Sunday, February 5th at UC Santa Cruz

In attendance:

• Julie Guthman
• Melissa Caldwell
• Shaheen Amirebrahimi
• Megan Carney
• Glenda Drew
• Alison Alkon
• Helena Lyson
• Lisa Jacobson
• Jeff Haydu
• Ali Hendley
• Jennifer Goldstein
• Erika Rappaport
• Katy Overstreet
• Melissa Bell
• Sarah Grant
• Stephanie Maroney
• Trisha Barua
• Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
• Stephanie Chan

Fall 2011

Monday, October 17th at UC Santa Cruz

In attendance:

• Melissa Caldwell
• Susan Carter
• Helena Lyson
• Katie Bradley
• Julie Guthman
• Sophie Sapp
• Erika Rappaport
• Charlotte Biltekoff
• Katy Overstreet
• Stephanie Chan
• Lisa Jacobson
• Tracy Perkins
• Danielle Boule
• Stephanie Maroney
• Dana Forsberg

Papers
Charlotte Biltekoff: “From Microscopes to Macroscopes: Eating Right in the Era of Alternative Food”

Julie Guthman: “Taking risks: reflections on race, biology, and food justice”

Winter 2011

Monday, March 14th at UC Santa Cruz

The winter 2011 quarterly colloquium will features three guest scholars. Members will have the pleasure of reviewing their works in progress and providing feedback. For more information on each scholar, please scroll further down the page.

• Aaron Brobow-Strain, Associate Professor of Politics at Whitman College, will be sharing a selection from his book in progress, White Bread: The History of a Dream.
• Becky Mansfield, Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio State University will be sharing a work-in-progress titled, “Environmental Health as Biosecurity: “Seafood Choices,” Risk, and
  the Pregnant Woman as Threshold”
• Benjamin Cohen, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia will be sharing a paper titled, “Confidence, Distance, and Food in a Suspicious World: 19th century Surfaces and the Fight Against Adulteration”

The meeting will be followed by a public event on the theme, Food Anxieties.

Both events will take place at UC Santa Cruz campus. The work-in-progress colloquium will take place from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. in the Oakes Conference Room. Lunch will be provided to all members who RSVP. The public event will occur at 5:30 p.m. in the Alumni Room of the University Center. For more details and to RSVP, please visit the event website.

About the speakers:

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Politics at Whitman College.  He has been involved in the U.S. food movement since the early 1990s, when he worked on, and later became part owner, of a humane-sustainable cattle ranch in southern Arizona.  Outside of the U.S., he has conducted research on global food politics in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador.  His first book, Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas (Duke University Press 2007), offered an ethnographic look at powerful coffee plantation owners in southern Mexico.  His current book examines the history of Americans’ deeply-vexed relation with industrially processed food through the lens of long-running battles over sliced white bread.  In the process, it tells the story of one hundred fifty years of food gurus, dietary reformers, industry experts, government officials, and ordinary consumers who believed that, if they could just get Americans to eat the right bread (or avoid the wrong bread), it would restore the nation’s moral, physical, and social fabric.  Tentatively titled, White Bread: The History of a Dream, the book will be published by Beacon in early 2012.

Becky Mansfield is an Associate Professor of Geography at the Ohio State University. Her broad interests include nature-society relations, political economy, health and the body, and politics of the environment. Her first edited book, Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations, reflects her long-standing focus on neoliberalism and nature. Her current project is about gendered neoliberal biopolitics of nature and risk. The object of study for this project is contaminated seafood and current public health efforts to use risk to mange effects of women’s seafood consumption on fetal neurodevelopment. Her work is also concerned with posthuman, postnature, socio-natures of the 21st century, and challenging dominant discourses of human-environment relations.

Ben Cohen is an environmental historian and science studies scholar visiting as an assistant professor in the department of science, technology, and society (STS) at the University of Virginia.  His research and teaching focus on the place of science and technology in agro-environmental history, from the nascent nineteenth-century years of industrializing agriculture to today.  Toward that end, he is the author of Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil and Society in the American Countryside (Yale, 2009) and co-editor of Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement (MIT, 2011). His current research project, “The Moral Landscape of Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Industrialized Food,” is a study of food purity, environmental change, and cultural values of authenticity from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. He also directs the UVA Food Collaborative and contribute to McSweeney’s, The Believer, and TheMorningNews.org.

