ABSTRACT. Oppositional in stance to the hegemonic food system, alternative agrifood movements (AAMs) produce and maintain values of healthy, agroecological farm community life that comprise a collective imaginary. This imaginary, mediated by AAMs and their supporting institutions, often valorizes a normative identity of white entrepreneurial subjects, and uncritically promotes a collectively nostalgic rural idyll. Agroecological apprenticeships are one site for reproduction of this imaginary. These on-farm apprentices and the farmers who host them are primarily white, college-educated, and middle- to upper-class. Yet, little is understood how class-based and racialized space is sociomaterially produced and maintained within on-farm apprenticeship. Drawing from insights from a critical ethnographic case study of on-farm apprenticeship programs on six farms, whose programs were supplemented and mediated by a local alternative agrifood organization in North Carolina, I examine how received knowledge from AAM praxis leads to socioperformative rehearsal of white upper- to middle-class expressions of distinction and privilege. In analyzing this field, I draw from Hall’s (1996) identification processes and Bourdieu’s (1984) conceptions of habitus. AAM’s nostalgic and normative versions of farming mediate a recasting of work in race- and class-appropriate ways, including (1) an over-emphasis on passion for the farming lifestyle, (2) the negotiation of the social stigma of manual labor to be healthy bodily exercise, and (3) an emphasis on a praxis of voluntary simplicity/asceticism. These identification processes create an ‘othering’ or ‘exclusion’ of identity enactments that include careful planning of a farm labor schedule, and practices to make manual labor easy and efficient. Thus, as agroecological apprentices and farmers alike often herald from a professional and/or managerial class habitus, the manual labor and lifestyle of farming is less able to be sutured into the identities of these beginning and aspiring farmers. The habitus, mediated and maintained by AAM praxis and mediated by local organizations, puts forward a version of farming that is unable to align with their habitus-based expectations of work-life balance; many apprentices do not continue farming, and many agroecological farmers are barely able to sustain their farm activity. Moreover, migrant farmworkers are rendered invisible and othered through the racializing and normalizing re/production of values of the dominant group. Additionally, there is little access to the space by members outside the dominant group, which maintains white, classed space on agroecological farms. This paper discusses how the sociomaterial within these apprenticeships interpolates subjects to an embodied, signified identity that re/produces socioperformative norms and excludes ‘others.’

ABSTRACT. Farmworker ministries provide essential goods and services as well as spiritual support to migrant agricultural laborers living and working in the United States. While faith-based organizations and/or ministries are key to supporting immigrants and/or refugee populations in the U.S., scholars have conducted little research addressing these institutions, especially those that endeavor to encourage the agency of those they serve. To address this gap, this case explores a participatory capacity-building project conducted by Valley View Ministry in the summers of 2015 and 2016. The project’s goals were to open participatory space for the workers it serves, deepen the Board of Directors’ (BOD) understanding of migrant farmworkers’ lives, investigate new ways to advocate on behalf of workers, and increase constituent influence in BOD activities and deliberation. This case applied ethnographic research methods including collection and analysis of key documents, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with farmworkers, members of the Board of Directors, and employees. This author also employed Fraser’s (2009) conception of “participatory parity”, defined as: “social arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life.  Overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction” (Fraser, 2009b, p. 16). The theory rests on the three components of redistribution, representation, and recognition, which guided the study and served as primary codes to analyze the data. This case specifically examines the relationship among the Ministry’s board of directors, employees, farm workers, and local growers, in light of the structural challenges these stakeholders face. The results contribute to empirical studies on community-based research with farm laborers, theoretical treatments of participatory development, and analyses of the enduring power of the agrarian imaginary: the image of the small-scale, white, male grower, to thwart such initiatives. Moreover, the study addresses how the agrarian imaginary impacts organizational governance, especially when implementing a participatory project that inherently calls for ontological and epistemological shifts away from dominant, farmer-centric frames and toward approaches support agency for all stakeholders. While the imaginary mediated both the organization as well as the workers’ capacity to be change agents, there were spaces where these dominant frames were challenged. This piece concludes with recommendations for organizations and individuals that endeavor to create these spaces while inevitably standing in tension with the material, cultural, and political constraints that workers, the organization, and farmers face.

ABSTRACT. Farm labor and learning spaces are growing across the food system in North America. As a form of knowledge politics, these spaces are a central issue encompassing farm(er) labor experiences in alternative agricultural movement discourse. Farm labor is historically diverse in scope across age, race, gender, class, sexual identity, and ethnic spaces. The farm labor conversation has also become a seedbed for social critique within the alternative food movement illustrating the everyday experiences of struggle and oppression that inform our food system politics, including but not limited to the intersecting forces of patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism. In this way, farm laborers, as learners and change agents, also illustrate possibilities to challenge and transform the pervasive and hegemonic practices of the global food system. In this paper, I explore the epistemological and ontological politics that inform the ways in which farmer-worker subjectivity is created, valorized, and critiqued through the complex and sometimes-contested lenses of interns, apprentices, and seasonal workers in the United States. First, I aim to emphasize the growing body of literature that has embraced a number of critical questions and empirical understandings of individuals seeking work-based experiences to “become” farmers. These experiences illustrate a range of work opportunities coupled with varying models of learning and pay structures that shed light on the complexity of these relationships and famer identities. This literature highlights what is commonly seen as internship and on-farm apprenticeship arrangements for adults seeking to either explore or enter into farming. Relatedly, this literature also points out the ways in which seasonal, guest, or mobile workers, often characterized as migrant farm workers, are uniquely positioned as agents of change in the food system, while also being challenged by precarity, immigration constraints, and the safety of their farm labor conditions. Second, bringing these experiences together through the lens of ontological politics (Mol, 1999, 2002; Law, 200) and the politics of possibility (Gibson-Graham, 2006), I aim to provide commentary about the way farm labor and learning experiences are currently being discussed and framed in the literature. I ask such questions: what and whose experiences are being validated and valorized, and in what ways? What worldviews are being enacted through this (in)visibility, and more importantly, how could they be done differently for social justice in our farm labor system? Possibilities for enacting new imaginative spaces for farm(er) labor justice will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. How do agroecological production practices effect rural women’s abilities to produce healthy chickens? Chickens are a key livelihood strategy for rural Guatemalan women, providing eggs and meat for their household’s food security and income through the sale of eggs, chicks, and adult birds. I argue that the implementation of agroecological practices designed to improve poultry production can positively affect women’s decision-making, time, and access to and control of resources. Using a women’s empowerment framework, I analyze the impacts of participation in Project CATIE-MAGA-NORUEGA’s improved poultry project on 33 women in San Martín Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango, Guatemala. I conducted participant observation, interviews, and focus group discussions with project participants and staff in 2016. Women’s participation in the project resulted in healthier birds. Healthier birds had more meat and laid better quality eggs. As a result, women could use the birds and eggs for household consumption or increase their sales in the market. The increased quality and quantity of birds and eggs contributed to reducing the effects of the agricultural gender gap in rural Guatemala.

ABSTRACT. Vermont has long been rooted in a strong agrarian past and holds a rich food history. It is a place where smaller scale models have provided a greater opportunity for active citizen participation, which in turn has impacted planning and policy development. By connecting members of a community and fostering the links between the people who grow food and those who consume it, local food systems can strengthen community resiliency, preserve the agrarian landscape, and increase economic viability through multiplier effects. For the past decade, direct to consumer sales have been a popular alternative to the conventional agro-industrialized model. However recent literature suggests that these markets have become oversaturated and require producers to spend an undesirable amount of time away from their farm. Research has shown that many Vermont producers are interested in scaling-up their production and increasing the proportion of their sales to wholesale accounts. Due to lack of infrastructure, inadequate access to capital, and limited logistical capacities, many growers are unable to overcome the barriers that prevent them from expanding their operations. Our research aims to investigate the practices of successful wholesale farmers, and to better understand the necessary technical assistance needed to expand their operations and facilitate their transition into these markets. This project will also examine lenders’ and technical assistance providers’ perceptions of viability of wholesale markets, and better understand what attributes contribute to a successful loan application. The findings of this research will be used to develop a “wholesale ready farmer” training program for Vermont producers – and create outreach opportunities and materials for agricultural lenders.

ABSTRACT. Invasive brush presents an ecosystem-friendly and low-cost food production opportunity for innovative people who enjoy managing animals. Brush is ideal goat food, and when rotationally browsed by goats for the three-prong purpose of brush management, goat milk and meat production, and farmer income, the problem can become a resilient food system solution. This study assessed the production aspects of 3 meat goats rotationally browsed over 3 years on 5 replicated blocks of brush-invaded oak savanna at a State-owned site in southwest Wisconsin. Weight gain among kids exceeded expectations, body condition remained good, and levels of gastrointestinal nematode parasites were considered acceptable for meat production and goat health. Goats selected a higher proportion of their diet as brush relative to previously published research, and different breeds and classes of goats performed differently in the brush.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces the literature on the social economy to the body of work on local food systems, in order to build a stronger understanding of the structures, practices, and politics of food system localization. Beginning with food system localization as a reactionary, scalar approach to address the shortcomings of global food provisioning, my emphasis here will be on the specific processes of localization that best align with the principles of social economy. My understanding of the social economy builds upon Karl Polanyi’s (1944) concept of the socially and politically embedded economy, and will be further developed using work by scholars such as J.K. Gibson-Graham, Nancy Fraser, and Gareth Dale. Drawing upon the concept of “embeddedness,” I aim to illustrate how localization with a mind to social economy may seek to re-embed food markets along three dimensions: within local values and social institutions; within the institutions of a broader, diversified local economy; and within a rooted territory or place.

To illustrate how food system localization may better align with the principles of social economy, I will use this framework to analyze the work of Lowcountry Local First (LLF). LLF is a non-profit organization based in Charleston, South Carolina, which supports beginning food and farming businesses in the region, advocates on behalf of independently owned businesses at the municipal and state levels, and provides key services to new business-owners. In analyzing LLF’s mission and key programs, this paper will delineate some of the practices and politics of localization that represent aspects of the embedding process detailed above.

Finally, this essay suggests that activists and scholars might address some of the limitations of food system localization by incorporating a social economy framework into their work. By limitations, I refer to factors that inhibit the transformative potential of food system localization, including failure to address socio-economic inequalities within and beyond the food system, the assimilation of local food into conventional supply chains, and the retrenchment of state support in areas that would most benefit local food systems. This paper will underscore the ways in which social economic principles may directly address some of these major challenges and limitations.

ABSTRACT. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) faces substantial challenges in increasingly saturated and competitive markets that highlight their localness. Retention of members is crucial for the model to provide benefits to farmers; otherwise, excessive losses of members requires considerable recruitment efforts and undercuts farmer well-being. We conducted statewide research on CSAs in California, including surveys of 111 CSA farmers, 409 former members, and 1,149 current members in order to examine retention rates and former members’ reasons for leaving. We answer three questions: What explains differences in CSAs’ retention rates? Why do former members leave their CSAs? And, how do former and current members differ in their satisfaction with CSA? Examining the datasets together shows what we call the retention paradox: while it appears that former members’ primary reasons for leaving could be addressed by offering them share customization, from the farm-level data we find that offering share customization has no effect on CSAs’ retention rates (tested through both bivariate correlation and multiple regression). We offer three hypotheses to further examine the retention paradox, and argue for a deeper theorization of CSA people to understand the limitations of choice as a frame for member retention. We conclude with specific routes that CSAs can take, individually and collectively, to retain members and cultivate CSA people.

ABSTRACT. It has often been taken for granted that local food is better for the environment, first because of reduced distance to market, and second because of a presumed commitment to sustainable farming on the part of farmers who sell direct to consumers. Recent research has called both these assumptions into question; indeed, the concepts of a "local trap," an "inverted quarantine," and "defensive localism" raise the possibility that the social movement for local food may be romantic at best, willfully blind to larger injustices in the food system at worst. Motivated by this tension between public perceptions and academic criticisms of local food, this paper seeks to draw attention to the tremendous diversity in how food is grown for and sold to local markets. More specifically, I ask: Are different market outlets for local food associated with differences in the adoption of sustainable farming practices by farmers? With this question in mind, this paper will report on the findings of an original, large-scale survey conducted with specialty crops growers (i.e. farmers of fruits and vegetables) in Michigan and Ohio. Respondents to the survey (n=approximately 880 farm operations) were asked detailed questions about what crops are grown, whether practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage, and biological pest control are used, whether the farm satisfies "organic" criteria, how crops are sold, and the environmental views of farm owners. Preliminary findings shed light on a nuanced relationship between local food and sustainable farming. First, and not surprisingly, selling food mainly wholesale, and therefore not selling local food, is strongly associated with increased use of agricultural chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. Second, earning income from some of the most common outlets for local food, such as farmers markets, roadside stands, and direct-to-consumer resale by other farmers, is not associated with greater adoption of sustainable farming practices. However, community-supported agricultural cooperatives (CSAs)-and to a lesser extent having a farm-to-table relationship with local restaurants-clearly emerge as an income source that is strongly associated with sustainable farming. Further analysis of survey data suggests that more than one reason may exist for the unique environmental character of CSAs, including the environmental views of farm operators and a heightened sense of economic security due to the membership contract funding model.

ABSTRACT. A new producer Cooperative presents an opportunity for local farmers: It's Local, community-based, cooperatively owned, back to the land, non-GMO, pasture-based, sustainable... And Neoliberal. This paper challenges sustainable agrifood regime-theories, and suggests a budding practice-based theory for building sustainable and equitable agrifood systems. This theory builds on a relational, reflexive model of decision-making, and critically examines the complexity of the "co-learning" concept in a relational organization.

ABSTRACT. The industrialization of the American food system was accelerated by the rise of commercial canning and bottling, an activity that became safer and cheaper as microbial science, industrial technology and the commercial demands of the first world war intersected in the early decades of the 20th century. Several major food companies, including H.J. Heinz, Hunts, A&P, and Duffy Mott, took advantage of the opportunity to establish branch plants along the transportation corridor in western New York defined in successive eras by the Erie Canal, the New York Central Railroad, and New York State Thruway (I-90) to process the region’s farm and orchard products. H.J. Heinz, emphasizing the “purity” of their products to the wary home consumer, established at least three branch plants for ketchup and vinegar in the eight-county western region to better control agricultural conditions and then process products soon after harvest. This paper, focusing on H.J. Heinz and its competitors, analyzes archival and secondary data using GIS to investigate the canneries, vinegar works, and other food processing businesses as key nodes in the ecological, cultural, and economic relationships that make up the food system. Maps depicting the links among branch plants, farms, nurseries, and transit points together with qualitative data about labor and management practices shed light on a key moment in the industrialization of food.

ABSTRACT. Strains of cannabis (Cannabis sativa, cannabis indica) have been used for centuries to make fiber, food, and medicinal products. After the prohibition of alcohol, Harry Aslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, spent a 32-year career demonizing cannabis. In 1970, Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act designating that specific substances be ascribed a category based on criteria; schedule 1 substances were designated those as being highly addictive, having no medicinal value, and being completely unsafe for use. Why cannabis was designated as Schedule 1 has been tied to Aslinger’s need to justify the existence of his department or to control the workforce. Whatever the reason, “Reefer Madness” and “Nixon’s war on drugs” effectively stigmatized cannabis use for decades while the black market trade flourished. Even non-psychoactive industrial hemp remains federally illegal and classified as Schedule 1. While the 2014 farm bill allowed land grant university (LGU) research with industrial hemp, the higher potential profit, high cannabidiol (CBD) cannabis for medicinal therapies remains limited and classified Schedule 1.

The legalization of medicinal cannabis in California in 1996 started a process that has led to more than half of the US states following suit, with nine states legalizing recreational cannabis use as of Februrary 2018. Despite obvious positive therapeutical use (relief of nausea from chemotherapy, seizure control with high CBD oils, ease of post-traumatic stress disorder, and ocular pressure relief in glaucoma), all cannabis remains classified Schedule 1 federally, and federal funding for research is unavailable.

It seems time to discuss the role of LGUs in cannabis education. Should students be taught the botany, fertility, and pest management of cannabis to supply the market? Should students understand that cannabis can control pain, and that this could be done well or ineffectively? Being a psychoactive substance, there is potential for abuse. The cannabis “stoner” stigma has the potential to fade, and production could be viewed as an effective economic opportunity awaiting agronomy students. The aging US population will demand pain treatment; how do we do this? Should we take the opportunity to teach our students how to possibly use cannabis in a healthy way, as a component of a healthy lifestyle, or do we continue to allow the specter of Harry Aslinger’s “reefer madness” control what is done at the land grant university.

ABSTRACT. Consumer demands for local foods have expanded over the last decade. The popularity of locally-grown agricultural commodities has given rise to demand for value-added, locally-produced products. Cottage foods, non-potentially hazardous foods prepared in home kitchens, are regulated under state-level laws. These laws are intended to exempt the small-scale production and sale of low-risk foods from costly food safety regulations and to enable producers to sell food directly to the end consumer. Yet, they represent new territory for state policymakers, who must now grapple with the challenge of designing policies that are broadly effective while also being locally specific. Allowable product types, food safety training requirements, permitted sales venues, income limits, inspection requirements, and permit type all vary state-to-state.

This research explores how lawmakers are tasked with identifying effective ways to regulate a localized food system while maintaining the safety of food products and protecting the consumer. How do they address a push for less government regulation, with claims that cottage foods laws violate the principles of food sovereignty and economic liberty of cottage foods producers? What happens to the producers who are caught in the crosshairs between food ethics and governance? Drawing on ethnographic interviews with producers, consumers, and experts in food safety, I highlight the unique state of the emerging cottage foods industry and provide insight into the current discussion between food freedom and bureaucratic restriction.

ABSTRACT. Many food scholars and advocates have called for a simplified public health message about food consumption and nutrition. Others (such as Scrinis) have pushed against the very notion of nutrition as a basis for approaching food choice. Yet governing institutions, such as the USDA, do and will continue to develop science-based nutritional advice. In this task, they face a central tension. Despite the public health charge to provide clear and simple, science-based advice to the public, nutritional science itself produces proliferation rather than clarity and simplicity. Not simply a corporate weapon to sow public confusion and new markets, proliferating markers, measures, and goals are useful to scientific knowledge-making and comport with the structure and reward systems of the field. In other words, more and better science cannot resolve this issue because science is itself the source of unruly complexity in nutritional advice.

Unable to mount a critique of nutritional science, governance institutions are caught between science and clarity, and must muddle through by balancing the two. This talk explores how the USDA, in particular, negotiates the mandate to provide science-based nutritional advice. This exploration is not meant to displace the political critiques of governmental food advice, but suggests that there are less obvious structural issues at work in seemingly futile efforts to cobble together a meaningful public-health approach to food.

ABSTRACT. I examine the literature about feeding practices of immigrant domestic workers in U.S. households, asking the research questions: What are the feeding practices of immigrant domestic workers in the U.S., and is the role of domestic workers included in the existing food studies scholarship? Domestic laborers in U.S. households, who are primarily women of color, sell their labor power to affluent families to feed others’ children and to support their own family’s health and wellbeing. Domestic workers play central roles in the food system as feeders of children in both their own homes and in others’, yet little food studies literature exists about domestic workers as integral parts of the food system. Not only are domestic workers central to the food system, but they also fuel the growth of middle- and upper- class economies in the U.S., allowing affluent women and men to work hours that would not be possible without hired help. The position of domestic home workers is rife with contradiction; domestic laborers and their own children experience high rates of food insecurity, while many of their jobs rely on making sure children from families they are employed by are adequately fed.

ABSTRACT. With a majority of long-term care being provided at home, rather than in institutions, it is surprising that food and meal times have been so excluded from conversations about care provision. This paper seeks to render visible food work as caring practice, and engage with the literature on long-term care of older adults and people with disabilities. Currently, food related practices, including preparing meals and shopping, are considered Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs), which are a component of needs assessments for the purposes of organizing long-term care in communities. Yet, there remains a dearth of information on how paid and unpaid caregivers navigate food and meals for people they care for. Exploring this fundamental aspect of daily life provides insight into the lived experience of care recipients and caregivers, and explicitly integrates food into care, as both an orientation and practice.

In this paper, the theory of ambiguous loss is utilized as a conceptual framework to explore the liminality of care receiving bodies. Specifically, we examine the conditions and impacts of the reduction or elimination of contributions to the household, which can come with age or the onset of disability. In this case, people, and their needs are present, sometimes without the ability to contribute sufficiently to the maintenance of the household. This adds a component to the relationships of care, which is overlooked in research on community-based long-term care. The need to consider supports, which assist older adults and people with disabilities in contributions to the household, specifically related to food preparation and practices, is an area in need of exploration. Ultimately, this work helps to shift the focus of service provision from a decontextualized care receiving body to a more complex, relational and dynamic understanding of caregiving and care receiving.

ABSTRACT. Wendell Barry states that eating is an agricultural act. This idea has spurred activists and scholars to explore new forms of growing food as alternatives to industrial agriculture that are more socially sustainable and environmentally sound such as organic, local, and community-based food systems. Scholars are now including the exploitation of farmworkers as an environmental and food justice issue. Food access activists promote buying clubs and worker-coops as alternatives to big-box retail stores. Something, though, is missing from our understanding of environmental food justice and activism. Once people purchase food, somehow environmental justice and activism ends and food scholarship takes over. I argue this is due to the gendered split between production and reproduction which privileges work done in the productive sphere over work, often unpaid carework, performed in and for households. In order to address environmental aspects of food and health at the level of eating, we need to expand the scope of food activism and scholarship to include household foodwork —the mental, physical and emotional labor involved in planning meals, cooking, serving, and cleaning up after meals— as an important facet of environmental (in)justice. This paper will present the argument that having appropriate financial, social, and cultural resources to feed people is a form of environmental justice; conversely, provisioning households and feeding people without adequate financial and social support is a form of environmental injustice. This perspective allows us to go beyond the productivist bias in food activism and disrupt the neoliberal focus on individual responsibility for consumption and feeding others to examine ways we can create policies and strategies to more collectively provide access to food and improve health.

ABSTRACT. Throughout much of the literature on the history of beer in general and hops in particular, there is often a brief mention of the moment when Wisconsin hops dominated much of the global hop market, and then declined nearly overnight, from 1867 to 1868. This paper takes that moment as its object, to investigate how and when hops took hold in the soil of what, at the time, was only freshly termed “Wisconsin.” What ecologies did the hop rhizomes encounter? What were the physical and social landscapes that gave these plants their home, and how did the plants, landscapes, and people act upon each other? The thirst for beer, not only in Milwaukee, but in New York, Boston, Liverpool, and Dublin, had consequences for the river valleys and deep loamy soils of this state, and the people, plants, and animals that inhabited those spaces. The heart of the 19th century hop boom was the town of Kilbourn City, now known as Wisconsin Dells, an hour north of Madison. Acre upon acre of this state once housed row upon row of hop bines, often harvested by young white women. At first glance, that industry leaves almost no trace in the topography of the state. But I set out in search of physical and archival remnants, using historical maps, old newspapers and local histories, collections of letters, and oral histories to piece together these past physical and social landscapes. I find fragments of correspondence about the hop-picking sisters of a Civil War soldier, and forgotten mid-19th century beer caves tucked into hillsides across this beer-loving state. These sources reveal white settlers using hops as one of many colonizing agricultural plants, part of a massive and violent change in human power relations and botanical organisms in the Wisconsin landscape. I also find a profoundly global awareness among the hop farmers who frantically open their newspapers to see reports of the prices of hops in Milwaukee, New York, and London as the bottom drops out of the market in 1868. At its peak, this hop cultivation had almost nothing to do with closed circuits of local production and consumption, but rather was part of a volatile worldwide market in pursuit of the highly perishable oils and acids of the hop blossom.

ABSTRACT. Modern beer was invented on October 5, 1842, by Josef Groll, a Bavarian brewmaster employed by the Bürgerliches Brauhaus in the Bohemian town of Pilsen. The light, clear, sparkling Pilsner style of beer was carried around the world by merchants, migrants, and empire builders, becoming known under such diverse names as Budweiser, Heineken, Corona, Kingfisher, Castle, Sapporo, and Tsingtao, as well as the original Pilsner Urquell. Along the way, the European beer displaced countless traditional, local beverages, thereby providing a seemingly textbook case of cultural imperialism. But this paper will argue that Pilsner was not just an agent of globalization, it was also a product of globalization, whose chemical and biological nature was successively reinvented in locations around the world. Founded on British and Bavarian advances in mass production and fermentation technology, Pilsner was adapted to local tastes, market conditions, and supply chains in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

ABSTRACT. Winemakers around the world honor the crucial role of terroir in their work. Grapes exposed to the sun, soil, and breeze on one hillside create a wine that is distinct from a wine derived from the neighboring hillside. At first take, geographic location seems to matter less to brewing. Nineteenth-century German emigrants to America imported malt and hops to achieve beer styles that tasted like they did across the Atlantic. Refrigeration negated the need for ambient cool temperatures to prevent beer spoilage. By the mid- to late twentieth century, large breweries like Anheuser-Busch produced homogeneous batches in facilities around the globe. American beer tasted the same everywhere. In other words, American beer tasted like nowhere.

The American “craft beer revolution,” however, initiated a sea change in the relationship between brewing and a sense of place. Oral histories recorded for the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History shed light on the many American landscapes that are intrinsic to the work of brewers, growers, maltsters, and other industry figures. This paper argues that the terroir of American craft beer is multi-faceted, comprising elements that are social, cultural, and historical in addition to environmental. Brewers rely on agricultural products as the first step in their brewing process; many work in tandem with growers to develop new strains of hops and select them in the field. Seasonal rhythms direct brewers toward fresh, if not local, ingredients and historic or new styles. The landscapes of American beer are human, too. Breweries embed themselves in communities, identifying with industries long present in the vicinity or seeking to revitalize neglected urban districts. Employee ownership models, philanthropy, and environmental sustainability appeal to many brewers as ways to encourage community well-being. Craft brewers offer insight, too, to a sense of place writ large in relation to brewing. Could craft beer have begun anywhere besides northern California? Why have cities like Boulder, CO, developed into epicenters of new brewing culture, whereas other cities have not? How do the brewing histories of places like Madison and Milwaukee, WI, continue to influence the brewing present?

With the recorder on, brewers, growers, and others reflected on the role of place in American beer. Their oral histories generate a new history of brewing in America and its relationship to the landscapes around it.

ABSTRACT. “Seed is life, it is a gift from Pachamama/Papatūānuku (Mother Earth), and when we cultivate our seeds, we dance, sing and rejoice together with all our relatives: mountains, lakes, animals, stars, sun, and moon.”

