW-Madison (including the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies, the Agroecology Graduate Program, the Holtz Center for Science and Technology, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies) and is also a board member of the Wisconsin Migrant Coalition. She received her PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2006.
Madeleine Fairbairn is a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. Her master's thesis examined the discursive framing of food sovereignty in historical context. Her research interests include alternative agrifood systems, food politics, economic development, and social justice.
Food for Thought Festival
Saturday, September 26, 2009
8:00 am-1:30 pm
Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. (off the Capitol Square)
Madison, WI
The annual Food for Thought Festival is a fun, festive forum that explores and celebrates our many opportunities to eat more pleasurably, healthfully and sustainably.
Go Big Read/Humanities Without Boundaries Public Lecture: In Defense of Food: The Omnivore's Solution
Lecture by Michael Pollan
Thursday, September 24, 7PM, Kohl Center
Doors open at 6PM
There are no tickets needed for this event, it is FREE and open to the public.
Real food--the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize as food-is being undermined by science on one side and the food industry on the other, both of whom want us focus on nutrients, good and bad, rather than actual plants, animals and fungi. The rise of "nutritionism" has vastly complicated the lives of American eaters without doing anything for our health, except possibly to make it worse. Nutritionism arose to deal with a genuine problem--the fact that the modern American diet is responsible for an epidemic of chronic diseases, from obesity and type II diabetes to heart disease and many cancers--but it has obscured the real roots of that problem and stood in the way of a solution. That solution involves putting the focus back on foods and food chains, for it turns out our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the soil, plants, and animals that make up the food chains in which we take part. In this talk, Pollan explores what the industrialization of food and agriculture has meant for our health and happiness as eaters, and looks at the growing national movement to renovate the food system. Click here for more details.
Description courtesy of Center for the Humanities.
