University Seminar on Food

Convener: Ivy Ken

The GW University Seminar on Food brings together scholars, policy makers, activists, and practitioners in the community of food.  Our spring programming is devoted to the theme of appetite.  You may have a taste for green beans that are fresh rather than canned, but why?  Your hunger for couscous may be a response to your desire to be home as much as to your body's nutritional requirements.  Even a baby's preference for food you've made versus food you've bought reflects not just a biological imperative but a social thing -- an appetite that emerges in particular social contexts.  Join our distinguished guests over the next two months as we explore some of the sociological, geographic, imperial, and historical roots of this powerful force in our lives.

An Appetite for Baby Food

Amy Bentley, Associate Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, present "Baby Food and the Industrialization of Taste in the United States" at 4PM on March 26.  Prof. Bentley's work demonstrates that even babies' appetites are invented, and decisions about what to feed children reflect larger societal events and anxieties.  Bentley served as the President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society from 2000 to 2002 and is currently an editorial board member for Food and Foodways and Food, Culture and Society.

An Appetite for Green Beans

On April 19 at 4PM, Susanne Freidberg will present "The Unnatural History of Freshness."  Freidberg, Professor of Geography at Dartmouth, is the author of Fresh: A Perishable History (Belknap 2009). Although our appetite for "fresh" food seems natural and healthy, Prof. Freidberg traces the ways freshness is, in fact, engineered, manufactured, and marketed.  Her cultural history of freshness is likely to prompt a different understanding of the milk and lettuce in your refrigerator.  Freidberg is currently a Burkhardt Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies in Cambridge, MA.

An Appetite for Couscous

Finally, on April 30 at 4PM, Sylvie Durmelat will present "Reel Couscous: The Migrant's Table on Screen in Maghrebi-French Cinema."  Prof. Durmelat combines her interests in collective identities, food studies, and post-colonial studies as Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University, where she teaches a seminar called "Food for Thought."   In her current book project, The Taste of Empire: Food Exchanges and Table Matters between France and the Maghreb, Durmelat explores the hunger for connection that may be particularly pronounced among immigrants.    

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In the fall we gave attention to food policy.  Specifically, the Seminar was focused on arenas in which particular food policies have--amazingly--been written, passed, funded, and at least partially implemented.  The process of implementation, though, is a tricky one that deserves more attention.  To that end, we brought together experts who have created, enacted, and observed some important food policies in order to provide the context that would enable us to better study the manner through which these policies translate into real action and sustainable social change. 

Saving School Lunch

Our first gathering, on October 12, 2011 featured DC City Councilmember Mary Cheh, who described the process of passing and funding the 2010 Healthy Schools Act.  This law rewards DC's public schools for serving more locally-sourced, unprocessed produce and sets stricter nutrition mandates for school children's meals.  At this session we also learned of the victories and challenges of enacting this law in the city's schools over the last year from DC Public Schools Food Services Director, Jeffrey Mills, who is one of very few directors in the country to successfully eliminate flavored milk from students' menus.  Finally, awe heard the recommendations of policy implementation expert Janet Phoenix, Assistant Research Professor of Health Policy here at George Washington University.  Dr. Phoenix proposed a potential framework through which interested scholars might approach the Healthy Schools Act as a research topic.  You may watch full video of the event here.

Monopoly Meat

In our second opportunity to convene, on November 21, 2011, we took on the important issue of market concentration in relation to one aspect of food production:  meat packing.  At present, just four companies control over 80 percent of the cattle packing market.  Barry C. Lynn, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation who has written the book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and The Economics of Destruction (2010, Wiley), provided the context we can use to decipher a monopoly issue such as this.  Mark Halverson, Staff Director and Chief Council for the Senate Agriculture Committee, reported on his work with Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who helped to challenge meat packing monopolies in the language of the 2008 Farm Bill.  This Bill invokes the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act in order to give the United States Department of Agriculture the authority to enforce anti-trust activity in the increasingly consolidated meat industry.  Researchers at the advocacy group Food & Water Watch have kept an eye on the implementation of this specific anti-trust provision, and Patrick Woodall, Research Director and Senior Policy Advocate there, reported on their research and described the metrics through which a delicate and complicated issue such as this can be studied.  You may watch full video of the event here. 

Collaborative Workshop

Finally, on December 8, 2011, area faculty, students, advocates, and researchers who are interested in pursuing food policy implementation research around these or other topics convened to begin the process of identifying research groups, grant opportunities, and collaborative agendas.  Dr. Pamela A. Mischen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration at the State University of New York at Binghamton presented the keynote address based on her work on "action implementation research."  Geralyn Schulz, Associate Dean for Research in the Columbian College, and Amy Butler, Executive Director of Foundation Relations, helped those in attendance identify funding possibilities. 

In all, the fall programming for the University Seminar on Food, which complements the work of GW's Urban Food Task Force, brought together food policy research already underway on GW's campus with the experts in Washington DC who have created and shaped the processes we hope to continue to study.  As we sustain this conversation through Seminar programming in the years to come, we also hope to address such topics such as the philosophy of food, the intertwining of food and religion, the ethics of urban gardening, and the varied international contexts in which food is a tool of the state, among others. 

The Seminar has benefited from the generous support of the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Sociology.

For additional information please contact Ivy Ken at ivyken@gwu.edu.