This quote captured during my study in Peru and Aotearoa/New Zealand encapsulates Quechua and Māori peoples’ unique knowledge systems and traditions of stewardship over the environment for safeguarding food security. This quote also highlights the important role that seeds play in Indigenous cultural, economic and environmental systems. Food in the form of seeds for Indigenous peoples plays a significant role not only in providing food but also in sustaining cultural knowledge and protection of a country’s agro-biodiversity. For example, the longstanding relationship that Māori has with food dates back to pre-colonial times and the the kūmara (sweet potato) is and continues to be regarded a sacred crop for Māori. Peru’s rich biodiversity is one of the pillars of its national economy; the country has over 2,500 varieties of potatoes. This study provides research-based evidence how Native seeds and agriculture biodiversity are endangered by biopiracy and the endorsement of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that inhibits the continuum of their right to healthy and culturally appropriate food. This research argues that the sanctity of seeds for Andeans and Māori relates to their Indigenous self-determination to restore their cultural origins and relationships with all beings, and to ensure that food security remains under the control of their communities. Research findings make a case for seed sovereignty acting as a contributor to a group’s collective well-being/Buen Vivir and self-determination to preserve cultural heritage and knowledge. This study concludes that seed sovereignty goes beyond the rights-based approach to food; rather, it is a tool for revitalizing Indigenous peoples’ food systems, for advocacy and policy change in food systems, and for moving beyond colonial approaches to food and culture.

ABSTRACT. “Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it.” – Aldo Leopold

“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.” – Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold described relationship with the land in terms of both reading and writing. In his conception, reading the land requires keen sensitivity to its needs and nuances; writing the landscape requires the same sensitivity along with the boldness to act.

Agriculture is one of humankind’s most significant signatures on the land. As such, the foods produced by that agriculture – from locally raised radishes to imported papaya – represent a “land signature” with which every person interacts daily. By deciding which attributes we value in our food, we humans have significant power to determine not only the character of our daily cuisine but the impact of its production on our environment. In this way, Aldo Leopold’s land ethic extends naturally into a food ethic.

Participatory plant breeding (PPB) projects seek to create cultivars that serve the unique needs of a region’s farmers, the particular tastes of its consumers, and the specific requirements of its land. Attendees will learn how participatory plant breeding works, hear the stories of PPB projects nationwide, and (literally) see the seeds of a current UW-Madison PPB project. That is, the Ph.D. research of presenter Solveig Hanson is engaging Wisconsin farmers, chefs, and consumers in creating uniquely colored, distinctively flavored beet cultivars. Two cycles of selection have been completed, allowing the “signatures” of participating farmers and consumers to emerge in the developing beet populations.

Discussion is invited about the values that currently drive crop plant breeding and ways that seed, farm, and food systems could evolve to better serve farmers, inspire cooks, and delight eaters.

ABSTRACT. Some farmers in the Guatemalan department of Quetzaltenango have begun to grow vegetables for local markets without the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. This recent development is set against a history of the region’s producers chemically growing non-traditional crops like broccoli, beets, and lettuces for export to nearby countries. Many of the non-chemical farmers are learning the language and techniques of their production from a large assemblage of organizations that make up a competitive market of alternative farming approaches. Local and foreign citizen, government, non-profit, private, and aid groups variably promote agroecology, permaculture, ancestral Maya production, conservation agriculture, appropriate technology, and biodynamic farming as solutions to problems ranging from rural development to climate change. The paper shows how the various actors who make up the assemblage, including the farmers themselves, mediate the discourses and practices of this cornucopia of alternative approaches while navigating a complex and competitive aid/development landscape.

ABSTRACT. The author proposes that the so-called "subsistence economy" of indigenous Alaska is more properly understood as a sacred, gift-exchange economy that is "our way of life." In the sacred economy, all its elements -- men and women and their families, the land they live on and share with animal and plant and the other beings, their connections with animals and the other beings through proper behavior, their technology, Luck, money, and food, the means by which all remain living -- are intricately related, in a world in which nothing is static.

This 'sacred economy' is based in hunting and in it, food from the land is known to give spiritual as well as physical nourishment. The author looks at the remarkable "Crow Story," a traditional story from the First Beginning, in the version written by the late Dena'ina Athabaskan (Alaskan) writer Peter Kalfornsky, which tells how Crow (Raven) gave the first songs and stories to the Campfire People. It describes with great humor, with song, and with unexpected twists that there is a "compact between the humans and animals," according to Kalifornsky. He ends the story thusly:

Sometime later, Crow visited his friend Camprobber and told him the story. “I went to visit the Campfire People,” he said. “They tell stories about me full of jokes and good times. When they go hunting I wish them good luck. Then they make a kill, and all of us Crows have a good dinner party!”

The author of this paper offers the story and its interpretation -- drawn from her work with Peter Kalifornsky -- as a way of understanding and illustrating the intricate relationships between story, cultural knowledge, mutual respect, place, and nourishment that allows the Dena'ina to keep living. She thinks that people of other backgrounds might recognize similarities with their own cultural practices, and invites comparisons.

ABSTRACT. The technological innovations of the mid-20th century kitchen, from zappable meals to seven-use-in-one appliances promised to liberate women from the drudgery of cooking. In their advertisements, companies such as Tupperware, Thermador, and Reddi-Whip spoke directly to the ever-busier schedule of the modern woman, promising that innovations in the kitchen would produce “more time and energy to spend with family and friends,” and even make them better wives and mothers. But the tools of the 21st-century kitchen were evolving in silent tandem with a much more contentious series of innovations—those of oral contraception. The adage of "better living through science" in the post-war era delivered notions of women's emancipation that were at odds with each other: one from the drudgery of kitchen labor, and one from the obligations of pregnancy and motherhood. In the rhetoric surrounding the promotion (or lambasting) of these technological advances, we can see fundamental questions about the role of technology in the lives of everyday women: what was liberation for, to provide more time for mothering and caretaking, or to make more time beyond the house entirely? In reading the concurrent development of these technologies, one exposes the conflicting embrace of scientific progress in women’s lives in this new era of possible progress.

ABSTRACT. Marietta had a little lamb; she raised and fed him well... and he placed third at the 1933 Montana Fat Lamb Show.  He was bought by the S&B grocery and ended up on dinner plates around Great Falls.  But before he became a meal, Marietta's lamb was a yearlong lesson in eating.  As a 4-H club project, Marietta's lamb was part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's efforts to make American farming more scientific and standardized. Between the lambing pen and the grocery store, Marietta and her lamb taught one another about food and nutrition.  As Marietta fattened her lamb, she kept careful track of what she fed him and how much weight he gained.  She read 4-H bulletins that explained the nutritional elements of different feeds and the properties they would impart to her lamb.  As her lamb grew, he offered Marietta immediate lessons in how nutritional science could produce healthier animals—lessons she could then apply to her own eating as she filled out a personal health and food habits record for herself.  The story of Marietta and her lamb, and the human health work into which it fed, illuminates how 4-H, the Extension Service, and other USDA efforts used methods originally conceived for improving crop and livestock raising as a model for teaching rural people about human nutrition as well.

ABSTRACT. Feeding the animals that contribute to meat and milk production has always been an important practice maintaining our larger food systems. Recently, the resources used to feed food animals has come into question as we contemplate our agroecological futures. Grass-fed, grain-fed, and GMO-fed animals have different values attached to the respective meat and milk that come from them. Some human consumers argue eliminating animal products from their diets is the best course of action to eliminate the animal “middle man” from such plant-based resources.

Before we can imagine changing current systems of production attached to animal feeding – we need to understand how these systems were established in the first place. Historically, the importance of animal feed was punctuated with the federal regulation of animal feed products alongside human food in the early 20th century. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 thus did not only impact human food manufacturers. It also affected how manufacturers of animal feed labeled and sold food in the United States. Feed analyses conducted by agricultural colleges in the early 20th century informed the basis of these laws.

After the Pure Food and Drug Act, feed businesses sought to protect their nutritional advising territory from these colleges and the legislative restrictions informed by them. In this paper, I describe how feed manufacturing businesses formed alliances with agricultural colleges, acting as extension “middle men” in the animal feed system. This alliance, along with the development of the American Feed Manufacturers Association to lobby for feed company rights, created the foundations of the animal feed industry as it is conceived today. A closer look at how feed businesses made themselves indispensable in our food systems through authoritative networks may bring to light how feeding cattle represents a more complicated socio-political network, which has been building since the early 20th century.

ABSTRACT. During World War II, public schools across the United States grew “Victory Gardens.” Many schools did not allow students to keep the produce they grew; instead, the vegetables were processed and used directly in the school lunch program. Working mothers demanded school lunches, since they would not be home if children were sent home to eat. Student gardening served as an important stop-gap between the end of New Deal school lunch programs and the 1946 National School Lunch Program (NSLP). On first glance, it seems that school gardens, touted as sites where children could learn about nutrition and health, were rejected along with nutritional standards for school lunch programs in the 1946 NSLP. However, when one examines the scientific, technological approaches to food taught in school gardens, the transition becomes more legible: from educating children about agricultural expertise, to allowing those with expertise in food production to provide foodstuffs. The gendered differences between home economics and vocational agriculture garden lessons demonstrate the politics of technology and expertise at play. This paper will examine how school nutrition curricula informed school victory gardens and the NSLP to come.

PANEL ABSTRACT: This panel proposes to look at instances in the twentieth century when Americans envisioned food through the lens of new dietetic and chemical science, following the chain of nutrients from soil to plant (sometimes to animal) and then to human mouths to create healthful bodies. When scholars follow these chains, we are able to more fully connect the agricultural to the domestic, spanning an artificial divide often replicated not only in society but in scholarship. Between the farm and the table lie many intermediaries that appear in our papers: biological (cows processing corn into beef), technological (combine harvesters harvesting bulk grains for children’s school lunches), and socio-cultural (the diffusion of nutritional education among children and housewifes to shape American diets). In the United States, these intermediaries are all in constant conversation with the market and the pursuit of profit: the business of growing food and of eating it. While in the contemporary United States, the function of these intermediaries is often invisible or obscured, this panel aims to explore and parse the chains that bind the American kitchen inexorably to the farm in the twentieth century.

ABSTRACT. From Lester Brown’s 1995 book, , to the 2015 New York Times article, “Why China Will Reclaim Siberia,” sensational titles cite global concern for the ecological burden of feeding the world’s largest population and the menace of China’s rising power in its quest for national food security. However, China shows pride in achieving national food security through grain self-sufficiency. While rural household farming remains the mainstay of agricultural production, state-owned agribusinesses have become major contributors to food security. The Beidahuang Group, China’s largest state-owned agribusiness, has gained a capacity to feed 10% of the Chinese population since the 2000s.

This paper analyzes the changing values of “wilderness” in the past 70 years as revealed in the transformation of Beidahuang from China’s largest concentration of freshwater wetlands to its largest complex of state farms. Driven by the “grain first” policy since the 1950s, Beidahuang wetlands in China’s northeastern frontier in Heilongjiang province were treated as “wastelands” to be reclaimed and cultivated. Tens of thousands of state-mobilized migrants, including veterans, rural and urban youths, political exiles and incarcerated criminals, were deployed to the frontier to build army farms and work farms, which evolved into today’s 113 state farms administered by the Beidahuang Group, with a total population of 1.67 million. However, the economic success of modern agriculture and human settlement has lead to more and more pronounced ecological consequences since the 1980s, with intensified soil degradation, lost habitat for endangered species, and increasingly frequent and severe floods and droughts, just to name a few. Ironically, “wilderness” has become a symbol to be capitalized in the age of rising environmental awareness of the public since the 1990s. “Wilderness” now invokes the pursuit of the pristine and organic––sought-out qualities for agricultural products in national and global markets. And yet, what is most intriguing is that, despite the fact that agricultural activities have drastically reduced the ecosystem services of wetlands, the Beidahuang Group has been designated by the state as both a model for modern agriculture and an exemplar for ecological conservation. This paper, therefore, will examine the state’s changing visions of Beidahuang wetlands and Beidahuang Group’s efforts in protecting wetlands while maintaining a continuous increase in grain yield in the past 15 years to reveal China’s strategies for mitigating environmental damages.

ABSTRACT. New forms of scientific, divine, and microbial collaboration have arisen in the context of the Philippine banana industry’s battle against Fusarium Wilt Tropical Race 4. Also known as “Panama Disease,” Fusarium Wilt is a deadly soil-borne fungal disease affecting the banana industry on a global scale. Plant pathologists in the 21st century have declared the virulent strain to be “incurable” by synthetic or chemical means. This has attracted apocalyptic declarations from Western media touting the imminent death of the world’s favorite fruit.

This paper presents one Philippine research team’s initiative to offer an unconventional solution to what many frame as an impending agricultural tragedy. Crop Vaccine (Bialexins) is a biological plant antibiotic that an increasing number of Filipino farmers have championed as the answer to the “bananapocalypse.” Its inventor developed the formula from a series of prophetic dreams in a departure not only from the paradigms of conventional soil science, but also from what is commonly understood as the scientific method. Banana farmers testify to Bialexin’s efficacy even as they fail to provide scientifically acceptable “proof” for their cause, employing instead localized understandings of soil ecologies and the irrefutable logic of the divine (“This is grace from God!”). This has compelled some plant scientists and industry management to dismiss the technology as either pseudoscience or a clever marketing scheme. In other cases, however, the resolve to find a cure in the absence of “scientific solutions” has opened up surprising opportunities for collaboration across the table: between multinational corporations and the pro-organic activists, agrichemical advocates and microbes, and humankind and God.

These feats of “backyard science” call into question the foundations of modern plantation agriculture and its reductionist “N-P-K mentality.” They must be taken seriously both as technological innovations and as forms of microbiopolitics, to borrow Paxson’s important term. This paper asks what conceptual tools are available to academia to recognize and legitimize local agroecological methods, and to open up collaborative channels on wider scales.

ABSTRACT. Consumers continue to seek out foods perceived to be minimally processed, and maximally free of additives, colourants, and other elements perceived to carry risks. The desire for clean eating, whole foods, and organic are in some senses versions of GMO panic.

However, the reasons why people fear food technologies are frequently not grounded in good scientific reasoning, but are instead motivated by misunderstanding or ignorance of the science, as well as a number of logical fallacies and psychological biases.

These problems are exacerbated by a number of factors, including advocacy groups who care less for good science than for promoting their cause; "churnalism", where misleading press releases are given wide circulation; and how difficult it can be for members of the public to differentiate good scientific reasoning from bad.

Perhaps most concerning is the fact that the "wisdom of the crowd", as expressed on social media and clickbait-driven websites, can drown out the views of subject experts, and allow for fearmongering and distrust of science to take precedence.

This talk will discuss ways in which scientists and science communicators can help consumers understand the ways in which they might be prone to be misled, and to introduce concepts that will make them better able to evaluate scientific claims in order to make more informed decisions.

ABSTRACT. The robots are coming. Machines have largely supplanted human agricultural labor; computing increasingly replaces human cognition. The increasing colonization of agriculture as the province of these machines suggests a future where the diversity and complexity of natural systems outside of human control will be replaced by systems more amenable to uniformity, and hence manipulation. This trend – the ever-increasing application of modern technology to agriculture – exemplifies Heidegger’s notion of Gestell, or “enframing”: a human mode of interacting with the world as an abstract “standing-reserve”, perceived solely according to its value for efficient re-distribution and re-organization. The continual pressure to increase agricultural yield demonstrates the encompassing nature of this relationship, driving progressive refinements in the efficiency of nearly every aspect of food production, from crop development, to fertility management, to automated harvesting and processing. These developments progressively exclude a notion of nature “in and of itself” from entering into agricultural practice, and increasingly exclude humans as well, as a vanishingly few number of people linger in a form of agriculture predominated by the maximal utilization of the “standing-reserve.”

Countervailing modes of agriculture (whether pre-existing indigenous practices, or the modern reactions of organics and biodynamics) temper the anthropocentrism of enframing by emphasizing humans’ roles as “members-not-manipulators” of the world. Such modes seem to be motivated not purely by a specific set of prescriptive standards, but rather an attraction towards an alternative manner of relating to the natural world. Realizing such an alternative remains a challenge within any context dominated by enframing. Reaffirming the role of people and wildness as a critical part of agriculture represents a possible antidote to the worldview of enframing, by (re-)establishing this “humans-as-members” identity.

This reaffirmation may facilitate an experience of interdependence with, rather than manipulation of, human and natural communities, and offers an opportunity for what Levinas terms an “encounter with the Other.” Herein, a relational ethics opens the door to agriculture rooted in Aldo Leopold’s (and others’) conception of land as a “community to which we belong.” As the scale of human activity in the anthropocene exceeds planetary boundaries, a wider participation in the ethics of interdependence may help catalyze the collective action necessary to sustain the prospect of agriculture within these boundaries.

ABSTRACT. College and university campuses are a prominent part of today’s “good food movement”. There’s a crescendo of academic and extra-curricular activity on campuses around agroecology and sustainable, healthful, ethical food systems; activism, and success, on behalf of “better” food service on campus is accelerating; wide-ranging food studies courses and programs are increasing in number. And there’s enormous room and need for further success. All session attendees are invited to briefly share models or programs they’d recommend for replication. We’ll begin describing three: A template exploring what it would look like if an institution’s administrative function as campus food service provider were linked to its academics. On a college campus think dining services inviting input from students studying foreign languages/cultures for ethnic food events; students in business, food systems, public health and sustainability courses researching a single ingredient: where it comes from, where else that ingredient might come from, its nutritional value, and art students designing a format for disseminating that information in dining halls and beyond. Even better, what if the college/university leadership chose to encourage transdisciplinary and experiential learning by recommending that food become a broad lateral theme across academic silos and administrative sectors—academics, campus life and campus operations. Hear about the exciting trajectory of UW-Madison’s Food Studies Network whose two coordinators are Art Department faculty. Taking as its foundational truth that food is “among the most transdisciplinary of themes” the Network is catalyzing increasingly broader collaborative work across the academic landscape and in the community. The pre-conference Sustainable Meal Hackathon is but one example. Learn (learn more, if you participated in the pre-conference Farm to Institution tour) about the path to a responsible and sustainable food system, and future goals, of UW Health, as well as challenges faced. UW Health continues to introduce delicious, healthier choices that are locally and sustainably sourced. UW Health provides food for all those eating on-site—patients, staff, visitors and students—and has seen substantially increased volume in its cafeteria and other outlets. In tandem UW Health is improving internal and external food and nutrition education. Bring your stories to share, hear others, and imagine what could be as we strategize about building toward greater success on individual campuses and as a movement. Our goal will be to leave the round table with plans to build bridges, to identify potential new collaborators and to strengthen our networks. And we’ll set timelines.

ABSTRACT. “Food systems” and “sustainability” are often abstractions, hard to relate to people’s everyday lives.  Narratives of food, agriculture, foodways, and community are a critical means of bringing those abstractions into ordinary practice. Oral histories work well when they are tied to the visual, the demonstrable, and the personal. The creation of a regional oral history archive focused on current and historic food and agricultural practices may be rooted in preservation but may also be a means to support and promote social and economic incentives for regional food systems. In the same way that agricultural tourism generates engagement with landscape, history, and labor, oral histories can provide material engagement and narratives that encourage regional consumption.

This roundtable focuses on one such oral history project, the Western Pennsylvania Foodways Archive (WPFA), which aims to be a hub for information, resources, learning opportunities, and technical assistance on food systems problems. The archive is housed at the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation at Chatham University, with a mission to transform food and agriculture in the region, fostering more sustainable, equitable, transparent, and inclusive food communities. The oral histories work in tandem with the hands-on work of product development, entrepreneurial support, culinary tourism, and skills workshops.

The WPFA has multiple goals: to collect and share oral histories, as well as contextual material such as interviews, recipes, images, and written text, to document past and current agriculture and food stories of the region; to provide a home for food, labor, and gender knowledge that may otherwise go undiscovered; and to make this knowledge accessible to the public, aligned with the principles of public history, by tying it to practical workshops and engaging pop-up dinners for the community, as well as sharing it through interactive web-based mediums.

The roundtable will focus on the multiple and occasionally competing aims of such a project, discussing how to navigate the demands of oral history and food voice narratives with economic and community development projects, environmental issues, and the limits of market-based solutions to regional food systems.

ABSTRACT. We submit this project as an "organized panel session" - roundtable:

What can Design bring to Food Studies, and vice versa? This session will reflect on methodological, theoretical, and practical issues arising from the interaction between Food Studies and Design, two very distinct fields which however can generate interesting and innovative synergies. Their interaction has the potential for reflecting and operating in original ways on urgent contemporary issues regarding food systems, from production to consumption. The participants, all of whom have experience teaching at the intersection of Design and Food Studies, will share their best practices, their pedagogy, and their research in a round table aimed at enhancing the transdisciplinary dialogue between the two fields.

ABSTRACT. Within two years of seceding, citizens of the Confederate States of America were struggling to access everyday goods and foodstuffs. With ports barricaded, trade prohibited with the United States, and their normal diets in crisis, southerners published their substitutions and workarounds for common recipes and medicinal remedies. Alongside treatments for asthma and recommendations for flubbing fresh oysters, "The Confederate Receipt Book: A Compilation of Over One Hundred Receipts Adapted to the Times," published without an author in 1863 in Virginia, includes a recipe for "Apple Pie Without Apples." The pie is just as the name suggests. It relies upon the typical flavor profile of an apple pie--it is sweetened to taste, rich from a small addition of butter, and spiced with nutmeg--but substitutes fruit for crackers soaked in water and cream of tartar. It is the only dessert, the only gesture towards luxury, in this otherwise thrifty text and its significance lies well beyond its seemingly oxymoronic name.

As a national symbol, apple pie is nuanced--it can conjure images of stability, an agrarian past, and one’s own mother--and, accordingly, it has enjoyed a special status in the American imagination. While seemingly timeless, apple pie’s national significance was gradually accumulated. Historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” applied to historical recipe analysis helps account for the development of apple pie’s national resonance. This presentation will argue that mid- and late-nineteenth century apple pie variants like “Apple Pie Without Apples” and “A California Pioneer Apple Pie" indicate a transitional moment in apple pie’s symbolic ascendancy as they represent a desire for familiarity or normalcy in moments of national uncertainty. As these two regional communities approximated apple pie in times of crisis and uncertainty using more accessible foodstuffs, this presentation will argue that apple pie was imbued with some nostalgic weight and ubiquity in the nineteenth century not explicitly limited by region.

ABSTRACT. As a leading women’s magazine during the Progressive Era, "Good Housekeeping" was a premier source of information for housewives on the developing science of nutrition. The magazine’s articles and editorials on how to cook and what to consume were infused with cautionary advice regarding improper eating as a symptom, and even a cause, of moral failings on the part of the eater or the housewife who failed to feed her family a diet of moderation. Nowhere was this more obvious than in advice on the dread symptom of modern middle class life, dyspepsia. In this paper, I trace the magazine’s obsession in its early years with this digestive ailment, and dyspepsia’s decline as a social and moral problem when a new obsession with body weight and size took its place as the magazine began to focus more on calories and the slim ideal by 1920.

ABSTRACT. The pages of Favorite Recipes, a community cookbook compiled by the members of the Mount Desert chapter of Order of the Eastern Star in 1927, chronicles a transitory moment in the American food system. This recipe collection preserves the transition to an industrialized food system with ingredients representing local resources and nationally available commercial brands comingling within the pages, sometimes within the same recipe. While in the eyes of the outside world, Maine food culture revolves around local produce – lobster, blueberries, maple syrup, etc. – this collection reveals the influence of national commercial brand on the Maine diet in the early twentieth century. Staples of nineteenth-century foodways appear in the collection, however, the influence of national, commercial brand is apparent in the ingredients list. Approximately forty-percent of the recipes contained within the volume reference a commercialized name-brand product, such as Pillsbury’s Health Bran, Kellogg’s All Bran, Dunham’s Coconut, Karo Syrup, Dot Chocolate, and Quaker Oats, or ingredients that were made available by technological advances and national transportation networks, including various canned products, tropical fruits, marshmallows, puffed rice, and peanut butter. Conversely, recipes referencing specific local products are relatively rare. Many common ingredients were likely sourced locally, but only clams, alewives, blueberries, and maple syrup are specifically noted as available locally. Favorite Recipes paints a portrait of a community. Preserving a record of the food items available within a rural municipality along the Maine coast. This regional foodways of nearly a century ago has something to offer researchers in the twenty-first century: a glimpse at what our great-great-grandmother’s ate. In “Unhappy Meals,” Michael Pollan provides a handful of unscientific rules of thumb to point readers in the general direction of health and sustainable eating. His first rule states, “don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” One of the first steps to eating sustainably is revisiting foodways before the invention and widespread acceptance of processed foods. Favorite Recipes provides a window into the eating habits of the early twentieth-century inhabitants of Mount Desert, Maine at a critical juncture as local and homemade eating habits gave way to nationalized and commercialized food choices.

ABSTRACT. Women have long played an integral role in the production and preservation of food, yet are often invisible in agricultural history. At the turn of the century women shifted from primarily home laborers to working in commercial factories processing food. The sauerkraut industry exemplified this shift in Upstate New York where cabbage served as a major agricultural crop. The importance of cabbage and sauerkraut in the early 1900's stemmed from both cultural significance to immigrant settlers as well as its ability to store and transport at a time when there was limited access to cold storage.

At the heart of these old factories were rural women who processed the raw cabbage into nutritious fermented sauerkraut. In 1913 considerably more than half of the cannery workers in New York State were women (Factory Investigating Commission, 1913). Who were these female fermenters and in what ways did they shape the cultural foodways of the region? How did their roles in their families, communities, and workplaces change? Through interviews, archival research, and scholarly literature their story is revealed as one of reliance and multifaceted identity.

References New York (State). Factory Investigating Commission, Hall, G. A., Goldmark, P. D., Vogt, J. H., Rogers, C. T. G., McKenna, C. F., . . . Price, G. M. (1913). Second report of the factory investigating commission, 1913.

ABSTRACT. Over the past five years, the Malawi Farmer to Farmer Agroecology project has engaged 6,000 smallholder farming households in participatory research around agroecological farming practices, food security, nutrition, and gender. In 2017, the project entered a new phase in which researchers and farmers are investigating how agroecological practice use has affected biodiversity at the farm and landscape scale. Central to this new research program is the objective to engage farmers to identify, test, and implement a suite of agroecological pest management strategies that simultaneously improve food security and support biodiversity.

Numerous scholars have stressed the importance of integrating local priorities, knowledge, and beliefs into agricultural development projects, particularly when working with smallholder farmers in a post-colonial context. Few studies in Africa, however, have specifically focused on insects, birds and other biological organisms that make up wild agrobiodiversity. As part of a broader project to understand the impact of farm-level practices on wild biodiversity, our aim in this study was to gain insight into farmer knowledge and perceptions of crop pests, birds, beneficial invertebrates, and local management strategies. To achieve this goal, we interviewed 43 Malawian farmers in January 2018, using a participatory method called photovoice. The findings from these interviews will inform data collection and next steps in the participatory research design.

In this paper, we discuss photovoice as a method to understand and assess indigenous technical knowledge regarding insects, birds and ecosystem services from wild biodiversity. While this method has been used in Africa to explore local perceptions of biodiversity and conservation within game reserves, it has not been used to explore smallholder farmer perceptions of wild biodiversity within agroecosystems. We find that when combined with semi-structured interviews and field observation, photovoice is an effective method to gain insight into farmers’ priorities regarding pest management, the diversity of local management strategies, and common knowledge gaps. Photographs gave insight into the ways in which farmers observed (or ignored) insects and birds that reflected broader understandings of their agroecosystems as well as some key gaps. Photovoice also can help overcome language barriers and different conceptual models for taxonomizing biodiversity when a researcher is working within a new cultural and linguistic context. We review the benefits and lessons learned from using photovoice within this research context, while highlighting initial findings shaping agroecological pest management research in northern Malawi.

ABSTRACT. This presentation highlights efforts to preserve and restore biodiversity in conventional agriculture in “Agrícola Santa Amalia”, a farm in the State of Guanajuato, Mexico dedicated to the production of Food Safety and Fair Trade certified vegetables. Agriculture and environmental concerns took different paths, sometimes in opposite directions, to the point that agriculture became synonym of wellbeing and productivity, while ecology became a synonym of being against growth and development. Ecology was sometimes referred to the science of the: "No!" At Santa Amalia, agriculture and environmental concerns join their paths towards a comprehensive, holistic, multiple, balanced and sustainable path. About 20% of Santa Amalia’s land is devoted to restoration into a biological corridor, benefiting species such as the Monarch butterfly and many migratory birds. The main goals of the project include: i) To restore bordering areas with native vegetation to attract pollinators and building biological corridors; ii) To develop actions that could be replicated within the region and to foster public policy for agriculture in central Mexico; iii) To conduct research and systematize information to strengthen the transition to sustainable development; iv) To train and share results with different sectors of society. Actions taken in Santa Amalia include: i) Soil preservation and water saving techniques with incorporation of organic matter into the soil; ii) Trimming and sanitation; iii) Placement of drinking troughs for wild fauna protection and population control; iv) Joint actions with scientists of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the National Laboratory for Biodiversity Genetics, University of Guanajuato; v) Negotiation of public policies to incorporate biodiversity into agricultural practices; vi) Flora restoration, mainly in the herbaceous, shrub and arboreal strata. Our results show that incorporating organic matter into the soil for twenty years has yielded substantial soil enrichment, water saving and agricultural production. Since 2016, 10,000 trees, shrubs and grasses were planted, and collaboration with research centers, universities and farmer's associations was established. Our conclusion is that preservation and biodiversity do not go against agricultural production, and that the growing demand for better quality produce grown sustainably fosters economic markets and better agricultural practices that incorporate food safety, and social and environmental responsibility. In addition, the creation of biological corridors and best agricultural practices contribute to the mitigation of weather change.

ABSTRACT. The objective of this paper is to present and to discuss an education experience in agroecology, the Nucleus of Studies in Agroecology of Mantiqueira (http://neamantiqueira.com.br/) from the perspective of Social Exchange Theory - SET (Emerson, 1976). Brazilian agribusiness is formed mainly for big organizations dedicated to commodity market monocultures. Brazil has around 203 million of inhabitants, and 15% lies in the rural area, with a tendency to fall (Agr_Brasil, 2014). Small and family farmers are responsible by 70% of the production of food consumed in this country. The Minas Gerais State, where this study is developed, the family farmers occupy area of 8,845,883 hectares. Small and family farmers, allocated in a radius of 80 km of Bocaina of Minas, environmental protection area in Mantiqueira Mountains, face hurdle of production due to diseases, lack of agricultural knowledge, little adaptation with environmental resources available in cultivation process, low social integration and economic difficulties for survival. New residents of the region, technicians in Agroecology, Marcelo and Bruno, joined Professor Itamar F. Souza from Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), to run an extension project, between the years 2015 to 2017, with the following goals: Boost the agroecology by providing change of perspective at the human being, where each one must realize the environment and relate themselves in a more integrated way. This work was done at the individual level and your awareness. In this phase 12 meetings were held, impacting around 420 people. The second objective was the involvement of UFLA in workshops and researches, contemplating the elaboration of a course in agroecology for the formation of students of the university. The SET was chosen to discuss this experience because it focuses attention on social behavior and interactions, followed by actions that generate reactions to the other. Based on the logic of stimulus, response and reinforcement, SET works with the concepts of reward and value. It was observed that the formation of groups to discuss the barriers of agriculture in the region and to know the possibilities of agroecology, was instrumental in stimulating social dialogue and illuminating the paths to follow. After completing this first training phase, the challenges are to maintain social interactions and its evolution towards the formation of a agroecological network of food supply.

REFERENCES

Agr_Brasil (2018). Perfil do Agronegócio Brasileiro. At http://www.reformaagraria.mg.gov.br/images/documentos/perfil_brasil_jan_2018[1].pdf, on 10th feb, 2018.

Emerson, R.M (1976). Social exchange theory. Annual Review of Sociology, p. 335-362.

ABSTRACT. This study sought to assess the impact of farmers’ use of the cocoa production technology disseminated to them by the Commercial Agricultural Development Project (CADP) facilitators in Cross Rivers State, Nigeria. Multistage sampling procedure was used in selecting 120 cocoa farmers. Descriptive and t-statistics were used in analysing data. Focus group discussions, key informant interview and sample survey were employed in eliciting responses from the respondents. Results of the study indicated that the cocoa production technology mostly used by the farmers were superior improved hybrid seedling, pruning machines to prune the shrubs and mechanical weed cutlers machines to control weeds, among others which suggests a high level of usage of the improved production technologies by the farmers. The result of the processing segment shows that the primary processing practices adopted were; use of equipment such as; pots, baskets, improved fermentation boxes, etc.; and breaking of pods with blunt object to reduce damages to cocoa beans through indigenous knowledge; among others. The result of the marketing segment showed that the measures used were; market facilitation by CADP for easy access to markets; quality control measures; and use of moisture testing kits called “aqua boy” to detect excess moisture due to improper drying, among others. Also, the benefits derived from CADP by the farmers were; matching grants from CADP; technology demonstration and capacity building on grafting technology on older cocoa stem for rehabilitation of old cocoa farms; etc. There were significant changes in certain areas of the socio-economic lives of the participant farmers before and after the inception of the project, such as; average quantity of crop harvested by the participant farmers, etc. Perceived constraints to their use of the technology was insufficient information, difficulty in acquiring land, institutional bottlenecks, etc. The project should develop and strengthen their ICT systems to provide timely and reliable information to farmers to enable them adopt the entire technology package.

ABSTRACT. Since the release in 2006 of the UN Livestock’s Long Shadow report on the contribution of livestock to climate change, the old debate around eating meat has divided into three main narratives in the US. The vegetarian narrative is that reducing or eliminating meat consumption is the most important action an individual can take to reduce his or her carbon footprint. The mainstream agricultural narrative is that modern intensive techniques of raising livestock are so efficient that the impact of US meat is negligible. The alternative agricultural narrative is that grazed grasslands can sequester significant amounts of carbon, so grass-based meat production can actually have a net climate benefit. All three of these narratives have support in the scientific literature; all three have some basis in fact; all three are spread by advocacy groups that ignore important information that challenges their simplistic conclusions; and all three have tended to result in a pattern of blaming others for climate change rather than real efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This session will outline the assumptions and key omissions behind the three narratives and recommend an alternative narrative designed to encourage real reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The factors influencing greenhouse gas emissions are many, and they interact in complex ways. Moreover, many details about net greenhouse gas exchange in soils are as yet poorly understood. As with the larger debate around whether climate change is truly caused by human action, this complexity and uncertainty allows distorted arguments to spread. At the same time, as with the larger debate around climate change, we do know enough to promote a nuanced and accurate but coherent message about the role of livestock in climate change and what that knowledge signifies for both farmers and consumers. In brief that message to farmers is if you raise livestock there are important things you can do to minimize your carbon footprint within your current farming system. Consumers can minimize all food waste, understand the climate change impact of various dietary choices, and recognize that greenhouse gas emissions are just one factor to consider in food decisions.

ABSTRACT. Dairy systems are responsible for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions in the US but are also at risk from a changing climate. The USDA has invested heavily in research to identify where in the dairy production cycle greenhouse gases can be reduced, but also how producers can adapt to climate change. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used surveys and focus groups to explore the beliefs of Midwestern dairy farmers about climate change and risk, overall risks to their own operations, and their openness to adopting specific beneficial management practices which were identified by project collaborators for their opportunity to reduce emissions without compromising milk yield and profit to the farmer. Results show that most dairy farmers believe that the climate is changing but do not believe that its causes are anthropogenic. Farmers were found to be open to a broad range of new practices, given sufficient proof of clear benefits. Other risks were seen as greater challenges. The drivers for beneficial management practice adoption by the producer are not related to reducing their carbon footprint; rather they are motivation by familiar factors such as reduction in soil erosion, improved water quality, or improved soil health.

ABSTRACT. Across the United States, dairy farmers staunchly loyal to input-intensive industrial agriculture reluctantly go organic as a business decision. However, once they make the transition and engage in day-to-day organic practices, they tend to undergo a true ideological conversion as well, what I call organification. Surprisingly, this conversion typically stops short of dislodging skepticism about human-caused climate change. Why do they rather swiftly understand the science of microbes, forage diversity, and soil carbon, and embrace a philosophy of “go to the farm not the pharmacy,” but not open up as well to the science of the greenhouse effect and the pressing importance of reining in GHG emissions? Based on interviews and participant observation on 60 organic dairy farms in Wisconsin and California, this research points to one important explanation: in the minds of dairy farmers, the price premium associated with the National Organic Program re-categorized organic dairy from feminine and hippie to shrewd and manly, allowing organic to be compatible with hegemonic masculinity. Climate change, however, still has no market legitimation that switches it from feminine to masculine. This research builds on literature documenting men’s avoidance of green behaviors in order to safeguard their gender identity (Brough et al. 2016) and literature investigating the “white male effect” (McCright and Dunlap 2013) more generally. I add an explicit focus on the role of political economy: how masculinity is embedded in the competitive capitalist market, and how the “free” market is embedded in dominant versions of masculinity. In addition to its theoretical significance, this research has a number of practical applications. For example, as an immediately available tool that augments a longer-term strategy of transforming both capitalist markets and dominant masculinities, this research underscores the importance of full-cost pricing for GHG emissions, both for directly curbing emissions and legitimating climate change in the eyes of stalwartly macho farmers.

ABSTRACT. While women have been involved in the coffee production process in the past, shifts in global agriculture have led more women into formal roles in cash crop agriculture as cooperative members. Empowering women as productive cooperative members requires not only technical assistance and support, but creating an inclusive social and political environment. Gender transformative approaches involve the creation of an enabling social environment and more equitable inclusion in formal and informal institutions that support expanded choices for women and men that move beyond merely superficial gender integration. This paper triangulates multiple qualitative methods to explore the relational and structural aspects of gender transformative change in the context of a federation of Fairtrade organic coffee cooperatives in the western highlands of Guatemala. The goal of the paper is to inform programs and policies aimed at promoting gender equity in agriculture and more broadly.

ABSTRACT. When our current food system is rooted in so many detrimental practices—corporate control and monopolization, abundance of unhealthy food and unsustainable production practices, unfair pricing for farmers, low wages and dangerous conditions for food and farm workers—it can be difficult to believe that any other way of agricultural production is possible. The Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) and its members demonstrate that there are alternatives to our current food system, and that these alternatives can truly become the norm.

The DFTA is a national membership-based organization in the United States and Canada representing five sectors of the agricultural supply chain—farmers, farmworkers, retailers, intermediaries (processors, manufacturers, and distributors), and other NGOs. Whether its farmers against farmworkers or retailers against farmers, different sectors of the food system are often pitted against each other. The DFTA’s model demonstrates that sector isolation does not have to be the norm and that there is considerable value in working together toward the goal of improved agricultural production. How is cross-sector collaboration in agricultural production truly achieved and how is domestic fair trade currently used as a tool for creating agricultural supply chains that are centered on health, sustainability, and justice? The 16 domestic fair trade principles that govern the DFTA provide a unique framework for transforming agricultural production. This presentation will include a discussion of domestic fair trade principles, concrete examples of domestic fair trade in action, and findings from our soon-to-be released domestic fair trade report written in partnership with the Colorado State Center for Fair and Alternative Trade.

ABSTRACT. Values based supply chains (VBSCs) have been identified as a promising framework for the development of small and mid-scale producers, farms that represent the disappearing Agriculture of the Middle (AOTM). In the past decade, public and private partners have put concerted efforts towards value chain development as strategies for strengthening local and regional food systems. While early efforts focused on food hub development and support for hard infrastructure such as aggregation, packing and distribution facilities, more recently there has been a growing recognition of the importance of ‘soft’ or social infrastructure as a key component to successful development. This shift is based in the belief that individuals and organizations embedded within communities play a critical role in networking, matchmaking, and providing technical assistance and resources to current and prospective members of local and regional food value chains. This research is centered around the emergent USDA/Wallace FoodLINC Initiative (Leveraging Investments through Network Coordination), a federal and private partnership launched in 2016, offering funding and training for value chain coordinators (VCCs) in 14 pilot communities across the U.S. Using a mixed methods approach, integrating qualitative data and a novel use of Social Network Analysis, this research examines the roles, functions and impacts that VCCs have on value chain development in their respective communities. Additionally, this research engages the individuals and organizations performing VCC work, and explores to what extent value chain coordination may be on the path to becoming one of the newest formalized professions in the food system space, acknowledging challenges and possibilities therein.

ABSTRACT. The panel will present findings from case studies of coffee cooperatives carrying out innovative projects to improve environmental sustainability and social justice in Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, and Ecuador. These studies feature interviews and fieldwork with workers and organizations at each stage of the coffee supply chain (e.g., farmers, roasters, microfinance institutions). These cooperatives’ strategies of economic and environmental diversification, incorporation of agroforestry principles, and new models of trade relationships will be compared and contrasted to strategies of existing certification systems in their ability to improve trade relationships and farm management practices.

ABSTRACT. Genderization in food and foodways has been widely discussed from diverse perspectives (e.g. Counihan 2012, Lupton 1996, Sobal 2005). For example, the association of steak with men and chocolate with women instantiates stereotypical indexing of given food items with a specific gender. Conceptual processes and reasons that give rise to genderization in cuisine often are deeply intertwined with the history and culture of which the cuisine is an important part. (Wilk & Hintulian 2005). In this light we may expect gender divisions to be manifested more distinctly in a historically patriarchal society that demonstrate other forms of stratification like gender indexing in language. These divisions have been interpreted to stem from gender roles and ideological expectations in the society. In another dimension, that of consumerism, gender indexing is effectively used as practical strategies in aiming at consumers’ perceptions of genderized artifacts with a strong sense of masculinity or femininity. Thus, the genderization in food and foodways may surface as a reflection of a deep-rooted gender ideology in the society, whether it be perceived favorably or adversely; but at the same time, the genderization can be an active means to foster gender identification.

The conceptual goal of this paper is to survey ways in which two aspects of gender—gender as a social construct and gender as it connects to the femininity-masculinity opposition—can form intricate reciprocity in food and foodways. More specifically, the paper examines ways in which gender and the feminine-masculine dichotomy are shadowed in the Japanese context of food discourse, by focusing on the language used to describe and promote food and cookbooks. Central to our investigation are the language describing particular food items (e.g. coffee) and the rhetoric used to promote cookbooks for men, based on contemporary and historical textual and visual materials. One of the major findings from this survey is that intended genderization as is understood in the Japanese context often is not straightforwardly aligned with gender roles and ideology or the femininity-masculinity dichotomy in reality, leading to ambiguous interpretations. In this connection, I will demonstrate several ways in which genderization is meant to be a positive force for male-specific cookbooks and food items for marketing purposes, and yet the intensions can be contradicted by marketing rhetoric.

ABSTRACT. Cooking and labor come together in the culmination of the culinary stage known as the kitchen. The traditional gendered dynamics present within the Western kitchen is reflected in dietary preferences, cooking techniques, and, in the focus of this paper, division of labor. This paper examines the gendered dynamic of the service industry 'back of the house' laborers and analyzes the dichotomous relationship between men and women in the kitchen in professional settings. The atmosphere of masculinity present within the service industry and professional kitchens encapsulates issues of class, education, and education culminating in systems of social stratification being reflected in hiring practices, academic discourse, self-sorting and divisions of labor. This social climate flies in the face of 'traditional' American intra-household perceptions of food and meal preparation. Within this paper, I discuss the phenomena of young and middle-aged men settling into a pattern of transient occupation, drifting from kitchen to kitchen and working the 'back of the house'. The idea of kitchen 'humor' is placed in a critical lens as a culture of 'boys club' kitchens are examined within the context of gendered labor dynamics. Manifestations of kitchen machismo is reflected in the 'front and back' of the house relationships and a culture of blue versus white collar division of labor. The gulf between the kitchen in the home and professional kitchen represent, in many ways, the American workplace's patriarchal projection of normative identities onto the workforce. It is all too easy to conjure up an image of a red-faced Gordon Ramsey screaming expletives at white coated and stone-faced cooking show contestants. This image goes beyond network television and into real professional kitchens. This image is more than an abstract 'othering' of front of house versus back of house and is expressed through a high rate of drug and alcohol abuse. High job turnover and limited workplace rights are further consequences of these dynamics. These subtleties have social, cultural, and economic impacts on the well-being of laborers. The daily and nightly cycle of 'misaim plas', the culinary preparation of work stations, mirrors the personal regiment of routine present in many restaurant laborers. Drawing from extensive literature, as well autoethnographic methodology from my own experiences in kitchens; I take aim at examining these contradictions, feedbacks, and labor idiosyncrasies to craft a narrative that brings attention to issues of class, social mobility, and adverse gender normative practices.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on interviews with 120 critically celebrated chefs in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, in this paper I identify the gendered logics of food work in American fine dining. I then use these logics to delineate how chefs make sense of two products of their culinary labor—their cuisine and their managerial practices. I argue that contemporary American fine dining chefs come to understand their position and therefore, their power, prestige, and value in the field in relation to two gendered logics of food work. The first logic is that which is both institutionalized in the field and most consecrated by major critical actors—the masculine logic of cultural food work. Working within this logic, chefs operate as artistic geniuses who alone create cuisine that is distinctive, creative, technically amazing, and artistic, and the cooks who work beneath them seek to execute their autonomous visions through disciplined training and repetition. Other chefs understand themselves in relation to a feminine logic of natural food work. Chefs working within this logic enact a managerial style of care work focused on staff members’ personal growth and associations with home cooking. By articulating how the gendered logics of food work organize processes of cultural production, I bring the literature on boundaries in cultural sociology into conversation with the theory of gendered logics of organization to uncover how gendered logics affect processes of cultural production in American fine dining.

ABSTRACT. This 15-minute presentation highlights a community-based partnership involving both outreach and community-based participatory research (CBPR) between Slow Food UW-Madison (SFUW) and the UW-Madison Odyssey Project. Uniquely, this presentation will be co-led by the SFUW undergraduate interns who cultivated this partnership.

The purpose of the SFUW/Odyssey Project partnership is to support food sovereignty by addressing barriers to individuals’ sense of food agency, while also addressing community-level barriers to alternative food systems. SFUW is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization run by UW-Madison undergraduate students who provide healthy snacks and culinary explorations throughout the South Madison community using a community of practice model. The UW-Madison Odyssey Project offers a free humanities class for adults in the South Madison community who face economic insecurity. Odyssey provides participants with free textbooks, childcare and youth programming (facilitated, in part, by SFUW), and a weekly dinner during the time that the class meets. On a weekly basis, SFUW interns both provide healthy snacks and engage in culinary explorations with these Odyssey Project adult participants and their children.

The CBPR aspect of the partnership has explored the impact of the use of a crockpot as a culinary tool to address barriers to food sovereignty. While simultaneously increasing access to local food products produced through alternative food systems, this community of practice (CoP) partnership model is based upon the shared commitment of both Odyssey Project families and the SFUW undergraduate interns. Using mixed-methods, including surveys, interviews, and participatory photovoice, the study looks at the mechanisms by which food preferences and culinary skills are transmitted intergenerationally through individual learning, social learning, and cultural learning at the family and community scales.

This presentation will summarize multiple lessons learned after two years of partnership and CBPR data collection. The presenters will highlight the importance - and challenge - of reflexivity in research design and emphasize why it matters. Presenters will also share the efficacy of slow cookers as a strategy for increasing food agency, particularly with respect to incorporating nutritious, seasonal foods into the diets of families living at or below the poverty level.

ABSTRACT. While food studies and agroecology tend to explore broad systematic engagement with food products, practices, and systems, folklorists offer a micro-analytical perspective on both the social and political processes involved in foodways, and their expressive capabilities in small groups' and individuals' everyday lives. This presentation demonstrates how folklore can contribute to this larger discussion of food studies by looking closely at the author's own family food traditions.

Using autoethnography, the author explores her identity as a Chaldean American, and how her heritage foodways play a role in both reaffirming that identity and complicating it. By exploring the processes involved in selecting special family foods and characterizing the role these special foods and foodways play in mediating family dynamics, the author explores not only the social function of her Chaldean foodways, but also their ability to instill and express family values.

For the author, Chaldean foodways offer a gateway to family stories and family history. Making and eating Chaldean foods, therefore, becomes a means through which the author and her family members connect to their heritage and each other, and enact and perform their identity. The author sees these performances as expressions of family values and intimacy. By cooking and eating these foods, family members reach beyond themselves to build and reinforce a social base upon which they can create and maintain the important aspects of their cultural heritage.

While the experiences of one family have little impact on larger food systems or agroecological perspectives, understanding the social processes involved can directly feed scholarly ability to understand and process communities' needs within this discussion. Through this presentation, the author hopes to highlight the aspects of culture and identity that surround food choice and production, and the meaning individuals can derive from participating in food traditions.

ABSTRACT. In Minnesota, hot dishes, known more widely as casseroles, have entered the popular and vernacular cultures of many residents as symbolic meal preparations that represent hospitality, home, and a sense of region. Whether the dish is satirized through humor, glorified in art, or shared through community cookbooks, potlucks, and competitions, the idea that diners can ingest essential nutrients with each forkful of the food remains consistent. A construction of proteins, starches, vegetables, and dairies held together by a liquid binding agent, hot dish serves as a convenient all-in-one meal rooted in practices of stretching fiscal, consumable, and labor resources in appealing manners. Accompanying this sense of convenience is a reputation for heavy reliance upon mass-produced, industrialized, ready-made food products, bringing together corporations like Campbell’s Soup Company, Kraft Foods, and Ore-Ida into one dish. This presentation will focus on how some home cooks may rely on these mass-produced products for basic hot dish components yet combine them with home grown and locally raised ingredients like beef, green beans, and onions. Ethnographic research conducted with a single meal-preparer, the researcher’s mother, complicates popular conceptions of hot dishes such as Green Bean Casserole (cf. Long) as “tossed together.” This presentation argues that hot dishes represent a negotiation of ingredients and methods constructed to meet taste and design aesthetics of the cook’s family and social networks. Through a close-reading of a variation, Tater Tot Hot Dish, and evidence from collectively written local community cookbooks from which this and other recipes are derived, the author examines the economic and social values that may be embodied in this meal. The cook’s incorporation of vegetables raised in the family garden can be seen to support her notion of “hometown cooking,” which places value on bringing family together to share healthy meals made from “scratch” and reveals how an individual meal preparer enacts idealized culinary roles in private and public spheres. This presentation suggests how this ubiquitous meal in rural Southwest Minnesota represents not only individual and family values, but also those of community as individuals make critical food related choices.

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores the “expressive potential” of a pair of the author’s maternal grandmother’s early 20th century cookbooks from north central Wisconsin, the 1924 edition of the Woman’s Alliance Cook Book from Merrill, and a hand-written, indexed ledger book that contains recipes Grandma obtained from family members and friends mostly in the Wausau area. Drawing on the works of folklorists Janet Theophano and Diane Tye, it will show how this “women’s writing” acts as an archives of Grandma’s family and social networks’ intertwined domestic and political lives, and also performs an autobiographical function embedded in the agriculturally developing cutover of north central Wisconsin at the time.

The required patchwork of qualitative research materials and methods incorporates this author’s reliance on a performer-centered microanalysis, the potential of close, to the point of microscopic, textual analysis, and the complexities of what one might call a “feedback loop” of using personal and family recollections of Grandma’s foodways—from ingredient choices and obsessions, shopping routines, specific dish preferences and meal patterns, dining table décor and behavior protocol, kitchen dress, appurtenances, and spatial characteristics, and eating out—to stimulate inquiry and the reverse, of using the primary sources to stimulate further reminders. The power of bringing insider yet ethnographically-informed views to this sort of women’s writing suggests a constrained syncretic version of food writing that borders on yet stops short of memoir in its search for a fuller nuanced portrait of an individual. While the continuing repertoire of family narratives has become condensed into a somewhat harsh, unforgiving, and formulaic caricature, a fuller and more equitable investigation of oral and written records together can provide important insights about Grandma’s personality, aspirations, and values, the character of her family and community relationships and related socioeconomic networks, and how these lend a sense of the “agro-ecological prospect” of the time that contributed to emerging and contemporary food system practices in the Upper Midwest.

The proposed panel session is planned to include a discussant with 3 paper presenters who are submitting abstracts independently. All contributors will honor Upper Midwestern legacies of studying the region's immigrant and ethnic foodways and food systems through complicated ethnographic methods that involve close personal relationships.

ABSTRACT. The few scholarly treatments of Jami Attenberg’s 2012 novel The Middlesteins have taken it to task for its portrayal of Edie, the matriarch at the novel’s center as, in the words of one critic, “selfishly refusing to seek help, lacking willpower, grotesque in her size and sickness” (Farrell 101). These readers understand the novel to represent Edie as blameworthy for her weight and to present this weight as a problem which, solved, would allow for a happy ending. As a corollary, they object to the complicity of the novel’s apparent stance with the various structures (neoliberal individualism, the medicalization of weight, master narratives of motherblame, etc.) that have been subject to strong critiques from the perspective of fat studies in their relation to discourses of weight. Even the novel’s jacket copy supports this reading, framing Edie’s weight as the object of judgment and blame, positing Edie’s “fixat[ion] on food” as the reason “things are splintering apart,” and asking, “Do Edie’s devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone, or are others at fault, too?”

While many of the characters in Attenberg’s novel, along with the book’s marketing materials, see Edie’s weight primarily as an obstruction to her thriving, however, I argue that we misread the novel if we take that view as the novel’s own. The Middlesteins, I argue, is less interested in probing causes and solutions for the “problem” of Edie’s weight than in exploring the perspectives that emerge in relation to that understanding of Edie. Edie is central to the novel less as a problem to be solved than as a focal point for other characters’ cognition and (self-)understanding. While the novel’s characters experience Edie’s weight in real time as a threat to her health, the novel offers its readers a temporally wider narrative perspective, a place from which we can understand Edie’s weight not simply in terms of its causes and effects, but also in terms of its experiential dimensions in multiple contingent presents. In this talk, I approach The Middlesteins through queer theorizations of temporality, and in dialogue with recent scholarly work on “fat temporality” (as in the 2018 special issue of *Fat Studies* on that theme). What lessons does the novel offer about the possibilities and difficulties of thinking about fat outside of narratives of personal progress? What structural barriers make it difficult to tell a story about fat that isn't a salvation narrative?

ABSTRACT. Memoir is a popular format for authors to share their experiences and knowledge learned throughout a particular period of time of their lives. What makes the public read it is these lessons’ applicability to the reader’s life or to learn how people adapt and survive extraordinary circumstances. Often though, the memoir easily fits into a niche. For almost the entirety of the 21st Century, American military forces have been deployed across the Middle East and Africa. Almost immediately upon return, “Global War on Terror” veterans (both military and civilian) began processing their experiences and sharing them with the public. The most popular forms of expression have been former soldiers writing their memoirs (Turner, 2014), publishing short stories (Gallagher & Scranton, 2013; Klay, 2014), or writing op-eds for general public consumption (Gallagher, 2016). However, these pieces are often intimidating and alienating to those who are not soldiers, veterans, or military scholars due to the overwhelming focus on war, the experience many cannot relate to, along with a tone of pontification. Similarly, food memoirs occupy a significant place in contemporary writing. Barbara Waxman (2008) specifically argues, “Food memoirs increasingly command our respect as we respond to their depictions of intense emotions, pleasurable recollections of communal and private food experiences, messages of familial wisdom, and insights into cultures.” Lucy Long (2004) further reminds us that food has stories to tell: of our past, present, and future; of our values; of our culture and ethnicity. Incidentally, war environments provide similar experiences for participants as well. Post-9/11 military memoirs could take a lesson from food memoirs that discuss war, like M.F.K. Fisher, as a way of extrapolating societal themes and larger issues that may illuminate how the two genres and sets of experiences overlap with one another. Overlaying Annie Hauck Lawson’s “food voice” on to post-9/11 deployment experiences contributes a unique perspective to both fields, examining how food continues to build and intensifies informal sub-communities and families in a military organization that establishes and nurtures structured relationships. Investigating the history of food and military memoir and blending both will provide a new perspective on how we contemplate both food and war in our shared experiences.

ABSTRACT. This paper derives from critical theory scholar Jürgen Habermas’s distinction of system and lifeworld and employs these concepts to a series of socio-historical case studies. Specifically, I examine the relationship of food activists, anti-hunger advocates, community organizations and other relevant parties (including labor and anti-war activists) to the system-upholding city government administrations of Republican Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001), Independent Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013) and Democrat Bill de Blasio (2014 – present). With the city as a microcosm for a much larger picture, this period represents such trends as the expansion of both neo-liberal political and economic policies at the local, state, national and international levels, and the growth, in the U.S and elsewhere, of a vast, tech-driven, homeland security apparatus. It further represents a growing class divide, both within the city limits and globally, culminating in the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 and beyond. In examining the cases of NYC based food activism within the contexts of these three administrations, I draw on a variety of data sources, including interviews, archival records and news reports so as to illustrate a series of policy shifts during this posited time frame and also to consider the lifeworld meanings of food oriented activism in a city at the forefront of a shift toward a global neo-liberalist agenda. Special attention is given to three particular food based organizations: Grow NYC, a city wide resource which focuses on farmers markets, green gardens and educational outreach, the Lehman Vegetable Garden, an educational campus based vegetable garden on the Lehman College – CUNY campus, and La Finca Del Sur, an urban farmer cooperative led by black and Latina women and their allies and focused on building healthy neighborhoods through economic empowerment and the advocacy of food justice.

ABSTRACT. Introduction of modern varieties and technological packages, market integration, agrarian unrest, and climate change have predisposed farmers to abandon traditional crops causing certain varieties to perish from centers of domestication and diversity and conjuring a landscape of loss. The trope of loss in the politics of plant genetic resources conservation foregrounds the abandonment of native varieties and attrition of local knowledge in favor of Green Revolution cultivars and high-input agriculture. Repatriation, or return, of plant genetic resources conserved in gene banks to their original custodians can be considered as a form of retribution for what some scholars and activists have characterized as appropriative incursions by the global North into the rich genetic and cultural heritage of the global South. However, the situation may not be this straightforward, or tractable. For many scientists at the International Potato Center (CIP), potatoes are “accessions” in gene banks --- to be collected, evaluated, exchanged, and bred. But to the Quechua farmers, potatoes are their wawas or infants --- swaddled and sang to, scolded and passed on --- celebrated in myth and ritual, and in everyday life in a landscape of memory. These divergent perspectives became entangled when Quechua communities, with the help of a non-government organization, the Association for Nature and Sustainable Development (ANDES), demanded that potatoes previously collected by the CIP gene bank from their land be returned. The Repatriation Agreement is a much-lauded first in biodiversity conservation that unequivocally recognized the rights of indigenous farmers to their landraces and acknowledged the benefits developed countries have derived from their use. In this paper, I will explore nodes of irreverence and sacredness in the conservation of potato diversity in the Peruvian Andes. I look at the life histories of three men --- a legendary potato amasser, a scientific collector and breeder, and a local farmer-technician --- who have a fascination for and intimate history with potatoes. I will examine biodiversity conservation as a scientific mandate, a popular call to arms in the local and global arena, and a mad pursuit of muses, and potatoes as enticers of such cross-cutting devotion. For while the somber discourse of loss is effectively deployed to justify projects that seek to recover and restore, in rendering affective attachment moot and divesting germplasm of memory and meaning, it privileges dependence and vulnerability and leaves little room for agency and resilience.

ABSTRACT. The informal exchange of seed between growers is recognized for its contributions to agricultural livelihoods and agrobiodiversity conservation. Seed exchange literature centers on direct interpersonal exchange in the Global South, examining regional network linkages and the functional role of seed circulation. However, our understanding of informal seed exchange remains limited due to a deficiency of studies located in the Global North, limited investigation of emerging exchange forums, and an under-emphasis on qualitative motivations for exchange. An exploration of emerging seed exchanges (“swaps”) organized through social media in the United States suggests that sensory engagement—particularly the desirability of varietal novelty—can be a powerful motivation for exchange. This raises questions about the qualitative properties of seeds themselves and prompts exploration from the “perspective” of the crop, where human agents extend crop distribution and create opportunities for adaptation to wide-ranging agroecological conditions. Further, social media opens new fields of interaction surrounding seed—hybrid spaces where physical places and virtual spaces intersect. In this paper, I explore social media as a new pathway for a long-standing human strategy of seed exchange and a crop “strategy” of seed dispersal. Using mixed qualitative methods, I ask why, despite the widespread availability of inexpensive commercial seeds, do informal means of exchange persist and re-emerge through new media? I argue that human motivation for exchange includes, but extends beyond, factors such as economic value and agrobiodiversity conservation, and consider possible implications for the agroecological prospect.

ABSTRACT. Although not native to the South, the tomato has become a staple, emblematic of backyard summer gardens and the resurgence of heirloom varietals. By framing tomatoes as a “charismatic crop”—-and focusing on human-crop interactions—-it is possible to tease apart the relationship among tomatoes and their humans. Through the confluence of an endless variety of taste, color, and shape, tomatoes assert their uniqueness, appealing to humans through their synesthetically pleasing qualities, qualities that humans have had a significant hand in coaxing from its genome. Its place as a staple summer crop invokes not only its biology and climatic origins, but plays neatly into the human world of memory and nostalgia for the ambience of warm, carefree summer days. While the tomato’s nostalgic properties, perhaps most vibrantly visible in its resurging heirloom varieties, call to mind grandmother’s kitchen gardens, the tomato’s popularity has situated it ever increasingly in industrial production, changing the relationship between the tomato and human in terms of labor, farming practices, and perhaps most noticeably, taste. Humans have remade the modern tomato biologically to fit industrial production, reframing social relations surrounding the tomato in its wake. Yet the memories of tomatoes past persist in backyard gardens and in areas that have historically cultivated tomatoes through their particularly favorable climate, soil, and the unrelenting dedication of its farmers.

The South, in particular, has laid special claim to this fruit with dishes like fried green tomatoes and celebration at dozens of tomato festivals annually. This paper draws on ethnographic research at seven of these festivals across the Southeast in 2017, which revealed a notable difference in discourse and optimism related to the sustainability of small farming and local food systems between rural areas—-where tomato production has waned—-and in urban areas, where farm-to-table restaurants and farmers’ markets have seen dramatic resurgence. Given these observations, how can we make sense of these incongruous narratives? How do we both address the optimism of small farming’s resurgence and the rural small farmers who speak of the ever-looming specter of industrial-scale agriculture, labor shortages, and the waning feasibility of production? Based on these questions, this paper considers the ways in which foregrounding and attending to the relationship between humans and tomatoes can perhaps work toward more equitable food systems and ensure the viability of this crop at local levels of production.

ABSTRACT. The ethics of food, agriculture, and food systems in general is often mired in essentialism that reduces the issue to either natural, material, nonhuman concerns or cultural, socioeconomic, human concerns. Jettisoning this dualistic and atomistic framework, actor-network theory (ANT) articulates a relational ontology consisting of networks of hybrid actants, inextricable mixtures of human and nonhuman variables. As such, ANT provides a powerful conceptual lens that can attend to the intersectionality of the aspects pertaining to food systems: the land, crops, animals, technology, farmers, eaters, economics, ecology, and culture. Despite its promise to describe the biocultural nature of food systems, ANT faces ethico-political challenges. Supposing that everything is a network of hybrids, how can ANT critically evaluate and make normative judgments about different types of hybrids and networks? For instance, what makes a landrace or heirloom crop ethically different from its genetically modified (“hybrid”) counterpart? And, how might ANT elucidate the ethico-political differences between industrial, monoculture farming and local, sustainable food initiatives? In order to motivate these questions, and ANT in general, this paper begins with a review of the hybrid and network nature of food systems and the ways in which humans and nonhumans are constantly engaged in an ongoing practice of mutual co-constitution. In addition to applying ANT as a descriptive, conceptual framework, this paper seeks to develop an ANT-inspired normative metric that is capable of addressing the ethico-politcal dimensions of food systems. Given that the agency and identity of human and nonhuman hybrids are constituted and sustained through biocultural networks of associations, networks can be evaluated on the basis of biocultural health and integrity. Since the health and integrity of supporting networks in turn is premised on a rich diversity between human and nonhumans, an ethical account should take into consideration the interests of each, attempting to form symbiotic alliances. This ANT-inspired ethical account will then be used to analyze two crops and their people: Carolina Gold Rice and Golden Rice. These prized specimens embody and exemplify the ongoing discourse surrounding food systems. Albeit for disparate reasons, and each involving different networks of actors, each has garnered widespread acclaim as the future paradigm of food. But which is the fool’s gold?

ABSTRACT. The phenomenological and ontological shift in memory studies posit memory as multi-sited and active. There is remembering in places, materials, bodies and the senses. Furthermore, each site of memory interacts and has a share in shaping knowledge. I use this framework to explore how evolving crop genetic resources alter ecologies of cognition, specifically how local knowledge is remembered, forgotten or changed.

In this paper, I specifically ask, if places and materials indeed carry memories, what becomes of local knowledge of rice with the changes in the rice landscape? This is motivated by the significant speed of turnover of rice varietal diversity since the Green Revolution in the 1970s. Such has been a technological revolution that introduced high-yielding modern rice varieties in Asia. I particularly investigate the ricescapes of Central Luzon and Negros Island Regions in the Philippines: the rice varieties in farms, markets and kitchens. Traditional rice farming has been described as patchy in upland and rainfed Negros and almost non-existent in lowland, irrigated Central Luzon. I explore what remains of the traditional varieties and what is remembered? How have the multiple landscapes of memory prompted forgetting? How have changes in the rice grains cascaded to changes in rice food traditions?

I conclude with the story of forgetting of traditional rice varieties and knowledge as a tale of ricescape disentanglements. It is initiated by consumers’ disconnection from rice production, aggravated by dizzying arrays of foreign, blended and unidentified or mislabeled rice varieties in the market. In effect, there are hardly any nominal and material mnemonics to aid rice memory. Consumers are alienated from the rice varieties both traditional and modern.

ABSTRACT. GM crops are often invoked as necessary for food security – particularly to address hunger and development in the global south. This argument summons legacies of the Green Revolution. More specifically, advocates rely on a discourse of “science,” coupled with the productionist paradigm, to deliver what is a political economic project. In this paper I trace how this rhetoric – of GM crops as a tool of development and food security – played out in the widespread public discussions and debates in India. More specifically, I attend to how concerns around food security and “science” were articulated in the societal and media discussions around Bt brinjal -- a Bt eggplant designed for small-holder resource-poor farmers. The process of evaluation for Btbrinjal was precedent setting in its level of transparency. But, the process itself was contentious. A society wide debate occupied national media for many weeks: airing a wide-ranging discussion of food, agricultural, and agrarian issues. While these discussions were widely framed as going “off course” (i.e. going beyond testable “risks” of Btbrinjal), I suggest this discussion had the significant effect of highlighting the political economic context invoked (e.g. food security, development, agrarian poverty), and more, putting its underlying logics on display in an important moment. I read the discussion and competing claims to excavate the logics guiding the differing viewpoints -- including understandings about the nature of the technology on debate, the nature of the problems invoked (e.g. food security), the diagnosed cause, and the solution offered (of GM crops). I unpack the larger societal issues and demonstrate that the sprawling discussion served to illuminate the role that this approach to development and agriculture played in producing the very situations it promised to address. In this context, Bt brinjal was seen as questionable, and became largely irrelevant to its own claims. The promises and problems of development and food security it invoked are issues of political economy; they exceed strictly testable “scientific risk.” In this context, when framed as political economic issues, the problems became questions – questions of how to approach development, and how food security could be better ensured – that required more comprehensive considerations. That is, the wide-ranging societal discussions offered a lens that reframed the debate. Thus, the debates can be read as emphasizing the questions at stake: suggesting that to address these issues, the approach must attend to the nature of the problems it invokes.

ABSTRACT. Over the past decade, a handful of foundation-funded “science communication” institutes have cropped up at land-grand universities. Structured by a humanitarian impulse to “feed the world” through technological intervention, these institutes aim, as one website puts it, to “depoliticize” highly-charged debates over agricultural biotechnology (GMOs). Emphatically supportive of biotech as a key tool for more sustainable, socially just agriculture, the discourse issuing from these science communication institutes routinely dismisses concerns about GMOs as “anti-science.” While we reject the notion that “science” is an unmediated and apolitical portal to Truth, this paper is less interested in the politics of scientific truth than it is in what we can learn from the technical operations of science communication institutes. These technical dimensions range from sending representatives to international development conferences, training professional communicators from countries in the global South with ongoing legislative debates around biotech crops, disseminating education materials for schools, websites and a video series, as well as energetic presence on Twitter and Facebook. We argue that these "science communication" institutes are increasingly inserting themselves into the global governance of biotechnology in a manner that demands analysis of their political economy. This paper does just that by taking one of these institutes as a case study for understanding the phenomenon more broadly. We offer a political economy analysis of its multifaceted strategies for bringing “scientific truth” to a global public.

ABSTRACT. Financialization of farmland is often considered from the perspective of land grabs: as a continued instrument for dispossession and alienation of land, from use values to instruments of capital. Sympathetic to this critique, but recognizing the value of understanding the functions of financial instruments, this investigation explores three scenarios of land financialization in the U.S. state of Minnesota in order to consider claims made about land through the lens of how farmland in urban areas is being reconstructed, appropriated, and used as the intersection of urbanization and agriculture is transformed in multiple ways.

First, we examine the case of a farmland rent sharing trust proposed by the Georgist organization Common Ground USA – this proposal aims to redistribute equity in farmland between larger and smaller renters, and to reconstruct the value of farmland rental around the food production capacity of the land. The case study traces the development of a governance framework for aligning land assets with legitimate users, with particular attention to cultural differences in the construction of land-worthiness and the accrual of equity in the value of improving food-producing soils and landscape features. 

Second, we consider public parks as farmland, a scenario that has provoked considerable concern about the possibility of abusing public assets for private gain. The case study traces the development of farming zones in parks in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and the shifts in understanding urban land and food land this process has involved, concentrating particularly on the construction and representation of land-based assets, their values, and the performances and procedures required to legitimize use or governance of this land.

Third, we ask similar questions about the financing and disposition of new land-based food enterprises through mechanisms of philanthropy and tax incentives, with particular attention to the criteria of worthy urban agriculture practices written into new policies in Minnesota in 2018. 

We consider these case studies in the context of the contemporary and historical imaginations of agricultural land, and the role that foodland plays in the political ecology of settler urbanization in the twenty-first century, comparing the qualities of land as an asset class vs. as a stewardship responsibility, as different financiers and landholders construct, represent, and produce value and management regimes.

ABSTRACT. Common knowledge suggests that the partnership between two people or organizations should be mutually beneficial. Collaboration promotes synergy by filling the gaps of each partner, whether it be through opportunity, knowledge, skills, resources, etc., to tackle mutually-held issues and/or accomplish goals. The development of this kind of relationship between communities and universities is of increasing interest to universities and community groups. That being said, historically relationships between “town” and “gown” have been tension-filled at best and, at worst, detrimental to the community. Often community and university partners face significant barriers relating to diverse motivations of individual partners and different desired outcomes. Jill will provide a conceptual model, along with some tips and considerations, for developing reciprocal relationships. The relationship between CLF and Baltimore City began in 2007 when the Center worked with the health department and the planning department to form the Baltimore City Food Policy Task Force. For the last seven years, Baltimore City government has supported a food policy director, 2 other planning positions, a healthy food access coordinator in the health department and an economic position focusing on food retail. CLF has partnered with the Food Policy Initiative through research and education, the latest output is the 2018 Food Environment Report. Anne will describe CLF’s contributions to Baltimore City and examine what it takes to create a successful partnership that meets most of both parties’ needs. Chatham University’s MA Food Studies Program emphasizes a holistic approach to food systems, from agriculture and food production to cuisines and consumption. Mim, whose courses include food access, community-based research and ‘sustainable consumption’, became active in the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council (PFPC) in 2015 and in 2017 was elected Steering Committee Chair. Mim will address the synergies between her PFPC work, research agenda and academic courses, including class projects generated by this relationship. Additionally, as the internhip coordinator, she will overview how internship opportunities have been supported and enhanced by her association with the PFPC. Graduate students in Chatham University’s MA Food Studies Program must complete a three credit internship. Sam will highlight his internship experience with the PFPC. which focused on researching and developing recommendations for greater engagement between the Council and local government authorities. Additionally, Sam assisted in the establishment of a Refugee and Immigrant Farming and Food Access Working Group and he will describe how this work benefited the Council as well as enriched his experience.

ABSTRACT. Fulvio Gioanetto is an ethnobotanist internationally known in the field of agroecology, both as a lecturer and in sustainable production practices. Mara Blas Cacari is a Purépecha knowledge keeper of medicinal plants and the manager of the family business of producing natural inputs.

My wife and I, along with our extended family, are small producers of corn and other traditional foodstuffs in Nurio, an autonomous P’urépecha community in Michoacán, Mexico.

Since 2001, we have developed a practice of using weeds and wild plants to produce inputs for organic crop management. We use weeds as biodindicators (indicating the type of soil, and its evolving deficiencies), as a source of micro elements (manufacturing ecological foliar fertilizers), and as living mulch. From natural materials, we produce pesticides, for the control of fungi, nematodes, bacteria pathogens, and bio-hormones while also recognizing their medicinal, veterinary and, in some cases, food properties. Drawing on P’urépecha agroecological knowledge of classification, biodiversity, soil and land use, we have developed organic management practicess for various crops that have enhanced yields. This increased producitivity has allowed us to help improve the quality of life of our indigenous communities of the Purepecha plateau.

Agroecology for us also means food sovereignty, or the right of every citizen to eat healthy and organic food at affordable prices as well as the development of markets and local economies. We present here our experiences with the biofactory (biofabrica) model in several bioregions in Michoacan, modular and small scale, where quality inputs are formulated and produced for organic and agroecological production.

1) An introduction to the Michoacán P’urépecha context, its geopolitics and how plants are understood within the cosmovision (presented in Spanish by P’urépecha herbalist Maria Blas Cacari, translated by Deborah Barndt); 2) An overview of agroecology as both a concept and a practice, framing the multiple uses of natural plants (weeds) for medicinal as well as production of natural inputs, challenging the use of industrial agrochemicals for both ecological and economic reasons; 3) An introduction to the family business of producing natural inputs with video illustrations of the process; 4) A practical workshop on the production of one natural herbicide as an example that could be applied in the Wisconsin context; 5) Questions and comments from the participants. After the presentations and illustrations of the process, we would like to invite participants to a hands-on exploration of natural plants in the area.

ABSTRACT. I will briefly review the status of "cultured meat" - animal tissue grown in the lab from stem cells - and present new network maps of research into animal agriculture and agroecology in general.

The technologies behind cultured meat are developing rapidly, and it is entirely possible that cultured meat could make industrial animal farming obsolete in the next few decades. This raises many questions about the future of our food system. For example, how will the environmental impacts of the material inputs, by-products, and energy use of cultured meat production change as the technology scales up? In a world where meat can be grown in a factory, what will be the role of integrated, agroecological crop-livestock farms? What does cultured meat imply for power and control in our already highly-consolidated food system?

These developments imply that this is a good time to examine how researchers are analyzing animal agriculture in general.  I am using network analysis tools to investigate whether the field can be divided into traditional agricultural paradigms, how various schools of thought have been interacting with each other, and whether new research is emerging to deal with the challenges and possibilities of cultured meat. I'll compare and contrast the animal agriculture research map with a map of agroecology research, highlighting knowledge gaps and areas of mutual interest.

ABSTRACT. Despite the historically fast-paced progress of LGBT rights in the United States over the last fifty years, many disparities remain regarding health equity and personal sovereignty for this population. In this paper I explore the realities and experiences of LGBT people within the food system and interweave related issues of health, access, and consumption. My research draws upon the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, sociology, public policy, public health and nutrition, gender and sexuality studies, social work, biology, and economics. Two distinct questions frame this paper. First, how and where are LGBT people involved with the food system in agriculture, food production, food service and retail? Of particular concern is the variability in urban versus rural life, access to capital and land, skill development, and the interpersonal relationships required for successful employment in these food-related fields. Next, how do the social determinants of health affect food choices and consumption? This spectrum of issues includes food insecurity and entitlement usage, body image, disordered eating and dieting, behavioral health, structural violence, and the various support systems/networks with family, chosen family, and the community. While this survey is ongoing, I identify research gaps across these disciplines and issues that need to be addressed. The LGBT population, for example, is often reduced to the image of an affluent, young, urban, white gay man in popular culture, ignoring the considerable diversity of LGBT folks. For this reason, I use an intersectional lens with regard to race, age, sex and gender identity, sexual orientation, and income level. This analysis aims not only to detail disparities and inequities compared to the non-LGBT population but also to highlight examples of successful and/or innovative inclusion in agriculture and food chain work, and to summarize strategies, interventions, and programming that effectively target health concerns and promote increased involvement and sovereignty within the food system.

ABSTRACT. Over the last century, dietary guidelines that focused on macronutrients such as carbohydrates, fats and proteins, have fallen in and out favor in the United States. In the 80’s, public health campaigns championed a low fat diet in order to improve health. A decade later, dietary guidelines changed to advocate the removal of carbohydrates. Today, the macronutrient of focus in many American diets is protein. Advertising, media and public health campaigns claim that protein can provide sustained energy and extended satiety when compared to other macronutrients, leading to fewer calories consumed overall. This long term focus on macronutrients has effected the form and quality of food that is regularly consumed. Using protein consumption as a lens, I explore how these public health campaigns and health related media have shaped consumers’ understanding and perception of food. How has this new public health focus on protein changed patterns of consumption and effected the health of the consumer? I used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods (ethnographic interviews with manufacturers and consumers, review of labels and marketing and data analysis of consumer purchasing patterns) to examine the relationship between macronutrient focused diets, food quality and consumer perceptions. Ultimately, this research aims to elucidate the impact of the promotion of macronutrient diets on consumer preferences, knowledge and health.

ABSTRACT. In 2010 Vermont was a new Latino farmworker destination. Publicity around dairy farms hiring Latino labor pushed Vermont dairy’s agricultural labor shortage into public view, and raised awareness that Vermont’s traditional farm labor force was inadequate to meet the needs of Vermont dairy, the state’s largest agricultural sector. Little was known about these new migrant workers, nor about how Vermont farmers were managing Spanish-speaking foreign labor. Dairy farmers were surveyed in 2010 about their experience working with Latino labor. The survey found that most dairy farmers spoke no Spanish, and most Latino workers no English. Farmers were resorting to hand signals to train their Spanish-speaking workers. In spite of these and other obstacles, farmers were enthusiastic about their Latino workers, who they rated more highly on several metrics than domestic labor.

In 2018 Vermont farmers continue to employ Latino farmworkers, and Spanish-speaking foreign labor is no longer new to the Vermont dairy industry. In the past decade Vermont’s dairy labor landscape has changed to meet the needs of these workers. A farmworkers advocacy group is prominently in the news seeking to protect and advance migrant farmworkers rights, argue for changes to state policy and organize Latino workers. Vermont has adopted several progressive policies, including Drivers Privilege Cards and Bias Free Policing policies. In addition, institutional developments like semi-annual Mexican mobile consulates and health care and education initiatives designed to meet the needs of Spanish-speaking farmworkers have developed to serve Latino migrants. At the same time migrant workers and their dairy farmer employers remain vulnerable. Vermont is a border state with active federal immigration enforcement. It remains one of the “whitest” states in the US, exposing Latino workers to racial profiling. And as the dairy sector comes to depend on Latino migrants, the possibility of losing these workers due to changes in US immigration enforcement adds stress to an already beleaguered Vermont dairy industry.

This research asked Vermont dairy farmers how they were managing their diverse farmworker labor force, including both domestic and Latino farmworkers. Farmer shared opinions on worker recruitment, farm labor management, wages and compensation, as well as perceptions of labor quality. In addition, farmers responses illustrate how the dairy sector in Vermont has adjusted to this new labor force. These responses are compared to the research in 2010 to assess where Vermont dairy has made progress and where challenges lie for the largest sector of Vermont’s agricultural economy.

ABSTRACT. This study explores the connection between dairy farm labour conditions and environmental sustainability, specifically prudent antibiotic use. Concern about antibiotic resistance has led researchers and regulators to focus on potentially imprudent antibiotic use in livestock sectors and high rates of antibiotic use on dairy farms. US dairy farms increasingly rely on non-family labour, particularly immigrant labour, and diagnosis and antibiotic treatment is often the responsibility of these workers. In this study, using data from US dairy farms, we examine how labour conditions such as a lack of training, punitive management, and overtime work may contribute to the imprudent use of antibiotics. We argue that the dairy industry, regulators, and scholars must recognize the interconnections of labour equity and farm sustainability.

*This presentation is part of the special session on Dairy Labor

ABSTRACT. [Special Session: Dairy Labor] Due to an increase in immigrants in both rural and urban areas, Wisconsin has become known as a new immigrant destination. One industry in the state that has shifted from a white workforce to a predominantly immigrant workforce is dairy. In the late 1990s, Wisconsin farmers began hiring immigrants, the vast majority coming from Mexico, to do the difficult work of milking cows. Previous research on immigrant dairy workers in the Upper Midwest found that workplace policies, cost, transportation, and fear due to their undocumented status presented barriers to accessing health services. This paper uses a transnational gaze and theories of scale to ask how health concerns shape the migration plans of undocumented workers. I focus on a group of undocumented migrants from Veracruz, Mexico who worked on dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Data come from a transnational qualitative study of 60 dairy workers conducted between 2010 and 2012, and follow-up interviews with a subset of workers in Mexico in 2017. Results suggest that while some workers overcame health-related barriers by obtaining support through local and transnational networks, others made the decision to return home. This research reveals the importance of a transnational perspective and the analytical value of scales when examining health concerns in new immigrant destinations that lack the institutional capacity to serve migrants. It also emphasizes the critical role that health can play in return migration decision-making.

ABSTRACT. Integrating crops and livestock could be seen as an agroecological ideal for the agroecological transition of agricultural systems. The recoupling of crops and livestock would enable maintaining production levels while limiting environmental impacts on soil and biodiversity. Still, crop-livestock farms are largely declining over the world due to globalized markets, agricutural policy incentives and limited availability of workforce and skills for integrating crops and livestock. Exchanges of manure and crops among already specialised cash crop farmers and livestock farmers could thus be an agroecological option while overcoming these factors. This study aimed at reviewed three case-studies in which we designed reality-based agroecological scenarios of local integration between crops and livestock with collectives of farmers in South-Western France. All farmers involved in the co-conception process were seeking for more autonomy in inputs through the exchanges. The 30 crop farmers were in conservation agriculture and seeking fertilizer through manure exchange and crop diversification to feed the animals allowing the 39 livestock farmers to limit animal-feed inputs. We used a serious game called Dynamix (DYNAmics of MIXed systems) as a tool to support the participatory animation with each group of farmers with cards and pions. The evaluation of the scenarios is on a supply-demand balance model included in Dynamix and associated to a multi-criteria framework including economic, environmental and social dimensions at the individual farm and collective levels. Among the four alternative scenarios evaluated with each groups, the selected scenario considered i) the insertion of alfalfa and cereal-legume mixtures into crop rotations and ii) transfers of manure from livestock farmers to crop farmers. Overall gross margin increased while environmental aspects were improved. Still, work load and complexity increased, i.e. logistical and social issues such as knowledge development. The trade-offs between individual and collective performances appeared acceptable and resulted in greater autonomy at the collective level. The participatory process with the serious game Dynamix could be applied to other collectives of farmers to conceive agrocecological scenarios of integration between crops and livestock beyond farm level. The scenarios conceived could be as well a source of inspiration for policy makers to favour the reintegration between crops and livestock.

ABSTRACT. In the past years, universities and government programs have encouraged goat farming and silvopasture among small-holding farmers in the rural South. Goats are promoted as beneficial for farmers with small acreages of diverse landscapes, especially farmers who have a mix of wooded and open landscapes. During my field research in Alabama between the years 2011 to 2013 I worked with a group of emerging African American goat farmers as they sought to build up their goat operations. These farmers attended workshops held by universities and community groups, applied for government grants to support their operations, and worked to forge a cooperative in order to support each other and potentially sell processed goat meat. Their interest in goat farming drew the attention and support from a number of organizations including university researchers, extension agents, and community organizations. These agricultural institutions surrounding the farmers repeatedly emphasized how goat farming might be an ideal enterprise not only from an environmental perspective, but also for small-holding and marginalized farmers seeking to make their land-holdings more profitable.

Yet, despite the apparent sustainability of goats from an environmental and economic perspective, and despite the resources encouraging and supporting farmers, the political-economic factors surrounding goat farming remained a significant bottle-neck for the emerging cooperative. This group of farmers was interested in goat farming as a form of supplemental income, but often the vision and plan of outside institutions failed to understand the structural realities or actual goals of local farmers. Barriers existed between the presumed growing consumer demand for goats and the farmers’ production, and between the ideal combination of forestry and animals and farmers’ land use plans. Most significantly, farmers struggled to efficiently process their goats, and ultimately most resorted to selling their goats as whole animals at auctions which frequently resulted in a net loss for individual farmers.

Drawing on my ethnographic research with this group of farmers, this paper highlights the significance of political, economic, and social structures in determining the outcomes of proposed sustainable or agroecological efforts. This paper aims to show how farmers navigate and negotiate with resources and obstacles, and how the supporting institutions sometimes fail to understand their actual needs or goals. Additionally, this research points to an important question often faced by small-holding farmers: What is the balance between following an ideal practice versus an economically viable practice?

ABSTRACT. In the 1700’s, primarily Irish immigrants settled in Aroostook County Maine to grow potatoes in the rich deep loam soils. The arrival of the railroad in the late 1800’s opened reliable markets and the industry grew. Growers produced potatoes one year in four or five to allow legume hay crops to fix sufficient N to produce potatoes. Livestock manure was an essential ingredient to maintain soil quality. After World War II, potato rotations were shortened to produce more potatoes, and nutrients were supplied with commercial fertilizers and pesticides were used to control pests. By the 1950’s, Maine produced more potatoes than any other state.

Because potato production requires tillage-intensive management, organic matter and soil structure degrade if soils are not rested or organic amendments are not used. Unfortunately, livestock operations are primarily located in Central Maine while potato farms are located mostly in Northern Maine precluding much sharing of land or nutrients. An exception to this is the Dorman/Fogler (D/F) operation in Central Maine. In the early 1990’s, the 6th generation Dorman family produced 350 acres of chip potatoes and averaged 250 hundred weight per acre (cwt/ac) to annually fill a 90,000 cwt storage. The Fogler family managed a 250 cow dairy operation within 10 miles of the Dorman farm.

By the late 1990’s, both farms struggled. In 2003, the Dorman family considered increasing production to increase income. At the same time, the Foglers decided to increase their herd from 250 to 500, and later to over 1000 milking animals. This required more land on which to spread manure. The D/F farm families began a unique relationship to share 840 acres of land between the two farms to benefit both families. With a hand-shake agreement, this land sharing has continued for 15 years. Recently, the Fogler family adopted no-till corn and alfalfa, and they cover crop all their acreage. The Dormans grow potatoes on roughly a third of the 840 acres each year to fill the potato storage. In 2003 the Dorman family income was $56,000 per year on 350 acres of production. Today, they only produce 250 acres of potatoes to fill the storage, and their average income has increased to over $202,000. Soil health has increased dramatically, and both farm families have prospered. It is a relationship worth exploring further.

ABSTRACT. Public lands and the agencies that manage them are integrated into the rural fabric of the upper Midwest. These agencies directly manage significant acreage in agricultural areas, including vulnerable acres that would make gains in soil health, water quality, habitat and GHG sequestration by appropriately integrating adaptive rotational grazing into land management. In Wisconsin alone, over 75,000 acres of grasslands are under DNR management. Beyond land management, these agencies interface with private land owners and managers, influencing their management decisions both directly and indirectly. The practices of private land owners and managers impact a significantly larger number of acres than public agencies, including a proportionally larger number of vulnerable agricultural acres. However, public lands are uniquely positioned to serve as high profile examples, which can help normalize adaptive grazing among a commodity crop dominated landscape. However, despite increasingly robust qualitative and quantitative data on the multiple benefits of adaptive grazing, many agencies are currently under-equipped to implement and optimize adaptive grazing on the acreage they manage.

The Wallace Center, through its Pasture Project, is partnering with the Wisconsin DNR to pilot the use of regenerative grazing as a conservation management tool on multiple sites. The team has built a bottom-up public land grazing model that is currently piloting adaptive grazing leases on 3 WI-DNR sites in SW-WI and working with a University of Wisconsin research team to measure environmental impacts over multiple years. Further, early financial analysis of these sites demonstrates not only cost savings to the DNR but significant revenue generation as farmers increase their access to pasture. Six additional DNR sites will be added in 2018, bringing the total DNR land engaged in adaptive grazing to approximately 1,000 acres. Both environmental and economic impacts will continue to be assessed in 2018.

The team will add 7-9 additional sites between 2018-2021, resulting in 16-18 pilot sites throughout the state and potentially over 2,000 acres of public land grazing. Planning has begun to build off the success of the DNR pilot projects to not only fully operationalize regenerative grazing as a WI-DNR tool on the public lands they manage and lease for crop production, but to also use the project results as a model for other public land managers in Wisconsin and surrounding states. This session focus on partnership development, data collection and results and discuss implications for WI state policy and efforts to build interest in other Midwest states.

ABSTRACT. In 2010, a coalition of agricultural stakeholders in the California central coast authored a report titled Safe and Sustainable, which outlined a strategy to ease reported tensions between environmental conservation and microbial food safety in fruit and vegetable agriculture. Their report advocated the concept of co-management: “an approach to minimize microbiological hazards associated with food production while simultaneously conserving soil, water, air, wildlife, and other natural resources.” Food safety regulators subsequently encouraged farmers to practice co-management, and farm advisors developed technical guidance and training modules on methods for controlling the spread of human pathogens while simultaneously protecting environmental quality and ecosystem services. This positive response to the Safe and Sustainable report seemingly heralded the end of what one scholar had termed the “war on nature” (Agriculture and Human Values 25(2): 177-18), waged in the name of stamping out human pathogens in agricultural landscapes. I argue that co-management, as currently interpreted, has instead taken fresh produce safety into a ‘cold war’ phase, in which overtly environmentally-damaging practices have been replaced by a more insidious, anti-agroecological stance. I base this argument on my analysis of two distinct co-management manuals and participant observation at two recent food safety workshops for farmers. Both manuals seek to educate farmers and raise awareness of co-management, but they differ markedly in their stance toward agroecological principles. Close comparison reveals a spectrum of interpretation that ranges from ‘shallow’ to ‘deep’ co-management. The first guidance situates safety as the primary objective for a productive and profitable food system; environmental tradeoffs are inevitable and ultimately acceptable. The second document instead situates safety as one among many goals for sustainable and healthy food systems; consistent with agroecological principles, environmental synergies are possible and strict tradeoffs are unacceptable. Both documents adopt an implicit theory of change oriented at shifting cultural norms by educating farmers. However, farmers face steep structural barriers that push them toward ‘shallow’, even in-name-only, co-management. These barriers include high economic and legal stakes associated with foodborne illness and ambiguous regulatory requirements that imply farms are never safe enough. As evidenced by my participant observation, the unassailability of these barriers is reinforced during food safety trainings, particularly with respect to instructions for managing animal “hazards” and non-crop vegetation. Farmers are encouraged at every turn to approach cultivation as an ongoing conflict between ecosystems and safety. To truly ‘deepen’ safety practices in produce agriculture, these structural barriers must be adequately addressed.

ABSTRACT. Extensive debate exists regarding the best way to create a more just food system. Some individuals use neoliberal strategies, like farmers markets which fall under the green economy umbrella, to frame their goals for change. This form of activism is sometimes criticized as limiting because it works within neoliberal structures for incremental change instead of attempting to reconceptualize our current food system. A prominent secondary criticism is that the food movement is exclusionary in its focus towards white leadership and congratulatory white activism. While scholars have debated whether the whiteness critique is true, and whether neoliberalism is a helpful tactic for achieving progress in the alternative food movement, less scholarship exists using the testimony of nonprofit food advocates themselves. This paper attempts to add further nuance to the discussion of neoliberalism and whiteness in the food movement by using semi-structured interviews with staff from three different alternative food organizations in Atlanta, GA. Food advocates discuss their entry into the food movement, perspectives on solutions for creating an alternative food movement, and their attitudes about the politics surrounding the movement. These interviews illustrate why certain solutions are held up as worthy of pursuit within the food movement space. These rich discussions touched upon the creation of priorities and a reckoning with the white privilege that the food movement has often been accused of. Most interviewees agreed with the critique of racial exclusivity in the food movement. However, many expressed apprehension to addressing the problems in a public or organizationally institutionalized way due to the sensitivity of the subject, concerns regarding stakeholder reactions, worry about the effect on the organizational reputation, and general lack of personal knowledge to address the critique responsibly. Some organizations internally address these two critiques but lack an institutional framework to continue working toward progressive action. This study highlights how neoliberal and white-privilege based dialogue is linked to personal motivations for entry into the food movement and the ways in which those ideals are championed and institutionalized within each organization. Aside from elucidating how food movement actors rationalize their modes of activism and the level of inclusion they foster within their organization, the results of this study call for deeper and more transparent institutional collaboration in addressing these critiques systematically to build a transformational and socially progressive food movement.

ABSTRACT. Human food systems are seen as having several types of structures, including food chains, food sectors, food channels, food cycles, and others. Food webs have not been examined as extensively as other types of human food system structures. Food webs can be defined as networks of individual entities (such as a home cook) and collective entities (such as a coalition of restaurant workers) within food systems. Food webs link these entities together to exchange materials, energy, and information. Entities are located at different positions within food webs, and each position offers a different perspective for viewing other entities as well as the food system as a whole (like commercial fishermen’s positions and perspectives differing from those of nutritionists). Structural power differences exist between differently positioned entities, with more powerful entities having different perspectives from less powerful entities. Entities positioned upstream in food chains (like food growers) have different perspectives than entities positioned downstream (like food shoppers). Considering pairs and sets of entities offers insights about how food web relationships are formed, operate, and change. Within collective food web entities, individuals and groups who hold more power have less complete perspectives about the entity than those who have less power (like commercial bakery owners not understanding the scope and complexity of everyday breadmaking as extensively as bakers). Most between-entity food web relationships engage those who hold more power in entities, while those who hold less power are largely confined within their entity and have little interaction with other food web entities (like food company managers considering sources of ingredients and places to market products while food assembly line workers focus on adequately processing particular foods). However, those who hold low power within food web entities share experiences and understandings about everyday food activities with other entities having low power in different positions in food webs (such as farmworkers sharing common perspectives with supermarket workers). Overall, conceptualizing food webs as structures within food systems offers unique insights that are potentially useful to consider in conjunction with other structures and processes in food systems.

ABSTRACT. As alternative food movements sweep the US in the name of sustainability, justice, and health—as well as wresting back control from corporations—people are encouraged to reconnect with our food origins, and to “know [our] farmers, [and] know our food” (USDA 2012). Many people appear to be heeding this call: farm-to-table restaurants abound, farmer’s markets are thriving and expanding, and community supported agriculture is growing at a rapid pace. However, the visions of re-localized food systems underpinning these initiatives can often emphasize a nostalgic agrarian rural imaginary that stands in stark contrast to contemporary rural agricultural realities. Too, as this idyllic vision is enacted, the images and perspectives of farmers may be paradoxically appropriated, underrepresented, or even misrepresented in food movement discourse in spite of early, concerted efforts to “bring the farmer back in” (e.g. see Kloppenburg 1991). Characterizations and images of farmers also draw upon antiquated visions of Jeffersonian sole proprietors that have little in common with today’s diverse rural producers. Thus is it perhaps not surprising that even as food writers, activists, scholars, and both government and market-based initiatives all emphasize face-to-face connections with farmers, the entrenched US rural-urban divide widens. Amidst the excitement generated by alternative food system initiatives, several questions have been left largely unexplored: What are farmers’ and ranchers’ experiences of participation and/or exclusion in the food movement? Moreover, does their participation in local food initiatives differ meaningfully from more conventional practices, in which rural producers serve consumer markets in powerful metropoles? To what extent is the rural-urban divide reconfigured or reconciled within local food systems initiatives?

To explore these questions, we draw first upon content analysis of alternative food system events, conferences, symposia, and popular food blogs, in order to systematically examine ways that the perspectives of farmers and ranchers are represented in alternative food systems discourse. Second, through in-depth interviews with farmers and ranchers who serve farm-to-table restaurants, farmer’s markets, and community supported agriculture initiatives, we explore the perceptions and experiences farmers and ranchers have of the food movement. Finally, we triangulate this data with in-depth interviews with chefs, food writers, farmer’s market managers, and scholars. We conclude our analysis with recommendations that aim to bridge rural-urban divides within agriculture generally, and the local food movement specifically.

ABSTRACT. The many barriers to healthy eating include access to real food, challenging food environments, individual motivation to change, and lack of information about what to eat or how to prepare healthy food. One approach to behavior change, then, is to reduce barriers that stand in the way of more healthful approaches to eating. The rise of farmers markets and general awareness of local food systems suggests an opportunity to reduce some of these barriers by improving access to whole foods and information about how to prepare healthy food. In addition, exposure to information about food and willingness to think differently about what is on one’s plate may prime eaters to change behavior. However, it is challenging to document actual behavior change and health outcomes that may arise from these opportunities.

We propose to close the gap between knowledge and action by connecting two activities that have been shown to positively impact health behaviors--experiential food education and shopping for local food at tailgate markets. We build on the theory of change that indicates that something that may be foreign or challenging, once experienced, will seem more accessible and feasible and thus more likely to lead to action. By surveying individuals who attend or participate in experiential food education efforts, we address the question: can increased knowledge about and experience with a local food system lead to more healthful food purchase and eating behaviors? Study participants were invited to participate in local food experiences such as tastings, cooking classes, food lectures and films, and attending a farmers market. Pre-and post-intervention responses were used to analyze self-reported health and economic behaviors in order to determine the extent to which participation in the activities led to behavior changes.

We find positive change in overall eating, food preparation, and food purchasing behaviors from baseline to post-study. Our results suggest that a simple, low-cost intervention to engage adults in learning about and experiencing local food can lead to a change in shopping and eating behaviors. These findings add support to the notion that enhancements to the local food system can induce behavior change that will lead to improved health outcomes.

ABSTRACT. As consumer interest in local foods and other products has grown, so too has the necessity of a mechanism to differentiate these products from non-local items. Nonprofit, government, and producer groups have developed various labeling strategies, local food messaging, and region-specific branding that producers utilize in marketing materials and product labels; there are now so many local brands and competing claims that consumers may have a challenge identifying authentically local products. At the same time, local producers who choose away or scale up from direct-to-consumer sales to place their products in grocery stores and other retail outlets are finding an increased importance of local food branding for the promotion of their products. Thus it is essential to investigate the effectiveness of local food branding.

The Appalachian GrownTM program is a local food marketing and branding campaign that is well-known in the southern Appalachian region. It was launched in 2006 by the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, a nonprofit organization that is well-trusted by both producers and consumers in the region. While previous research has focused on consumer familiarity with the Appalachian GrownTM label, in this follow-on work, we examine the supplier side of the market and investigate the impact of the Appalachian GrownTM program on farm enterprises that have adopted the Appalachian GrownTM brand for differentiating their product in markets. Specifically, our research asks: how do producers perceive the Appalachian GrownTM program? How much value, and in what form, has the program brought to their enterprise? In addition, we query producer willingness to pay for the program.

Results of farmer surveys conducted in 2011 and 2015 indicate that most of the 200+ producers who responded find value in the Appalachian GrownTM program and would recommend program participation to others. Nearly two-thirds of responding producers indicated their participation in the Appalachian GrownTM program helped improve sales; the average reported sales increase attributed to the program was 27%. Contingent valuation was used to estimate producer willingness to pay for the program; median willingness to pay was estimated at $60 per year.

These findings should be of interest to producers of local food and consumers who utilize local food brands to identify products, as well as those who create and manage local food campaigns. In particular, the perception and willingness of producers to contribute to brand operating costs is important to consider when identifying potential financing mechanisms for local food brands.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I will highlight ways in which tech companies have created a new form of institutional dining. Using concepts from schools, universities, prisons, and communist public mess halls, they have created a way of eating at work that utilizes the best and worst of these models. What I will show is that by designing free food programs based around a this set of criteria, they have managed to, somehow, create dining spaces that is inclusive yet individualized, forced, but lenient, infantile, yet adult.

There are downsides to free food programs that have been designed this way. They have done away with the packed lunch and cooking for oneself and reduced foot traffic to local cafes and restaurants. Yet, food free food in the tech industry isn’t a fad that’s going away – it’s become an industry standard employee perk.

From schools: Some companies have adopted a lunch bell, or audio signal, to let employees know that lunch is ready. Employees leave their desks and collectively move towards the dining area.

From hospitals: The idea of individualized meals. Vegetarian, vegan, non-dairy, gluten free, etc. are all (usually) catered for.

From prisons: They have adopted the concept of forced commensality. Although the rules are not as strict as in a prison, peer pressure can be strong.

From Communist Public Mess Halls: The egalitarian idea that everyone is equal eating from the same pot, where CEO, executives and managers all eat the same food and sit at the same table as everyone else.

Overall, the dining spaces and programs inside these organizations are a unique brand of institutional dining that has had little previous academic attention.

ABSTRACT. The international Slow Food movement aims at leading the transition towards a fairer, tastier, and more culturally biodiverse food system. A discourse on biodiversity shapes the whole practice of the movement and the over 500 Presidia projects worldwide represent the most successful scheme of action for Slow Food in the field of the defense of biodiversity. Different from seed banks or traditional knowledge museums, Slow Food Presidia ask consumers to engage with local economies to defend endangered food and support the ‘earth's last custodians’.

This paper explores the extent to which the Slow Food movement is avant-guardist and effective in leading a change of perception about issues related to biological and cultural diversity among consumers and producers themselves. This papers questions whether the discourse on biodiversity developed by Slow Food allows local communities to make a political claim and appropriate innovative environmental and cultural practices, or alternatively to pave the way for market or political capture.

Cheese production systems are at the crossroads between culture and nature, and allow the linkage of knowledge and practices to all the categories of life: ecosystems, vegetables, animals, and microorganisms. Based on ethnographic methods (participant observation with Presidia producers, semi structured interviews with 50 Presidia stakeholders, including cooks and Slow Food’s supporters, and discourse analysis of communication materials), a cross-comparison of two sheep milk cheeses recognized as Presidia in France (Béarn Mountain Cheese) and in Italy (Piacentinu Ennese) provides evidence for the assessment of Slow Food’s discourse and practice related to biodiversity.

Every discourse is not culturally neutral (Foucault), but generates systems of exclusion through the definition of systems of truth and false. This paper explores the emergence of the concept of biodiversity in the public arena and then how the Slow Food movement mobilized it. Then the paper shows that Slow Food framed Presidia with aesthetic or hedonistic, and ecological elements, and has fixed a moral goal to be followed by the whole movement. The paper argues that Slow Food emphasizes certain elements of biodiversity and hides others, whereas the concept is splintered on the ground, according to the actors’ interests. A discursive approach allows seeing biodiversity alternatively as technology of governability (Foucault, Bendix & Hafstein) or sovereignty (Skrydstruop).

ABSTRACT. The 2016 Presidential election was marked by intense partisanship and divisiveness, trends in our political system which have been building for some time and continue to grow. While debate about the extent and means of this polarization continue, many are concerned about its impact on our government and country as a whole. In response, multiple efforts have emerged to try and build relationships and understanding across the political aisle. Dining Through Difference is one such effort, seeking to better understand the role that food and commensality can play in facilitating this exchange. A series of five meals was held with a group of 14 urban and rural residents of Southwestern Pennsylvania from across the political spectrum. Each meal began with facilitated conversation and structured activities promoting participants to examine and explain their own beliefs about government and to listen to others doing the same, and ended with an open-ended family style meal. At the conclusion of each meal, participants answered a survey gauging the extent to which they felt able to understand and engage with other’s perspectives, and the extent to which they felt heard and able to participate. This presentation will explain the theoretical rationale which supported decisions made for the project, the details of how the project came together, the results that were found, and lessons learned from the process. Hopefully, it can serve as a model for others to utilize in their own communities.

ABSTRACT. For Back-To-The-Landers of the mid-1960s--1970s, mainstream America was wasteful and soul-less. Too much was throw-away: human relationships were transient, and the food consumed by society was fast and mass-produced. For them, the work of daily life coincided very little with the art of living well. Work, in short, neither equaled nor brought pleasure. Their response to this reality, or their rejection of it, was as quiet as it was emphatic. Back-to-the-landers slipped away from the cities and suburbs of their upbringing to remake their lives. Once these smallholders built their own homes they began to produce their own fresh food in their newly chosen rural environments. What they hoped for, above all, was to create independence and to find happiness.

Many of them were willing to work hard at these projects of homebuilding and farming, and in one way or another they were all sincere about them. They were also, as I read them, deeply revolutionary in their outlook. But because they didn’t “bring” revolution to anyone in a larger era of revolutionary thought and action, instead leaving society behind, the revolutionary ideology of this generation of “new pioneers” can be hard to observe. This does not mean it wasn’t there. In many respects, back-to-the-landers were radical thinkers who wanted to rebuild the basic contours of their existence-- the pacing, parameters,human interactions, and sustenance through which they lived their lives. They wanted, as many of them proclaimed, to forge an entirely new connection with a land.

As I study the Back-to-the-Land Movement,their idealistic (and naïve) aspirations are most radical in their pursuit of pleasure-- in particular, gustatory pleasure. This was not a group of new-age Puritans, and they did not embrace suffering for its own sake. This is strongly evident in their interest in making maple syrup. For them, maple tapping and syrup making represented the deep pleasures possible in their new lives. In the articles from Back-to-the-Land newspapers and other publications, homesteaders repeatedly described the fun they had in going out into the forest at the very end of winter to pull from it the sweetest of syrups. Repeatedly they attest to the pleasures of eating at their own breakfast tables-- drenching their plates in sweetness that came from their own hard work. For them then, maple syrup was an intensely pleasurable reminder of their ability to enjoy their own efforts in remaking their world from the ground up.

ABSTRACT. At the very beginning of the modern restaurant, as Rebecca Spang has shown, the French word “restaurant” meant restorative -- a bouillon-based preparation for suffering invalids. Meat was at the heart of the preparation, but in an unrecognizable form. By the early nineteenth century, restaurants had become spaces for hearty eating and drinking rather than to restore one’s health. In the United States, they were also generally opportunities for male sociability and networking, while being seen as dangerous for women.

Vegetarianism and temperance were both important aspects of the long cultural shift which eventually led American restaurants to welcome women alongside men. This paper examines published sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tracing changes in newspaper editorials, restaurant reviews, advertisements and travel guides as restaurants were reinvented to remove alcohol and promote lighter, meatless foods, seen as more appetizing for women.

Strictly vegetarian restaurants were more common in England than in the United States, but at the turn of the twentieth century many American cities had a few such restaurants. Other restaurants found ways to appeal to vegetarians without cutting all meat from the menu, and vegetarians provided each other with advice on eating out even when traveling to cities without official vegetarian restaurants. Meanwhile, as the temperance movement swelled, many kinds of restaurants emerged which served no alcohol at all.

The connection between rejecting meat and rejecting alcohol came from a renewed approach to eating for health but also from a new interest in ethical, prosocial ways of eating, appealing to both men and women. Before women could feel welcome, restaurants needed to help them feel safe and respected. In the early twentieth century a growing number of restaurants focused on ethical eating as a way to provide and communicate that security. It is interesting to speculate about what kinds of restaurants will serve marijuana edibles now that that long-lasting prohibition is ending.

ABSTRACT. Since it first took root in the United States in the early nineteenth century, vegetarianism has been simultaneously a set of personal dietary choices, a cluster of broad cultural meanings, and a social movement with organized advocacy efforts. We argue that one of the best ways to study this overlap of private beliefs and practices with public concerns is through cookbooks, which have served as a central means of disseminating both vegetarian philosophy and praxis. In this paper, we examine shifts in the content and form of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks and zines, the publishers of these cookbooks, and the social worlds from which these cookbooks emerge in order to trace continuity and divergence in the vegetarian movement. We draw on archival research, interviews with cookbook authors and publishers, bibliographic information, and textual and design analysis of cookbooks themselves to document changes from the 1830s, when the earliest American vegetarian cookbook was published, to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Included in this analysis are the food choices suggested in these cookbooks – ingredients, cooking styles, and techniques of preparation – which are variably grounded in religious, political, gastronomic, or health rationales, and which serve to connect readers to a lived experience of vegetarianism and sometimes, to associated social and political affiliations as well. In this way, we frame cookbooks as supremely social texts, even as they are deployed most commonly in private realms. Further, we suggest that the highly fluid traversing of the public-private boundary positions cookbooks to serve as especially effective carriers of social movement concepts and calls to action. As a stable medium that may be consulted in any time and any place, often traveling far from their own places of origin, print vegetarian cookbooks also play an important role as part of an abeyance structure that can keep various threads of movement ideology and action alive and entwined in the current lives of their readers. We highlight particular authors and books that set out new agendas, aesthetics, language, politics, and food choices, but also make observations about the importance of the vegetarian and vegan cookbook corpus as a whole and its generally unrecognized but crucial significance for the vegetarian movement.

ABSTRACT. “Companies making plant-based alternatives to a variety of animal proteins are popping up everywhere,” explained The New York Times in a May 2016 profile of Beyond Meat, a faux-meat producing company whose products arrived on the shelves of health food conglomerate Whole Foods that very month. As Tom Rich--a vegetarian, corporate representative of Whole Foods explained--the Beyond Burger “tasted and felt and chewed like any other burger, and on some level, I just want to be able to eat the same way everyone else eats.” The Beyond Burger was not merely another frozen veggie burger to enter an already saturated market of grains, vegetables, and soy, it was meant to appear fresh, sold in a refrigerated case, and included the markings of a real hamburger, including a pinkish hue, the appearance of fat, and even “blood” made from beet juice. The burgers were also invented in a food science laboratory.

The makers of Beyond Meat and Whole Foods shoppers might be surprised to find out that a similar desire helped change vegetarianism and the politics of the movement more than a century earlier. The location of experimentation was also similar, though relatively new at the time. Surrounded by a few dozen beakers and interconnected Pasteur pipettes, workers clad in lab coats manipulated microscopes to try to understand the most beneficial properties of new, faux meats. The landscape of the experimental kitchen at the Battle Creek Sanitarium could easily have been mistaken for a chemistry laboratory. But the materials developed in this lab were not science for the sake of science, but science for the sake of nutrition. And it took an enterprising woman, Ella Eaton Kellogg to harness the power of science to reinvent vegetarianism in America. Ella Kellogg’s work at the helm of the experimental kitchen transformed vegetarianism through the development of meat substitutes. This paper will explore Ella Kellogg’s oft-overlooked role in developing the first mass produced vegetarian, faux meat products in the United States. In fact, Ella Kellogg was more directly involved in this process than her more well-known husband, John Harvey.

ABSTRACT. The ideological and rhetorical divide between hunters and vegans in popular culture is expressed most often through extreme polarization. Rhetorical actors on both sides see the two groups as incompatible in terms of lifestyles and ethical constitutions. However, there are a growing number of hunters producing rhetoric that mimics the rhetoric of the vegan and vegetarian communities, particularly as it reflects a major concern of the ecological wellbeing of the natural environment. One can even go as far as to say hunters are embracing and utilizing a more feminist rhetoric messaging within popular culture, something often attributed to vegan communities. Therefore, this paper examines the rhetorical markers of hunters who are building bridges with the rhetoric of vegans and vegetarians, along with the future implications of a united rhetorical front between these groups.

ABSTRACT. For more than a decade, food systems scholars have noted greater attention by consumers on where the food they consume is produced and by whom, and how its production impacts the environment. This has contributed to a growth in local food movements. It has also led to increasing interest in research and activism around new systems of food choice or what Richard Le Heron refers to as “Alternative Food Movements and Networks” or AFMN (2001:60). Le Heron notes, however, that even this growing interest by international food researchers is limited because macro-level studies on food and agriculture issues are always partial. There are few contexts that are actually researched in depth (Le Heron 2013:51).

In this paper, we present an initial analysis of a micro-level study of Bucks County, Pennsylvania farmers and their links and perspectives on AFMNs. The local food movement in Bucks County has been led by a grass roots organization, The Bucks County Foodshed Alliance. Their sponsorship of farmers markets plus an increase in CSAs (community supported agriculture), cooperative food markets and even “agritainment” in the region over the past two decades demonstrates a renewed interest and attention to the local food system. What can this shift tell us about farmers’ values and their perspectives on food and farming? Through an extensive online survey, our research assessed farmer and/or operator motivations for their chosen methods of production, and the meanings attributed to how farmers produce and where they choose to market their products. We also examined farmer and operator perceptions on the future of agriculture in Bucks County, and assessed their level of interest and participation in value added farm produced products as a means to increase income and consumer choice and ability to support local farms. This research was guided by the question of how “alternative” is this renewed interest in local food systems in reality? Is it driven by market demand and the financial promise of niche products for struggling small farms or is it also driven by other considerations such as concern over the ecological impacts of industrial agricultural food systems and a desire to “relocalize” our food systems?

ABSTRACT. Autonomy is a key principle of agroecology. First scientific works of Gliessman and Altieri have positioned autonomy from the markets and external forces as one of the goals of the agroecological prospect. Farmers' and peasants' organizations, firstly in Latin America, have adopted this goal to strengthen their action for the emancipation and the local self-governance of their members. Recently in France, new public policies seeking to develop agroecology include the objective of autonomy in its legal definition. The few existing studies examining farmers' ways to increase their autonomy show how they compromise this pursuit with other aims and concrete everyday realities. Among them, the lack of appropriate resources provided by the upstream operators and the difficulty to find commercial outlets for a diversity of products form crucial lock-ins.

We propose to enrich the current analysis of the dominant agrifood systems' lock-ins through the examination of the concrete strategies and compromises of French farmers seeking to increase their autonomy. Indeed, in this country, the recent public policies focusing on agroecology have shed new light on a movement of farmer-led collective projects developing agroecological practices to increase autonomy, especially in relation to input sellers. To understand this phenomenon and its implications in the dominant agrifood systems, this paper presents the main results of a research-action program focusing on the development of agroecological practices by French farmers, who are member of machinery cooperatives (Cuma). These farmers seek to increase their autonomy by relying to a greater extent on local cooperation.

Our work first aims at questioning the values that guide the farmers seeking to become more autonomous through cooperation and how they manage to do it. How and why do these farmers accept to become more interdependent with their peers to increase their autonomy in relation to markets? Secondly, we analyze how they compromise to enable their pursuit of autonomy. Which lock-ins and limits of the dominant agrifood systems do these compromises reveal? In the final discussion, we examine the possible ways to re-organize the local processes of territorial and community development to found new agroecological agrifood systems.

ABSTRACT. Iowa produces more corn, soybeans, and hogs than any other state in the US. Yet even within the heart of the Corn Belt, small-scale farms growing food for local markets are appearing. Iowa's sustainable agriculture pioneers have, until recently, primarily focused on shifting towards no-till production, herbicide reductions, or cover-crops within the context of commodity grain operations (Bell 2004). Small-scale, diversified farms using organic production methods, then, can represent a new vision for agroecology on the Corn Belt. Despite their different goals and orientations, many of these small-scale farmers interact frequently with the industrial agriculture system surrounding them. From landlord and familial relationships to loan applications, ostensibly distinct systems of agricultural production often overlap in individual farmers' lives and livelihoods (Janssen 2017). This paper addresses one particular pathway through which the values of industrial agriculture can influence the experiences of alternative farmers: the "we feed the world" narrative. Repeated by farmers and promoted by public institutions and private agribusinesses alike, "we feed the world" is a ubiquitous feature of Iowa's agricultural discourse. Its parallel, "you can't feed the world farming like that," is a common critique levied at alternative farmers by actors in the conventional system, often accompanied by negative judgements on the price of direct-marketed products or the intensity of non-mechanized labor. Building on Comito et al.'s (2013) argument that "we feed the world" mediates the tension between the mutually exclusive roles of "farmer as steward" and "farmer as businessman," the paper suggests that some actors within the industrial system also wield "we feed the world" to defend against real and perceived criticisms originating from alternative agriculture. Reflecting both Malthusian fears and the country's export-oriented agriculture policy, the notion that only scientific, industrial agriculture can ensure sufficient calories for the growing world population is more a discursive self-defense strategy than a factual assessment of organic yield potentials. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic research across Iowa, this paper analyzes the effects of the "we feed the world" narrative on beginning alternative farmer's status on Iowa's agricultural landscape. It also examines how this narrative intersects with beginning farmers' perceptions of their own work, and their responses thereto.

ABSTRACT. Deike Beecken, Bernhard Freyer, Valentin Fiala

The focus of this study was on the tension that exists between action and attitude of conventional farmers towards ecologically sustainable management, as conventional farmers are now confronted with a twofold role of originator/sufferer from environmental problems resulting from their own intensification processes. Problem centered guided interviews were carried out at 10 small to medium sized northern german family farms with 15 individuals participating, who all had milk production as their major source of income. Farmers were asked about their self image, the subjective perception of nature, the evaluation of their own management practices and criticism by the community. An analysis of the communication process by means of analytical induction according to Florian Znaniecki served for the evaluation of the transcriptions. Furthermore, the study aimed to analyze the identity of conventional farmers using Niklas Luhmann's different-logic systems theory. The survey makes clear how the external image and the internal vision of conventional agriculture conflict with each other. Farmers are criticized by outside observers on the part of society, but they often do not regard their management as problematic. This external criticism does not seem to be reaching the system internally and therefore does not lead to a change of action towards ecologically sustainable management. The assumption made at the beginning of the study, stating that conventional farmers lack awareness of environmental sustainability and, for this reason, persist in their dual role, has been rejected in the course of the research process. On the contrary conventional farmers, regardless of their farm structure, have an awareness for environmental sustainability and recognize the problems of conventional farming. The increase in awareness is all the more pronounced, the more diversified the operational structure of a company is. Nevertheless, the consciousness does influence the identity and thus the behavior of the farm management practices. There is a clear demarcation from the surrounding agriculture on the part of the interviewees, but their own operations are mostly characterized as sustainable. The results obtained show the challenges facing future political regulations, which aim to support sustainable agriculture.

ABSTRACT. Serving as phase 2 of an arts-based approach to engaging food pantry clientele in an effort to formulate solutions in regard to designing a new food pantry model, this paper details the shift from a researcher-led approach to a co-constructed approach with clientele. This study explored the benefits of a participant-led, co-created, arts-based methodology as a strategy for enhanced communication and critical thinking skills with vulnerable populations at two food pantries. The research questions that led this study were: (1) How does an arts-based approach open up the discursive space around food insecurity? (2) What does arts-based research look like from a co-constructed approach? and (3) How does a co-constructed approach affect public viewing and solution building?

Throughout the study, each participant shared lived experiences about food insecurity through a series of creative workshops that involved collage, found poetry, and exhibit brainstorming and design; they also shared through individual creative journaling in between workshops. During each session, participants would talk through their experiences, concerns, and ideas as they worked on and shared the meanings behind their creations with the other participants. Each group's collective work culminated into a public art exhibit representing their associated pantry. These exhibits served multiple purposes, representing a source of pride and an empowering platform for clients to share their vision of a better food assistance system; and to also remove stigma around food insecurity, while casting a wider net of communicative engagement within the community.

The use of arts-based workshops resulted in clients' increased interest, emotional investment, and leadership in discussion topics as the workshop series progressed. One client took the initiative to exchange emails with the researcher and another client to discuss ideas outside of the meeting times. The use of journals proved to be a valuable source for expression and critical thinking, as well as a prompt for discussions based on creating new programs for the food pantry. Clients at one pantry ultimately chose to use the concept of a garden space at the pantry as their focal point, creating a wooden pallet garden from recycled materials and creating an action plan for implementing a garden space. The resulting exhibits also emphasized client ownership of issues and ideas, which led to the design of engagement programs at their local pantry based on their own discussion topics, with two of the most significant being a pantry garden space and client-specific support groups.

ABSTRACT. Starting in fall of 2016, a metropolitan-based food bank in the southeastern United States initiated a three-year program, Stabilizing Lives, intended to focus on designing more holistic and concentrated services to partner agency clients to achieve food, housing, and financial security. In research collaboration with a land-grant university, this process was designed in two phases: (1) To help facilitate a participatory research process with staff, volunteers, and clients at five participating agencies to identify factors that promote food insecurity; and (2) to work in consultation with food pantry clientele to place the decision-making process and methods of social change into the hands of the clientele, emphasizing the capacity of participants to identify problems, emphasize and legitimize cultural meanings, and conceptualize and implement developed solutions. The overarching research question that directed this project was: Where should the food bank invest more resources to help support households’ move toward social and economic stability?

Each participating agency (a total of five), through the direction of the food bank, organized a planning team that was comprised of food pantry staff (~2), volunteers (~3), and clientele (~3-5). Planning teams were intended to function as a collective and cross-representative voice of the associated agency. Research methods included a photovoice project and in-depth interviews with all participating clientele, and two focus groups with each planning team.

Resulting data and subsequent analysis revealed that the current organization of emergency food distribution treats recipients as atomistic individuals, without recognizing or responding to their membership in family networks or their stage of the life course. Food pantry clientele, like anyone else, know themselves as members of families and social networks of care and obligation, and these connections strongly influence their food needs. They, like anyone else, encounter different nutritional and additional needs at different stages of the life course. In addition, food pantry clientele draw on a diverse set of social, cultural, and human capital resources to negotiate the trade-offs of living in poverty. They possess ingenuity, resourcefulness, knowledge, and experience that could be productively incorporated into re-envisioning the social safety net. Finally, results point toward a need to re-envision the current emergency food infrastructure model to more purposefully situate clientele, the food bank, and local agencies as equal partners in a re-making of the food pantry model.

ABSTRACT. In 2016, a metropolitan-based food bank approached a southeastern land-grant university with a request to design a participatory research project that would inform the creation of more holistic and concentrated services to partner agency clients to achieve food, housing, and financial security. Focusing on a subset of the larger, collaborative research project, this paper examines the value of an arts-based research approach aimed to foster new avenues for dialogue creation and better understand held meanings and personal experiences related to food insecurity. The research questions that led this study were: (1) How does an arts-based approach open up the discursive space around food insecurity? (2) What does arts-based research look like from a researcher-led approach? and (3) How does a researcher-led approach affect public viewing and solution building? Following the completion of a photovoice project, in-depth interviews, and two focus group discussions with clients, staff, and volunteers at five participating partner agencies for the larger project, the researcher of this study used the collected data to design a public art exhibit. This art exhibit was displayed at a day-long interagency summit event that was held at the food bank, and attended by nearly 100 area stakeholders, including partner agency staff and volunteers, other non-profit leaders, legislators, and agency clientele. As part of the art exhibit, three developed pieces represented three primary themes that came out of the data: (1) Helping self and others - which was represented by "MILK," (2) Dealing with Health - which was represented by "Fresh," and (3) Complexities and uncertainties of life - which was represented by "Non-Food Items." Throughout the day, and during breaks, attendees were encouraged to complete a questionnaire that addressed viewer perceptions regarding the intended issue. Questionnaire responses revealed that viewers overwhelmingly enjoyed art as a narrative tool for client stories-while the exhibits served as key sources of dialog throughout the day. Through the questionnaire responses attendees also addressed that the lack of client-made art was a weakness in the show. Ultimately, the design process of the research-led exhibit provided invaluable critical reflexive insight for the researcher, challenging her to continually reassess personal perspective versus client perspective. Results from this project informed the second phase of research, which was to focus co-created art installations with clientele, as feedback from the survey from attendees, including clientele, indicated value in pursuing opportunities to share artwork designed and directly guided by food bank clients.

ABSTRACT. When Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, the devastation was unprecedented. A majority of the island’s roughly 3.5 million inhabitants lack basic necessities, such as food and water. To date, over 60% of the island still lacks power. The storm brought international attention to a defunct colonial relationship between the U.S. and its island territory. Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status and crumbling economy complicated the government’s disaster response. When Puerto Rico’s people most needed assistance, the U.S. fell short and outdated laws prohibited the rest of the world from engaging in relief efforts. Grassroots mobilization for a sustainable and just recovery has been underway on and off the island addressing calls for inclusion of the people in the recovery process. This presentation provides a theoretical contribution via a case study exploring the conditions under which an environmental disaster can serve as a catalyst for the rise of food sovereignty activism. The Our Power Puerto Rico #JustRecovery campaign seeks to collectively address climate adaptation and food system failures in Puerto Rico. This work highlights how a combination of historical disenfranchisement, environmental disaster, and failed federal response contributed to the rise of a coalition of social movements (food sovereignty, climate justice, environmental justice, farmworker rights) using theories of frame alignment and resource mobilization. Using initial data from a digital content analysis of social media, organization websites, and published interviews, I posit the various organizations share a master frame of justice, and have bridging frames tied to identities. Future work includes interviews to be conducted summer 2018 to understand how the organizations have been mobilizing resources and capital in Puerto Rico to push for a more climate resilient food system.

ABSTRACT. Spanning two continents, Istanbul is a vibrant food capital in Turkey, with over 14 million people, and a rich history that includes a diverse culinary, ethnic and religious heritage. Though there is much interest in the imperial culinary background, what are the food issues in the city today? Through semi-structured interviews with 13 food activists, this presentation maps current food discourses, ranging from culinary belonging to environmental concerns, from urban residents’ relationship to food to social class on the table, and from the culinary stamp of old migrants from Anatolia to the new migrants from Syria and beyond.

The proposed presentation inquires how NGOs and food activists perceive and articulate the primary issues around food in Istanbul, and in Turkey, and explores their tactics to resolve them at the structural or individual level. The constant comparison analysis revealed a remarkable variety of interests and tactics, but generally, a broad agreement on how food and culture are connected. The tactics include:

• Representation and education through seminars, talks, conferences, and essays about food, stressing the importance of accessibility and democratization through digital information and public events • Filling gaps not addressed by the government, such as creating and funding local projects through grant-based competitions, focusing on supporting entrepreneurial activity, and working with marginalized populations to create avenues of opportunities for them • Bridging the gap between urban consumers and rural producers by creating commercial spaces that values local and organic produce • Engaging urban citizens (especially children) to “get their hands dirty” and get close to food production • Preserving specific ethnic foodways (such as collecting Jewish/Sephardic recipes) • Providing a systemic critique against the state and the capitalist system, and resisting against it through their food work which they envision as protest (using waste to distribute free vegan food, bartering, public eating spectacles to bring attention to the problematic aspects of food consumption such as opulence and excess), • Campaigning around environmental concerns (political activism against legislation to cut forests for commercial purposes, declining fish population in the Bosphorus straight etc.)

Given the variety of approaches, their target audience shifts accordingly from non-Turks to middle class urbanites, to children, women, refugees, and the Turkish state. These groups resemble their global counterparts in the way they frame the issues and their tactics against the complex Istanbul backdrop.

ABSTRACT. Herbalists consider fire cider a community-owned recipe, one that is open-sourced and routinely reimagined by individual practitioners. With the advent of Instagram and the broader connected community it creates, many folk herbalists carved a commercial niche and developed an extended client base by marketing their individual versions of fire cider through this social media platform. My research looks at this historic “recipe” and how this community of shared knowledge deals with modern legal issues including copyright and trademark law. While this story spans several mediums, I focus mainly on the Instagram accounts of women folk entrepreneurs, how they use the hashtag #freefirecider in the hopes of winning back their recipe, and, in turn, help form a folk narrative within the Instagram modernity.

When asked about the role of Instagram in the success of the #freefirecider campaign, several herbalists claim that it gives the community a voice and a platform through which the newest generation of folk traditions can learn about the issues surrounding the recipe. One herbalist credits the success of this year’s World Fire Cider Day with the “massive social media coverage” as herbalists and supporters shared their sentiments, recipes, images of their process, and stylized ingredient shots, each connected with collaborative tags. A quick search for the #freefirecider tag populates over 1,600 posts and the more generalized #firecider has nearly 13,000. Combined with the other terms that make up their collective folk taxonomy, this feminist narrative reaches a digital community spread across the nation, around the world, and far beyond the geographic boundaries of U.S. trademark law. Whether this reach culminates in a successful win for tradition over trademark, only time and the tags will tell.

ABSTRACT. With strong roots in Anthropology, the Food in Culture and Social Justice program at Oregon State University has had more of a focus on interculturality and de-colonization than many Sustainable Food Systems university programs. Interculturality is centered on cross-cultural dialogue and through this dialogue, we often discover that words with identical historical roots come to mean different things. Nowhere is this more clear than in an examination of agroecology in the US and agroecología in Latin America. In this paper, I emphasize the importance of exposing university students to agroecological movements in other places in the world as a path to de-colonizing the US classroom. A specific focus will be on an Intercultural Learning Community which takes place in Oregon and Ecuador.

ABSTRACT. Campus farms have taken on a diversity of forms since their popularity grew in the 2000s (LaCharite 2015; Sayre and Clark 2011). A growing trend focuses campus farms on entrepreneurship and meeting the bottom line, whether the farm manager or student-entrepreneurs take on the responsibility of selling goods from the farm or faculty seek public-private partnerships to finance operations. We critically engage with this trend, focusing on both its advantages and disadvantages to the mission of institutions of higher education. Over the past year, we have conducted ethnographic fieldwork on our own campus farm at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. We have also visited and spoken with several campus farm managers in the region with the primary goal of figuring out how these farms finance themselves. We explore the roles of foundation grants, academic research grants, farm sales through dining halls, CSAs, and farmers markets, student paid and unpaid labor, and community volunteers in making campus farms financially sustainable. We ask: how do sources of funding impact the missions of campus farms, including how they facilitate experiential education and critical thinking for students, build relationships and food security for the community, and produce food for local communities. What are the risks, what is lost and what is gained, as we shape campus farms into entrepreneurial projects? We find both advantages and disadvantages to this approach and make recommendations for best practices.

ABSTRACT. Food insecurity recently has been identified as a growing problem among college students, especially those who are first generation students (Dubick, Mathews, and Cady 2016). Universities are slow to identify the problem even though food insecurity impacts learning and academic success. Through campus wide surveys, student interviews, and participant observation at a campus food pantry, risk factors and coping strategies were identified for undergraduate and graduate students at a state university. Minority students participated in the campus food pantry weekly; however, they were underrepresented in the research survey to assess food insecurity and follow-up interviews. The study offered cash incentives for interviews and opportunities for 25 students to win bags of groceries of their choice for participation, but those incentives were not sufficient to obtain minority participation. The sample of 800 students was primarily composed of women, international students, and Euro-American students. We explore the reasons for lack of participation in the study by minorities and describe the use of culturally sensitive recruitment strategies to improve participation during Spring 2018. The results of this ongoing study will be used to demonstrate the problem of food insecurity among college students and its potential impact on their academic success and wellness. Final reports will be shared with the campus food pantry staff, faculty, university administrators, and community organizations that serve college students. The authors hope the study will encourage policies and programs to increase food security of at risk students.

ABSTRACT. Starting as a way to grow food on campus, the Communiversity Gardens at Northern Illinois University (NIU) have grown to play a much larger role in transforming the culture of food and health for students, faculty, and staff. The NIU Communiversity Gardens broke ground in May of 2014 as a partnership between the university and the DeKalb County Community Gardens.

Under the advisement of staff from the Institute for the Study of the Environment, sustainability, and Energy, and the Office of Student Engagement & Experiential Learning, 15 student interns have been mentored to serve the community through the Communiversity Gardens to date. Several of the student interns presented on their experiences at local and regional conferences. In addition more than 800 volunteers have donated more than 2800 hours to ensure that produce is grown, harvested, and made available to students and the community.

During this same time, faculty and staff recognized the need to integrate engagement opportunities with the Communiversity Gardens into the curriculum. As a result, the interdisciplinary Certificate of Undergraduate Study in Sustainable Food Systems has been created and connects number of related courses offered in departments across several disciplines. Since the fall of 2016, 21 students have enrolled in the certificate program and widened their knowledge about the food, food systems, and food justice. Given the university’s geographic location and the fact that it does not offer a major in agricultural studies, the certificate is a popular choice for students interested in sustainable agriculture, horticulture, and nutrition.

With the roll-out of the interdisciplinary certificate the new required course, Introduction to Sustainable Food Systems, began enrollment in the fall 2015. This general education course is offered to students across the university and introduces them to the broad array of topics surrounding food and, depending on the season, provides them with adequate time for hands-on experiences in the gardens or at the greenhouse. The students are often interested in ways to improve campus eating habits and this course offers ways for students to collaborate with the NIU Huskie Food Pantry to increase education on nutritional diversity and provide vegetable eating guides. Thanks to the growing faculty and student interest in food and food systems, NIU was able to add another general education course, Philosophy of Food, offered through the Philosophy department.

ABSTRACT. There is much debate in the scientific community about the genetic diversity among crops in the U.S., with many citing high diversity with biological resiliency. How do we define diversity? I’m interested in leading a discussion about diversity within Agroecology – what is current landscape of crop diversity, market diversity, and diversity in the social movement? How do we rate the current diversity in these pieces of the whole? Where do we need to work at building more resiliency by increasing diversity in Agroecology and what are strategies to do so? It’s a large task, but one that will help keep true the aim of the science, practice, and social movement of Agroecology.

ABSTRACT. “How does the labor of sensing work?” From embodied instruments such as tongues and taste receptors to sensory prosthetics like blood pressure monitors and pain-response scales, sensory facilities are constantly working. Yet accounting instruments such as timecards and surveys—themselves the heart of economic metrics that decide what is and is not work—routinely erase the waged and unwaged labor of “the sensorium,” as well as its economic and moral values.

In a double-move, these instruments also produce the sensorium as something that must be labored upon. How do these sensorial absent-presences come to shape the practices of taste science, nutritional epidemiology, supplementation, artisanal craft production, and agricultural justice? How is sensorial labor valued--and how might it be valued otherwise?

This experimental roundtable brings together food studies, critical nutrition, and science and technology studies to unpack the work of sensing. Through interactive conversation with each other and the audience, we explore the human and cyborg techniques used to transform sensing into knowledge and related goods, asking what, and who, bears the burden when things produced through these processes don’t “work.” We consider the messy, dynamic lives of sensory labor-atories -- scientific or otherwise -- and in the process call for an expansion of Critical Food Politics to inquire what futures are made possible by working, or more delightfully, playing, with the senses.

ABSTRACT. This roundtable discussion will highlight opportunities for students, faculty, and community organizations to apply for funding from federal and non-governmental sources. The session will provide an overview of the agencies and organizations and their funding opportunities. These include research, extension, education, and community development support for practitioners, faculty, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. We will showcase investment areas that can support the theoretical and methodological contributions of the arts, social sciences, and humanities. We will discuss broader funding trends in food, agriculture, nutrition, health, and community development, including interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and disciplinary specific pathways. In addition, we will review grantsmanship, including timelines for submission, and offer tips and advice for conceiving of and submitting competitive proposals.

Roundtable Participants: Douglas Constance- Southern SARE, Sam Houston State University Wesley Dean, USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Clare Hinrichs- Northeast SARE, Pennsylvania State University Sunil Iyengar- National Endowment for the Arts Ariela Zycherman, USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture

ABSTRACT. The panel will present findings from the core projects of our two year USDA grant on Domestic Fair Trade and Agricultural Labor. This panel features a review and synthesis of six case studies related to Organic Valley logistics; Milk with Dignity campaign; Good Food Purchasing Policies; Wisconsin CSA farms; Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship; and $15/hr minimum wage campaigns. These case studies focus on strategies, such as coalition-building, supply chain negotiation, certification, and public policy, to explore the extent to which they were successful at improving labor practices and returns and to identify challenges to moving them forward. It will also feature an empirical analysis of American Community Survey data from 2014 and 2015 of wage patterns of farm workers, along with food and janitorial workers, to identify whether there are notable patterns of wage discrimination or lower earnings in agriculture or for specific demographic groups. The panelists will compare and contrast the evidence from these different research efforts and discuss future market-led and government policy paths related to improving labor practices and earnings for agricultural labor, including family farm operators.

ABSTRACT. The recent Guatemalan oil palm boom has generated concerns over possible negative social and environmental impacts, yet it continues to be embraced as an opportunity to spur rural development and improve food security. This paper uses the socio-ecological food systems framework to demonstrate ways in which oil palm expansion has contributed to increasing food system vulnerability and decreasing adaptation capacity in two communities in the Lachuá Ecoregion in northern Guatemala, leading to declining local food and nutrition security. Cross-scalar dynamics of self-provisioning and market-provisioning of food, and the effects on water and soil nutrient cycling are considered, as they lead to changes in local food access and consumption patterns, notably the reduced consumption of fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Results show that in the absence of additional efforts to improve food security, oil palm expansion does little to boost the local food system through economic development. At the same time, it exacerbates many existing food system vulnerabilities, such as soil degradation and shrinking forest resources, and introduces new ones, such as exposure to oil palm market shocks. Lessons suggest that food system vulnerability deserves serious consideration within development interventions.

ABSTRACT. Categories of difference intersect to produce barriers and privileges unique to individuals and communities. Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality – all of these categories impact our lived experience. The framework of “intersectionality” helps us to understand the emergent outcomes of these intersections and center the voices of marginalized populations. Using this framework, this research seeks to uncover the impact of intersecting identities on the success of sustainable farmers.

Sustainable farming is posited as a progressive movement and healthy alternative to conventional farming. This generalized association, however, obscures the harmful aspects within and prevents sustainable farming from a truer progression which focuses on the success of marginalized farmers. Perennial polycultural farming poses even more specific challenges because of its large upfront costs, slow return on investment and lack of robust and inclusive farmer resources.

The case studies here within reveal the impacts of intersecting categories of difference on three levels: institutional, community and individual, and the attributes within these three levels which allow individuals to overcome barriers within perennial polycultural farming in the Midwest region. The goal of this research is to build out resources and programs that invite and include marginalized populations, rather than reinforce the status quo. Diversifying our biophysical landscape can only be sustained through diversification of the social landscape, and to do so we must understand how the system helps or hinders, and how individuals rise and fall.

ABSTRACT. Diversified farming systems (DFS) use management practices that foster beneficial agroecological interactions. Such practices are considered more environmentally sustainable, as well as more resilient to environmental change, than highly specialized, less diversified, and typically monocultural systems. DFS practices may include, for example, incorporating hedgerows, insectory strips, cover cropping, mixed crop varieties, intercropping, riparian corridors, and natural areas into farm systems that are typically certified organic. Such practices supply critical inputs and ecosystem services to the farm and surrounding landscapes, such as pollination, pest control, soil nutrients, water health, and reduced pesticide exposure for farmworkers and local residents. Moreover, DFS practices not only promote agroecological benefits, but they also enhance socioeconomic advantages, such as the ability to recover from environmental or market shocks. However, despite the potential for diversified farming systems to improve the sustainability of agricultural systems and communities, they have not been widely adopted in the United States. Given that farmers today face unprecedented market, regulatory, and ecological constraints, it is critical to understand how these factors affect farmers’ choices of management practices, which in turn affect environmental sustainability and farm economic viability. This paper examines barriers to DFS adoption, as well as the opportunities and innovations for DFS, among organic strawberry growers in California’s Central Coast region. This work also examines farmer perceptions and experiences of the benefits, costs and tradeoffs of DFS.

Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted with 25+ growers, this paper examines the role and impact of new regulations such as the Food Safety Modernization Act, land and labor access, institutional supports, niche markets, farmer knowledge, and “maverick” innovations by farmers, on the adoption/maintenance of diversified farming system practices. This work also explores potential opportunities not fully captured by farmers practicing DFS in this region. These opportunities include social networking, farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchange, and possible structural innovations such as land and grower cooperatives. Finally, this work offers policy recommendations to incentivize DFS practices nationally.

ABSTRACT. More equity in the share of economic and social benefits between the different actors of the agrifood systems is a key aim of agroecology. Despite the increasing success of agroecology, social equity still remains a major challenge for the movement, as reminded very recently by Rosset and Altieri (2017). To address such a challenge, agroecological scientists suggest farmers and agricultural organizations limit their financial dependence on non-agroecological actors, for instance by limiting the use of external inputs, dependence on dominant agro-industries and on global markets.

This study investigates whether social equity and financial independence go hand in hand with practices, in the context of the vegetable production for fresh market in the Walloon Region (Belgium). On one side, we analyze the financial (in)dependance of the producers from wholesalers. Most producers supplement the range of vegetables they offer to clients by buying vegetables from wholesalers – selling foreign (and non-agroecological) vegetables – and reselling them in their own shop. On the other side, we examine the working conditions of producers and farmworkers, two crucial aspects of social equity. Eventually, we highlight the links between working conditions and financial (in)dependence of the producers from wholesalers. To highlight agroecological strategies, we conducted comprehensive interviews and technico-economic appraisals with agroecological as well as organic and conventional producers. In total, 41 producers were interviewed as well as numerous actors of the Walloon vegetable agrifood system for fresh market (farmworkers, consumers, union members, advisors, etc.).

Our results show that financial independence from actors of the dominant agrifood systems does not necessarily produce social equity. We found two groups of agroecological market gardeners. The producers of the first group prioritize their financial independence at the expense of social equity, while the producers of the other group make the social equity at the expense of financial independence. In the first group, producers refuse to financially depend on non-agroecological wholesalers. Consequently, they suffer from hard working conditions and they are not able to offer good employment conditions to their farmworkers. To get over such a situation, they try to reinforce their ties with consumers. Our study shows that such a strategy is insufficient and instead diverse political actions should be engaged as well. In the Walloon context, these actions should at least facilitate secure access to land, develop adapted investment subsidies to agroecological systems, strengthen union movement and facilitate interactions between the diversity of vegetable production systems.

ABSTRACT. Alternatives to the globalized industrial food system have been gaining momentum in the U.S. since the 1970s, with the slow and local food movements. While scholarship has widely covered the potential and faults of direct agricultural markets and local food systems, focusing on farms, farmers markets, and CSAs (Feenstra 1997; Anderson and Cook 2000; Hinrichs 2000; Born and Purcell 2006; Feagan 2007), few studies explore the impact of restaurants in alternative food networks (Starr et al. 2003).

This research traces the impact of over 50 years of intentionally local sourcing to uncover the magnitude of farm-to-restaurant enterprises. With the leadership of acclaimed chef Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, established in Berkeley, CA in 1971, pioneered a wide network of food businesses and farms that are supporting local food procurement. Their open kitchen approach encourages close ties between chefs and customers, and between chefs and farmers (Chebrough et al. 2014). Since its establishment, the restaurant’s menus have been based on regional, seasonal ingredients that have sometimes been fertilized with food waste from the restaurant (Kim 2013), also fostering a closed and seasonal food cycle. By analyzing historical data on the network of staff alumni and their spin-off businesses, and related farms that supply these businesses, we map the expansion of social ties and related acreages impacted by this local food movement over time. Through qualitative analysis with in-person interviews, we explore the magnitude and the impact that the network has had on the ways in which people have been growing and consuming food in the region, and gain an understanding of how the values of the movement have flowed throughout the network.

This research informs the sociology of economic markets and social movements more broadly. We employ the theory of embeddedness (Hinrichs 2000) with geosocial network analysis to understand the interplay between social movement diffusion, geography and demographic characteristics of network actors. Embeddedness refers to the idea that the market and economic behavior are mediated by social relations, which are often reflected in the close social ties that take place in direct agricultural markets (Hinrichs 2000). With this research, we extend the theory of embeddedness to unearth the role of social networks in alternative food markets, and show how the Chez Panisse network has cultivated a national movement with a palate for agroecological, sustainable, localized, and overall caring forms of food production and consumption that shape landscapes of production.

ABSTRACT. Tourists from all over the world flock to Portland, Oregon to consume artisanal delicacies and dine in hip farm-to-table (FTT) restaurants. FTT diners ‘vote with their forks’ to achieve environmental sustainability and champion local farmers and award-winning chefs, both predominantly white and male. Yet, racialized and gendered hands, bodies, and minds perform the majority of FTT labor, and many of those who work in FTT experience the same poverty wages, erratic scheduling, discrimination, and other exploitative labor practices that plague the foodservice industry at large. In short, those working in the ‘sustainable’ food economy are struggling to sustain themselves. Through empirical research conducted in partnership with workers and organizers, I investigate labor exploitation, worker organizing, and sustainability discourse in restaurants and grocery stores that prepare, serve, and distribute local and organic food in Portland. I extend conversations about the social relations of local, fair trade, and organic agriculture (Born & Purcell, 2006; Brown & Getz, 2008; DuPuis & Goodman, 2005; Guthman, 2011, 2014; Jaffee, 2007), further down the food chain to examine the exploitative, racist, and patriarchal labor relations of the FTT foodservice and retail industries.

Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews, two years of participant observation, and qualitative content analysis of company advertisements and organizing materials, I demonstrate how values-based discourse masks exploitative labor practices that make it difficult for workers to meet their basic needs, and I investigate how workers are pushing back against sustainability-branded capitalism. I position social reproduction – the work and care necessary to fulfill human needs and reproduce the next generation (Luxton and Bezanson, 2006) – as an important terrain of political struggle for low-wage workers, and highlight the unique opportunities that the FTT foodservice and retail industries offer workers who are organizing for better jobs and lives. I offer insight into how workers are forging more just conceptions of sustainability and how FTT and other alternative food advocates can support these efforts.

ABSTRACT. In 2000, about the only thing that was labeled “farm-to-table” was salmonella.

The expression, which ultimately went from cutting-edge to cliché in under a decade, was then used exclusively by food scientists discussing the risks associated with raw or undercooked-shell eggs. Within a few years, though, every American who ate in a restaurant had learned to associate “farm-to-table” with happiness and health: The prototypical farm-to-table meal was a grilled chop from a well-cared-for pig, lightly salted and served alongside heirloom applesauce and greens grown by that nice guy from the community contra dance.

Farm-to-table was pitched as the opposite of Big Ag, and was undeniably successful in prompting some consumers to think more critically about their food sources. But now that the movement has come and gone, it’s worth asking whether it in fact delivered on its promise to improve American food, and the working conditions of the people responsible for producing it.

Did the drumbeat of support for local food result in better farming practices and more sustainable agricultural economies? Or did the hype surrounding farm-to-table drown out its potential, harming small-scale farmers and eaters alike?

Because the farm-to-table movement was so closely entwined with dining culture, we propose to report on how the philosophy played out in restaurants, and tackle the above questions from a restaurant-goers’ perspective. We also hope to explore how honesty, skill and professionalism fared in the farm-to-table era, which created a new class of culinary hero.

All three of us worked as food critics during farm-to-table’s heyday, so had thousands of chances to examine these matters by the light of an Edison bulb: John Kessler was the dining critic at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 18 years; Hanna Raskin served as a critic in Asheville, Dallas and Seattle before joining Charleston’s Post and Courier as its critic; The Tampa Bay Times’ Laura Reiley, in addition to reviewing restaurants, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-nominated ‘Farm to Fable’ series, scrutinizing sourcing claims at restaurants and farmers markets.

We propose to open our presentation with a very short overview of the trend and its measurable effects, along with a survey of the movement’s milestones. This introduction will be followed by a less structured discussion, giving audience members an opportunity to participate in this important conversation about the ways in which current thinking about food and farming reaches the public – and what happens next.

ABSTRACT. Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important characteristic in the realm of food systems as worldwide agriculture begins to approach the limits of the natural world. Farm to Institution (F2I) supply chains represent an alternative agrifood system which possess great potential to aid in an overarching food system transformation from a conventional supply chain to a more local and sustainable food procurement network. By linking local food producers with large institutional purchasers such as universities and hospitals, F2I programs hold the capacity to feed a local community while also promoting social, economic, and environmental sustainability. However straightforward it may seem, countless challenges have been encountered by those who have begun to explore such markets. The purpose of this session is to illustrate such challenges and discuss the benefits and opportunities that are also evident in F2I supply chains. Working with influence from our community partner Maine Farm to Institution (MEFTI), we provide a comprehensive analysis of studies and reports previously done in the New England region (U.S.A.) in order to illustrate a concise understanding of the current conditions in the regional F2I market. We also present qualitative data analysis results from a pilot study of interviews done with supply chain actors in Maine (n=5) to cross validate with our literature review findings. While our research suggests that at present there are still numerous obstacles being faced by supply chain actors in New England F2I markets, it also indicates a promising amount of potential benefits and opportunities. With understanding of both the challenges and opportunities as perceived by supply chain stakeholders, as well as their impression of the linkage between F2I and sustainability, we can begin to assess how viable Farm to Institution may be as a sustainable alternative to conventional food systems.

ABSTRACT. 14% of Vermont children live in a household that is food insecure, meaning that children in these homes experience hunger or reduced food consumption due to a lack of family financial resources. School meals for low-income children provide an avenue to combat the impact of poverty and food insecurity on child development and roughly 43% of Vermont youth receive free or reduced price meals in school. For eligible districts recently available federally funded universal free school meals programs provide all children meals regardless of income. The following paper draws on analysis from 2017 research that surveyed staff at 57 K-12 schools in Vermont which have implemented universal free meals programs. This project partners closely with Hunger Free Vermont to examine the influence of universal free school meals on multiple domains of child development to further strengthen Vermont school food and policy initiatives aimed at reducing hunger and improving childhood development, especially for Vermont’s most vulnerable children.

The specific research questions guiding this project include: 1. How has the implementation of universal free school meals influenced the school climate? 2. How has the implementation of universal free school meals influenced student academics and student behavior within each school? 3. What are the implications of implementation of universal free school meals on school finances and school food programs?

The data is derived from an online survey sent to 240 school principals, assistant principals, school nurses, food service workers, business managers, and special and para- educators. Of 240 invited to the survey, 116 participated. Participants responded to the survey from February 24 – May 15, 2017. The survey used an online platform, with 26 questions including basic demographics, utilizing both a 5-point likert scale as well as open-ended response formats.

Results consistently showed positive impacts for schools in Vermont that implement universal free meals programs. Respondents confirmed that universal meals programs correlate with increased readiness to learn, reduced food-insecurity, better school meal program finances, and improved social climate in participating schools. This study offers unique data and analysis relevant to policy makers and other researchers as it represents one of the first and only statewide studies of K-12 universal school meal programs in the United States.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, Dr. Abatemarco will describe preliminary findings from a Participant Action
Research Project in the Adirondack North Country of New York. This research project began
when she worked with a coalition of regional non-profits to put on a food justice summit on
March 1, 2018. The goal of the summit was to bring together regional stakeholders including
representatives from businesses, farms, community groups, government agencies, and social
service beneficiaries. At the summit, she initiated a participant action research project with the
aim of identifying priority food justice projects for the region. The first step in data collection
was a “road mapping activity,” which brought all the summit participants together to
brainstorm priority projects, and anticipate challenges and opportunities in the work for
regional food justice. In addition to data collection at the summit, she will be completing follow
up interviews with social service beneficiaries and individuals who struggle with food and
economic security in the region.
Tatiana will speak about the power of Participant Action Research to contribute to progressive
food justice movements, her preliminary findings based on the road mapping activity at the
Food Justice Summit, and preliminary data from the interview project which is underway this
summer. She will address the particular challenges and opportunities of food justice work this
rural region. Adirondack North Country of NY is home to a small, sustainable farming
resurgence, but is also a location with both extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

ABSTRACT. Food sovereignty has emerged as an innovative and diverse movement that calls for the integration of agroecological practices and social values to strengthen the resilience of community food systems. By emphasizing both food as a human right and the democratic participation of those producing and consuming the food, food sovereignty aims to ensure economic viability for small farmers, environmental justice for local ecosystems, and food that nourishes both the culture and health of communities. One of the originators of the movement in the global South, Via Campesina, positions itself as a voice for landless people, peasants, and indigenous peoples and frames food sovereignty in direct opposition to neo-liberal policies that promote the power of corporations, inequitable trade, and systematic injustice. The food sovereignty concept has recently been adopted by food system activists in the global North, and many believe it is important to understand how the term is being transposed into this geography. Previous work suggests that opposition to neo-liberalism and promotion of social justice are being weakened in the context of the global North. This presentation aims to explore how food sovereignty is framed in the context of the state of Maine to contribute to this understanding. Recent legislation in this state has paved the way for municipalities to declare themselves food sovereign, which would exempt local producers from state regulation. Investigation of discourse from news sources as well as activists on the ground reveals diverse understandings of the food sovereignty concept in Maine. The most prominent themes involve a desire to promote individual choice and food freely sold in local markets, as well as a libertarian-like opposition to regulation. These themes contrast with weaker, but still present concerns for local producers, local food resiliency, community health and food access, as well as anti-corporate sentiment, all of which align more with the principles of food sovereignty in the global South. Ultimately, this case study supports the idea that understandings of food sovereignty may differ across global contexts, as well as within regions. Implications of these differences contained within a food sovereignty frame need to be further explored to determine their collective action potential and whether they can be bridged without compromising the underlying goals and ideals of the food sovereignty movement.

ABSTRACT. Located outside Washington, DC, Prince George’s is one of the wealthiest majority African-American counties, and one of the highest-income counties overall, in the US. Yet its 9.2% poverty rate, while lower than that of DC, is the highest of all Maryland and Virginia counties surrounding the city. Prince George’s contends with significant disparities in income levels, food insecurity, and health measures. The highest rates of diet-related illnesses occur in its most urban areas and inside the Capital Beltway, “food swamps” where gas station and convenience stores, carry-outs, fast food, and other restaurants prevail over grocery stores offering fresh foods.

Where persistent disparities in health and well-being occur along race/ethnicity, class, and gender lines, Critical Disability Studies offers tools for understanding and responding to inequities in ways that have great potential to advance food justice. I will explore these possibilities using Prince George’s County (where I reside) and its Food Equity Council (on which I serve) as a case study. The Prince George’s County, MD, Food Equity Council (or FEC) predicates its very existence on the pursuit of food equity. Critical disability insights suggest that disability issues pervade the equity concerns that the Council is pursuing.

Arising from 1970s activism by disabled people, the interdisciplinary field of critical disability studies contests “the mainstream view of disability as deficit or pathology” while advocating for “both accommodation and equality for disabled people in all areas of life” (Reaume 2014). The field also critiques a charity model of disability “for providing badly needed services without engaging the underlying causes of social exclusion” (Reaume 2014). Stated simply, the field highlights disability as part of the human condition rather than exception to it (Wendell 1996).

This expansive notion of disability highlights a broad and complex range of concerns, such as the structural factors underlying diet-related chronic illnesses. In a qualitative study of food access in upstate New York which did not sample for disability or health status, the remarkable “unanticipated finding emerged that nearly one-half of all participants…had a variety of health conditions and disabilities that limited food access and, in turn, healthy, affordable food” (Webber, Sobal, Dollahite, 2007). Disability understandings of access--and the many types of barriers to participation in society—can offer food equity efforts new, more inclusive ways of conceptualizing and addressing food access.

ABSTRACT. The Moroccan economy has liberalised rapidly over the last three decades. Agriculture – still the country’s most important employment sector – increasingly shifts from small-scale, often subsistence, farming to large-scale farming, often for export. Coupled with population growth, this caused a rural exodus and ever-increasing urbanisation. At the same time, the Moroccan government continues to regulate the production, distribution and consumption of wheat – still the unchallenged staple of Moroccan (food) culture – to ensure national food security. To do so, it both supervises the import of cheap wheat from abroad and subsidises domestic wheat production, despite its high costs. The resulting food system is marked by these conflicting policies and, in light of the recent global food price rises, increasingly exposed to uncertainty and risk. In this contribution, which is based on long-term ethnographic research in and around Marrakech and Beni Mellal, I seek to disentangle these processes by adopting the rather unusual perspective of urban domestic breadmakers, especially those who are recently urbanised and poor. To identify what they consider good wheat for making flour and bread, including considerations of cost, they rely on their rural origins and bodily knowledge of regional agriculture and ecology. Their agro-ecological knowledge and emphasis on controlling as much of the process of making flour and bread themselves are also reflected in urban food space: weekly markets that supply regionally sourced grains are ubiquitous and even newly built neighbourhoods in the fast growing urban peripheries boast a small mill where locals can grind their grains and a public wood-fired oven that testifies to the continuing importance of homemade bread’s distinct tastes and textures. Drawing on the centrality of bread as the unchallenged staple of Moroccan (food) culture, I propose the notion of ‘cereal citizens’ to conceptualise how in making homemade bread recently urbanised poor Moroccans contribute to shaping the Moroccan food system. I will demonstrate how this laborious preparation of bread not only reflects the government's contradictory agricultural policies, but also how especially women’s bodily practices are a crucial feature of the political economy of food. Their breadmaking constitutes not only the basis of daily sustenance and social life; it also creates core cultural values that slot into the government’s agricultural policies. Finally, these practices also point towards an uncertain future for both recently urbanised poor Moroccans and the Moroccan food system.

ABSTRACT. In 1954 King Cole Ducks started operation as a family-run farm in rural Ontario to fill a unique market niche: providing fresh ducks to Toronto’s rapidly growing Chinese community. Through specializing in the production of this less-common, semi-aquatic fowl, King Cole engaged in intergenerational, intercultural, and interethnic conversations. The relationship between King Cole and Toronto’s extensive Chinese community provides a fascinating farm to chopsticks journey. As the duck moves from a white family farm in Ontario to elegant Chinese restaurant tables, King Cole, Chinese Torontonian Chinese restaurateurs and distributors, and consumers engage in dynamic discussions of cultural incorporation, preservation, and cooperation. From both Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives, our research uses oral histories from the multiple agents involved in duck production and consumption, and local archival resources to retrace duck’s journey within Toronto’s intercultural culinary infrastructures.

King Cole’s opening comes after a very important year for the Chinese Toronto community: 1947 the end of Canada’s Chinese exclusion act. With the end of exclusion, the Toronto Chinese community stabilized and grew with later waves of immigration from Hong Kong that came later in the twentieth century due to increasing uncertainty with the rise of a communist China. These new ethnically Chinese Torontonians brought with them a historical Chinese appetite for duck that has been developing since the Han dynasty, as archeological evidence has shown. To feed this diasporic desire for a taste of home, Chinese Torontonians would need to the cooperate with their new neighbors, which in this case was King Cole.

For the non-Chinese Torontonian consumer, President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s in 1973, made Peking duck emblematic of Chinese cuisine within North America. Coupled with images of the Cantonese roast ducks hanging in windows in Chinatown, duck emerged as a dish that captured the exoticism and elegance that characterized the rejuvenation of Chinese cuisine after North Americans had grew tired and too comfortable with the once exciting Cantonese fare.

With multiple palates to please and a single farm distributor, our research retraces the tremendous farm to chopstick journey of duck through and outside of Toronto’s Chinese culinary infrastructure. Along the way our research engages in questions of meaning, taste, and terroir from an intercultural perspective that considers the multiple backgrounds and nostalgias attached to this iconic culinary item.

ABSTRACT. A culinary rather than a botanical term, the word ‘spice’ is used to describe a biological mismatch of flowers, berries, fruits, stigmas, seeds, roots and bark that alter colour, flavour, and add medicinal properties to foods. The imprecision links kitchens in a complicated line to agricultural plans and debates around climate resilience - a total trajectory between production and consumption (Appadurai,1986) and an agri-culinary ecology of growing and cooking worlds.

Macau, a special administrative region in south China, where its small, longstanding Goan community claim a special place in Lusophone foodways, provides the context for the exploration of this imprecision and the tensions it produces in discourses of continuity and change. This is particularly clear in the practices of cooking and feasting in this multi-faith community, it’s various food prohibitions, and the challenge over time in capturing the particular savoury sour notes of its iconic dishes. Such tensions have increased in a city independent from China until 2049 under the terms of its handover by Portugal, yet one that continues its centuries-long almost total dependence on its powerful neighbour for its meat, vegetables, rice and water. In the decade since the Food and Agriculture Organisation promoted the growing of spices as climate smart smallholder agriculture, China has emerged as a major spice producer, processor and exporter. It is now the largest spice supplier to the EU, where precisely formulated ready-mixes and ready meals drive demand, and where debates about heavily processed foods have intensified. This has parsed China’s spice world with global discourses of health and food provenance.

On first view, Macau seems less vocal than its neighbour Hong Kong over concerns about the food it imports from China. Yet it is in the acts of choosing spices, where they come from, what work they do, and of wrapping spice mixes around meats and vegetables and rice where Goan cooks prepare for church feasts and food festivals that demonstrate the extent to which imprecision of spice, and between sameness and change is vitalising. Doing what they should and what they want sits imperfectly with orally transmitted recipes, contested Goan recipe books, a suitcase trade in processed condiments, and materials bought in traditional Chinese pharmacies and grocery stores. These acts engage and question the ecology of growing and cooking, immigrant bodies, belonging and the food of China.

ABSTRACT. Balut, fertilized duck eggs, is a popular street food in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines. Using data from fieldwork in the U.S., this paper will examine the consumption of balut in the Filipino diaspora. In the United States, balut consumption by those of Filipino heritage fall along the lines of culinary nationalism. A closer look at how balut has become an overt display food in public spaces such as festivals can reveal the rise of Filipino nationalist sentiments amidst the backdrop of protests against balut’s portrayal in mainstream Western media. This, coupled with the fact that Filipino Americans are now the second biggest Asian group in the United States, has pushed balut to the forefront as arguably the most identifiable food from Filipino culture, competing for attention with long-term crowd-pleasers adobo (meat cooked in vinegar), pansit (noodles) and lumpia (egg rolls). This paper will be on the consumption of fertilized duck eggs as an outgrowth of culinary nationalism for Filipino Americans and for other reasons shared by non-Filipinos. It looks at what is being communicated in the consumption of balut, whether in small groups or in large competitive eating contests in festivals. I argue such events can be seen as a localized genre that can be interpreted as a resistance to the exoticization of this Filipino food. In that sense, it can be seen as a “countercuisine” which ends up garnering one culinary capital in the mainstream.

ABSTRACT. The new Australian Schools Curriculum necessitates the inclusion of “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) Histories and Cultures” across all learning areas. The sub themes of this cross-curriculum priority include: (i) culture, (ii) people; and (iii) country/ place. While this configuration of curriculum governance offers new hope via a structural mandate; adopting a historical-cultural-politics reveals that Australia's First Peoples’ perspectives have long been marginalised from a colonially dominated learning area (McConaghy & Nakata, 2000; Whatman & Meston, 2016). Further to this, in contemporary times, meaningful enactment of curriculum ideals are far from a straightforward given the shortage of resources and examples. Thus this raises more questions than provides answers about what is possible when including an Indigenous approach to health education in schools.

This paper will draw on both a literature review of food and Indigenous knowledge in school health education as well as a reflective inquiry on a ‘bushfoods’ module in a teacher education unit, at one Australian university. Programmed into a teaching module was a workshop for students with a local traditional Boonwurrung elder of the lands on which the University operates. The process of this educational approach will be examined by considering the role of the ‘cultural interface’ (Williamson & Dalal, 2007) and temporality, space and place when meaningfully incorporating a strengths based approach to Indigenous knowledge in school health education. Tensions and possibilities are mapped in relation to bringing subjugated Indigenous knowledges to the fore through an analysis of what happens when concepts of Indigenous and endogenous (Ma Rhea, 2017) plants are made visible and prioritised in learning. How do the affective aspects of sensorial, somatic and visceral learning (Perhamus, 2010) intersect with institutional and student dispositions when a teacher educator attempts to ‘Indigenise’ health education as a strengths based and educative approach to health curriculum.

References: McConaghy, C., & Nakata, M. (2000). Rethinking Indigenous education : Culturalism, colonialism and the politics of knowing. Flaxton, Qld.: Post Pressed.

Perhamus, L. M. (2010). ‘But your body would rather have this…’: conceptualizing health through kinesthetic experience. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23, (7), 845-868. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2010.529470.

Rhea, M. (2017). Frontiers of Taste: Food Sovereignty, Sustainability and Indigenous–Settler Relations In Australia. Singapore: Springer.

Whatman, S., Quennerstedt, M., & McLaughlin, J. (2017). Indigenous knowledges as a way to disrupt norms in physical education teacher education. Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 8(2), 115-131. doi:0.1080/18377122.2017.1315950

ABSTRACT. Chinese migrants who came to Australia for the Gold Rush in the nineteenth century had to find a new way of making a living after the rush ended. Many of them went into the restaurant business and as a result, by 1890, one third of all cooks in Australia were Chinese. Many other Chinese migrants started working as market gardeners working on small fields in suburban areas close to the city. They experienced severe discrimination and were repressed by public and government policies. Unlike Chinese restaurants which have now become a common sight in most multicultural global cities, Chinese market gardeners are on the verge of extinction after more than a century’s struggle. In La Perouse, Sydney, the land that Chinese market gardeners occupied is subjected to resumption despite being heritage-listed. The land that has been growing fresh produce and feeding the city and migrants alike is now deemed to have better use (to be an extended part of a cemetery).

My paper looks at the Chinese market gardens in major Australian cities including Melbourne and Sydney to investigate their contribution to feeding the cities for the past 160 years, and the functions they served as a life-line for Chinese immigrants of different generations. I describe how these gardens became colourful additions to Australia’s agriculture by allowing small-scale farming in suburban areas to cater to local consumption and by introducing new varieties of Chinese greens to Australians’ dinner plates. More importantly, I examine how the farming skills of these predominantly Cantonese early immigrants afforded them a livelihood in a hostile new land and how their farming practices were adopted and incorporated by other immigrants groups and European Australians.

Unlike feeding Australians through Chinese restaurants, growing fresh produce and providing food supply through market gardens are exposed to more constraint and are less well remunerated. The fate of these two jobs common for early Chinese immigrants seems to have been written from the start. Is this also the fate for other small growers and farms these days, or could our urban food supply prosper with diversity in the future?

ABSTRACT. Breadfruit is unique. It is so abundant that a single tree may produce for 50 years, yielding 50 to 150 large, starchy fruits annually, with some varieties yielding as many as 700. It requires so little labor that the people of Pohnpei, a high island in the Carolines of Micronesia, describe it as a gift from the gods. It is so versatile that it can be eaten at any stage of its development: steamed, boiled, fried, baked, roasted in fires or stone ovens, consumed raw when very ripe, preserved in pits for as long as a century, or fed to pigs. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, as independence movements gathered steam and the U.S.-administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands advanced a series of increasingly contentious government feeding programs, breadfruit took on a new role: as Pohnpei’s most potent, most contested metaphor for food sovereignty. This paper explores the role of breadfruit symbolism in independence-era Pohnpei, and reflects on breadfruit's lessons for food sovereignty and food security issues in Oceania today.

ABSTRACT. Thinking ahead, 2019 will be the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Doris Witt’s Black hunger food and the politics of U.S. identity, the thirtieth anniversary of Jessica B. Harris’s Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking, the fortieth for Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the fiftieth for Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and the 400th anniversary of the colonial enslavement of West Africans in the U.S.

In light of these paradigm-shifting milestones, we will honor the aforementioned authors who moved the dialogue forward. Taking stock of the current state of the field from a critical perspective is necessary. Concurrently we honor and call our ancestors, as well as the nameless black and brown cooks, dishwashers, mammies, farmers, and laborers who helped provision, harvest, prepare, serve, or teach us how to produce the food for our tables. This multi-disciplinary roundtable proposes to utilize critical scholarship of race, gender/feminism, cultural studies, and queer theory to assess and discuss the circulation of food within hierarchies of power, race, and the political stakes inherent and often ignored when discussing production, consumption, and commensality. We might ask what does food become when we consider race and, conversely, how might we view race differently through food practices? What difference does race make in the fields where food is grown, the places where it is sold, or the manner in which it is consumed? The country has become polarized around issues of race, white supremacy, oppression of women, and partisan politics; currently deemed as tribal and biased. By engaging a cross-section of scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences we aim to explore how the humanities enters food studies or food studies enters the humanities when the subject is centered on race, gender, and justice.

ABSTRACT. Food systems and their relationship to rural economic development are often overlooked in the literature, as early analysis often focused on urban and peri-urban food systems (Jablonski et al 2017). While there has been renewed interest in the impact of urban food systems on rural wealth creation (Schmit et al. 2017), and policy development for food systems in rural areas (Whittaker, Clark & Raja, in review), (unintentional) urban bias in food system analyses might obscure pathways for rural development. In this session, we propose to identify the questions that have been raised by our recent research in order to develop new research trajectories that focus on understanding how food system activities operate in rural areas and evaluation of their social, ecological and economic impacts. In order to do this, we must understand how food circulates in rural areas in both formal and informal channels; the impacts of agricultural and food system activities on rural wealth creation; and the processes of governance that support policy development for rural food systems. Presenters in this session will give 5-7 minute lightning talks that address indicators for rural wealth creation, identification of channels of local food circulation, and development of governance mechanisms in rural food systems. The rest of the session will be devoted to discussion of the key questions raised and potential new trajectories of research for understanding rural food systems.

Moderator: Jill Clark, Ohio State University.

Lightning Talks:

•Mary Hendrickson, University of Missouri – "Localism and Rural Food Systems – Exploring How Food Moves in Rural Communities"

• David Conner, University of Vermont – "Lessons learned from the Northeast"

•Aiden Irish, Ohio State University – "Collaborative Governance and Policy Development in Rural Food Systems”

ABSTRACT. NOTE: Panel Title "Minimum wage, Migration, #Metoo, and Media: Restaurants at the Center of Social Change"

Using a comparative ideological rhetorical critique, this paper seeks to highlight the distinct methods of persuasion employed by those debating the issue of restaurant worker wages and the tipping system. In recent years, a debate has begun to emerge regarding restaurant worker wages to assess if the current system needs reform. I will analyze two lobbying organizations, the National Restaurant Association and Restaurant Opportunities Center United, for the presented and suggested elements of their argument in order to assess the underlying ideologies present in each. It is my assertion that the ideological tensions in the approach to the subject of tipping prevent true dialogue between parties and instead create parallel narratives that conflict with one another. Understanding the rhetorical nature of the construction of the sides of the debate will point toward a more complete understanding of the data, arguments, and players involved in framing the issue of restaurant worker wages.

ABSTRACT. Why do restaurants--particularly those now popular for featuring "high-end Southern cuisine"--serve an "indispensable role" in "American" culture? How does this indispensable role serve as a "black mirror" for the historical legacy of the plantation in US culture and agriculture? As we (student and teacher) join you (presenters and audience) to explore the restorative role of public eating houses, our mouths will become organs of both expression and ingestion. What will we taste when we taste chef Edouardo Jordan's "Hoppin' Johns black-eyed peas" from Seattle's acclaimed Junebaby (as take-out)? When we participate in a $799 billion restaurant industry employing the nation's second-largest private sector workforce, for what are we paying and to whom? When eating at Seattle's most celebrated, culturally attentive, and sustainably-oriented restaurants, whose labor values are being redistributed and whose cultural values are being expressed when the tip goes from the front of the house to the back … as a $15 an hour minimum wage?

Although talk of organic growing practices, sustainability, and farm-to-table culinary breeding networks that link seed breeders, growers, chefs and eaters have become widespread in conversations surrounding food justice movements, discussions regarding the gendered and racialized elements of restaurant work often lead to (and from) indigestion--even when contained by "scare quotes." In this session we'll consider the organoleptic, affective, and profoundly subjective characteristics, yet always already public act, of ingestion as an expression of the wages of "eating out."

ABSTRACT. In October 2017, Brett Anderson published a long investigative article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune revealing the existence of an extensive culture of sexual harassment at restaurants run by celebrity chef John Besh. This was a watershed moment, not only because it led to the resignation of Besh from the leadership of his restaurant empire and not only because it helped trigger a deeper debate about the working conditions faced by women across the industry. One key aspect of this report was the author himself. Anderson’s main role at the newspaper was as restaurant critic, a position usually associated more with taste-making than with investigative journalism. Anderson’s report raised sharp questions about the conduct of management and workers in restaurants, but it also raised questions about the proper role of restaurant critics. What, as New Yorker gastronomy writer and critic Helen Rosner later asked, is the moral responsibility of restaurant critics in the age of #metoo?

Restaurants have long been central to social change, providing sites for challenges to class, gender, and racial hierarchies over much of the 20th century. Restaurant critics have played a key role in shaping the way people think about restaurants, sometimes in collaboration with owners and chefs, but often in the face of considerable resistance from the industry. Most debates around the ethics of restaurant criticism have focused on the ability of the critics to fairly evaluate restaurants. But there have also long been more subtle efforts by some critics to use their platform to offer commentary that went beyond food, service, and atmosphere. There is not a clear consensus among critics about their obligations in reporting and commenting on social issues beyond matters of taste in restaurants. This paper draws on the history of restaurant criticism in New Orleans—interviews with critics as well as a close reading of the archives—to examine the ways restaurant writers have chosen to address the relationship between restaurants and social movements. It asks how critics have chosen (or not) to assert their own moral authority when confronted with questions of social justice in the restaurant industry.

ABSTRACT. New Orleans's post-Katrina restaurant boom saw an increase of around 600 restaurants since 2005, further feeding the city's swelling tourism economy. This growth in restaurants led to a surge in restaurant workers, many of whom are Central American and Mexican immigrants that came to the metropolitan area to rebuild after the disaster. For many Latinx workers, the demand, flexibility, and deregulation of the service industry-documentation status rarely impacts hiring practices-is precisely what attracts them to restaurant jobs; nonetheless, laissez-faire policies also mean that hours worked and wages earned go under-regulated as well, representing a central tension within neoliberal economies. Moreover, newly created service industry jobs in a deregulated sector combined with an anti-immigrant federal administration present degrees of precarity in the labor force that disproportionately target immigrant workers.

Drawing from a 2010 ROC-NOLA restaurant industry report along with six years of ethnographic work with Latinx food workers in New Orleans, I draw attention to the growing insecurity of restaurant jobs. Having analyzed the stories of Latinx restaurant workers and key actors in restaurant/business organizations, my findings are threefold. First, I show the increased reliance on Latinx workers in restaurant industry, illustrating how these jobs, which are oftentimes subcontracted, blur lines between formal and informal economies. Second, I examine how restaurants have been targeted by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids throughout the first year of the Trump administration. New Orleans saw a 54% increase in ICE arrests in 2017. Third, I explore the role of restaurants as sites of resistance to support immigrant workers and, alternatively, better grasp the potential of organizations like Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of New Orleans, Louisiana Restaurant Association, and ROC-Gulf Coast to protect immigrant workers.

ABSTRACT. The #MeToo movement has made waves in the restaurant industry in the United States but it has had a tougher time gaining traction in France, despite the long history of gender inequality in professional kitchens. In addition to blatant sexism, discrimination and pay inequity, women are extremely underrepresented at the top ranks of the culinary professions. Only one woman currently holds the coveted three-Michelin star designation for her restaurant and the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) en Cuisine title has only been awarded to two women since it began in 1924.

This paper will look at the systemic issues surrounding women’s underrepresentation at the top ranks of French cuisine. It consider the gender bias inherent in culinary training and apprenticeship and the ways in which the professional kitchen creates a power dynamic that impedes women’s success and creates opportunities for abuse and harassment. Women’s silence will be considered in light of this close-knit community—few are willing to speak out for fear of imperiling their advancement in culinary professions.

Finally, this research considers how French women have worked around the dominant system of exclusion and discrimination to define new spaces for female creativity and success in the culinary arts. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Lyon, France, the voices of women from different generations brings to life the everyday struggles of being f

ABSTRACT. Using my experience with ODU’s Diversity Institute, my involvement with the College of Arts and Letters’ Institute for the Humanities, BFBL Hampton Roads, and ODU’s GivePulse platform, my contribution to the panel will explore solutions for the problem of sustaining student engagement with food justice in the broader community. One of ODU’s long-range planning objectives is to connect our campus with the community in which it resides; food justice is an opportunity to make these connections meaningful in immediate and lasting ways. My work on this panel offers specific recommendations for building lasting connections between campus and community organizations. What must we do as educators to get students excited about food justice? What sorts of initiatives pay off and which do not? Most critically, how can we create sustained, nourishing engagements between students and the communities on and around our campuses?

ABSTRACT. Roughly one third of the food in the world is wasted, and almost half of the food in the US comes to the same fate. These statistics, while often presented to promote awareness of the shocking amount of food that goes unused, can overwhelm students who wonder what they can do about such a huge problem. After several years of teaching food waste courses, I believe that students need a way into experiencing these complex linkages beyond documenting the food left on their plate. Moreover, I find that students sometimes become paralyzed with guilt over their own contribution to the problem, or their inability to solve it. An overview of food system concerns and their relationship to power, identity, difference is important in teaching and learning about food waste, in particular at a moment when recovery of food waste has been rebranded as a solution to hunger and little is being done to decrease production of unused food. Community engagement projects and partnerships allow us to move from a discussion of these rather abstract systemic connections to action, reflection and re/connection to course concepts. Students see the potential for sustainable, collective responses. Not only do they feel they are contributing to something larger than themselves, they also value the relationships that form with local and different communities that otherwise might never have happened. When mutual goals are met, a partnership facilitates student learning, benefits community efforts, forms lasting relationships and sparks the desire to do more.

By means of illustration, this paper describes a food recovery and waste mapping class project conducted in the US and Italy as one way to involve students in community activism regarding food waste. In the first section I discuss the design, goals and objectives of the project. Next, I discuss student and community partner responses and evaluation. I conclude with some takeaways for teachers as they relate to community partnerships, student learning and activism toward food justice.

ABSTRACT. Access, justice, equity, and sovereignty have made their way into the lexicon of food. What are the challenges of instilling concepts of social justice action in food systems classrooms, and what does success look like? To this end, there is value in information sharing and experiential learning from experts in the field (quite literally: farmers, processors, distributors, food service workers, farmhands, community activists, and government officials) combined with the academy (researchers, academics, and scholars) that builds a framework to create a truly transdisciplinary education and critical reflection for future food systems change makers. I take a critical food systems approach, coupled with an experiential service oriented classroom priority. I'm interested in creatively structured learning experiences that integrate community members/agencies/activists expertise and university resources to instigate systems thinking and participatory outputs in the area of food systems. Alongside my co-panelists, I propose an important direction in food systems education that may be the best platform for what must follow: creatively structured, critically engaged, community-centered learning experiences. Ultimately, these connections are vital to transformative food systems change - the thing that connects us all.

ABSTRACT. A freshman writing course offers an unusual site for students to deeply consider how theories of food waste and hunger intersect at a local non-profit, yet, through the vehicle of service learning at our local food bank and emergency food pantry, freshman students can actively participate in a local solution for hunger and waste. My freshman writing course melds service to the community with course readings exploring the current conversations surrounding food insecurity and waste. Through course readings and in-class discussions, we consider the historical development of these two societal issues as well as some solutions being enacted in both the private and public sectors to alleviate hunger. The food bank provides a site to explore theories in practice. For instance, some of our readings focus on the work of Tristram Stuart, author of Waste and a food industry critic and of Jonathan Bloom in American Wasteland to reclaim waste as a viable option for alleviating hunger. The food bank is successful on both fronts by taking waste from private homes, grocery stores, and industrial food systems and distributing it to food insecure individuals within our community. Students also explore first-hand accounts of poverty and hunger in course readings as well as texts offering critical analyses of the successes and failures of government and private sector programs to alleviate and end hunger. Service work augmented with traditional classroom experiences can help students shape their ideas about hunger and waste into thoughtfully articulated arguments informing civic engagement.

Service learning can offer a portal for students to actively learn about important issues within our society. Just as the writing process taught in college is a recursive process, so too, is the process that moves a student from passive observer to activist. Service learning offers students concrete experiences to complement the abstract theories they study in the classroom as they recursively move between service and classwork. As they travel between the concrete and abstract experiences, they have opportunities to reflect on, revise, and renew their value systems laying the foundations for civic engagement. They also gain confidence through their deep study of the issues to be able to effectively address the problem in a public forum and search for solutions in a productive manner that effects positive change in our community.

ABSTRACT. Gaining an understanding of the injustices and deplorable realities embedded in our corporate, profit-based food system stimulates a call to action. Courses in food studies often require students to address food issues, propose solutions, work at improving a given situation while engaging with stakeholders, policy makers or community members outside their usual contacts. This panel examines many of the forces that affect student action on food issues and the transformations that ensue. Members of the panel approach civic engagement / food activism from various disciplines: communication and integrated learning; English literature and composition; hospitality management; food culture and gender studies. Within these frames of engagement, we observe student disenfranchisement and empowerment, collaboration, leadership, buy-in, and risk-taking. The diverse range of factors that influence student action / civic engagement will be discussed with a goal of sharing best practices and gaining a deeper understanding of commonalities and differences. My work as an educator and food sustainability advocate involves providing students with opportunities for experiential learning in the garden; for educational presentations with a food sustainability focus; for organizing food charity fundraisers and food demonstrations. It also explores the consequences of direct civic engagement that is centered on food production / consumption issues. This engagement can be directed at state policy makers or toward peers and administrators on campus and/or in the Hospitality Management department. My role as panel moderator, will be to facilitate an examination of our topic, identify themes, and focus discussion. I will also contribute to the discussion of strategies that enable students to identify power and consider the motivation of stakeholders. Also of value would be an examination of student transformations observed in the process of civic engagement that are evident in their written reflections and classroom presentations

ABSTRACT. In this workshop, we

• Critically assess the relevance of the SDGs for the future development of organic agriculture; • Reflect on the relationship between SDG and the organic movement; • Refer to the Principles of Organic Agriculture as guides for achieving the SDG targets through organic practices; • Discuss the extent to which organic agriculture can contribute to fulfilling the SDGs; • Reflect on the current limitations of organic agriculture and how to develop organic to better contribute to the SDGs.

The organizers will formulate critical statements to serve as entry points for group discussions organized around the World Cafe approach. The output will be summarized and participants will be invited to contribute to a special issue or common article based on the workshop discussions and findings. This workshop is targeted towards researchers, teachers, advisors, etc. and/or practitioners of organic agriculture.

ABSTRACT. This workshop panel will discuss the increasingly important role of social media in academia and the breadth of how food studies scholars and practitioners use various platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and academic and portfolio blogs to promote the discipline, our scholarship, our organizations, to network with other scholars and community members and engage with those in the public food sector. Each panelist will share their unique perspectives on using social media in our scholarship, for networking, and working with the food community. In addition to a discussion of the theoretical justification of social media, this panel will also include practical tips (community engagement, social media strategies, hashtags, and more) for anyone wanting to dive into or further expand their presence on social media. Since this is a workshop-style panel, we hope to provide attendees with some new digital tools and approaches for their own social media practice through guided group activities. Before the panel, we will post a short syllabus of objectives and prerequisite actions to help utilize every minute of our short workshop. Following along on social media--Instagram stories, Twitter, or your platform of choice--is encouraged. Hashtag TBD.

ABSTRACT. In this dynamic roundtable, panelists and audience-participants will develop a framework for understanding and enhancing the role of biodiversity in order to build more resilient farms and ranches. Panelists will provide examples of so-called “wild farms,” as well as new tools and resources useful to both scholars and practitioners. Presentations from leaders of the Wild Farm Alliance (WFA), Baumgartner and Connor, will share their biodiversity continuum that lays out a progression of activities to restore and enhance agroecosystems, and how to adapt ideas to particular places and circumstances. Also, a new guide from WFA helps organic farmers and certifiers achieve compliance with and take advantage of biodiversity conservation and resource protection standards. Dana Jackson will present an advanced preview of a forthcoming book by her longtime colleague at the Land Stewardship Project, Brian DeVore, called Wildly Successful Farming: Sustainability and the New Agricultural Land Ethic (University of Wisconsin Press, anticipated October 2018). Hassanein will share some Montana examples of reconnecting regional food systems with agroecosystems, and of thinking about agricultural biodiversity at the landscape scale. We will leave plenty of time to engage the audience and hear from you about new advances in the theory and practice of rewilding agricultural ecosystems.

Rountable Conveners: Jo Ann Baumgartner, Director, Wild Farm Alliance Shelly Connor, Assistant Director, Wild Farm Alliance Neva Hassanein, Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Montana Dana Jackson, Author, Sustainability Advocate, and Retired Senior Program Associate, Land Stewardship Project

ABSTRACT. “Food provides a way to strengthen Diné peoples’ connections to each other, all living things and Mother Earth, and fosters sovereignty for the Navajo Nation….” This panel, moderated by Dr. Patty Loew and featuring Dr. Franklin Sage, Director of the Diné College Policy Institute and two graduate students from the Medill School of Journalism, explores a community-based, multimedia approach to communicating how the Diné are rebuilding a self-sufficient food system to improve nutrition and health on the largest Indian reservation in the country. In February 2018, a group of fourteen graduate students in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University spent a week in the American Southwest, talking with community members and focusing, not only on food insecurity, as most mainstream reports do, but on strength-based approaches the Navajo are using to reclaim traditional foods and reassert tribal sovereignty. With the help of the Diné College Policy Institute, students Kristine Sherred and Cailin Crowe explored land use reform, food challenges, and a 2014 “junk food tax.”  Dr. Sage explains the role his institute played in the current Navajo Nation Food Policy. Journalists Sherred and Crowe describe how they approached their stories and what they found.