Fall 2010

Presenters

Lynette Hunter, Household Technology Books Project

Charlotte Biltekoff, Handbook of Food History Chapter on Nutrition and Dietary Health

Location and Date

The Fall 2010 Studies of Food and the Body quarterly meeting took place at the UC Davis campus in the Robert Mondavi Institute Sensory Building conference room on Friday, October 29th from 12 – 3 p.m. The event was followed by a special public event sponsored by the Robert Mondavi Institute the next day. Members were encouraged to attend both events.

Attendance

• Alison Alkon
• Charlotte Biltekoff
• Melissa Caldwell
• Ryan Galt
• Lynette Hunter
• Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon
• Trisha Barua
• Melissa Bell
• Katie Bradley
• Kelley Gove
• Breeze Harper
• Stephanie Maroney
• Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
• Katy Overstreet

An Evening with Diana Kennedy

No one has done more to introduce to the authentic, flavorful cuisines of Mexico than Diana Kennedy. Acclaimed as the most knowledgeable writer in English of Mexican cooking, Kennedy has been an intrepid indefatigable student of Mexican foodways for more than 50 years and has published several classic books on the subject. The afternoon will include a discussion lead by Diana Kennedy, followed by a reception and book signing of her latest book Oacaxa al Gusto.

During the month of October a special exhibit, De Atole a Cuitlacoche… De a Tlacoyos: Los Sabores de, put together by Myra Appel will be on display at the UC Davis Shields Library lobby. In addition on October 28th the Special Collections Department will make available for viewing select holdings on food and beverage of Mexico in honor of Diana’s visit.

When: Thursday, October 28th, 5:00pm
Where: Silverado Vineyards Sensory Theater, Robert Mondavi Institute Sensory Building
Price: Public ($35), Friends of the RMI; UCD staff, students and faculty ($20)*

Spring 2010

The Spring 2010 Food and the Body MRPI meeting will take place on April 15, 2010 at the University of California Davis campus, from 12-2:45 in the Robert Mondavi Institute South Building room 1207.

Presenters

Judith Carney, “Fields of Survival, Foods of Memory.”

Melissa Caldwell, “The Visible and the Invisible: Intimate Engagements with Russia’s Culinary East.”

Science and the Experience of Eating and Drinking with Harold McGee

Our meeting will be followed by a special event, a lecture and discussion panel with acclaimed food writer, Harold McGee.  McGee will be joined by Jean-Xavier Guinard, Susan Ebeler, and MRPI member, Melissa Caldwell.

This event will take place in the UC Davis Conference Center Ballroom A-C.  The schedule of events is below:

• Registration 2-3 p.m.
• Lecture and Discussion: 3 p.m.
• Reception 5:30 p.m.

If you are a MRPI member and would like to attend the McGee event, please RSVP to BOTH Kim Bannister at kbannister at ucdavis dot edu and Sarah McCullough at smcc at ucdavis dot edu.

Click here to see a flier for this exciting event.

Directions

For directions from San Francisco to the UC Davis campus, click here.

Members in Attendance

Alison Alkon

Charlotte Biltekoff

Joe Bohling

Judy Carney

Stacy Jameson

David Michalski

Katy Overstreet

Carolyn de la Peña

Rosalinda Salazar

Winter 2010

The Winter 2010 Food and the Body MRPI quarterly meeting took place at University of California Davis on Friday, February 5th from 12-3 p.m. in the Robert Mondavi Institute South Building Room 1207.  All meetings are only open to group members.  If you are interested in learning how to become a part of the group, please email smcc at ucdavis dot edu.

Presenters

Carolyn de la Peña

“What Produced the Mechanized Tomato Harvester?  Exploring Masculinity and Expertise in Post-War Food Production.”

Erica Rappaport

“Imperial Formations: Indian Tea and the Forging of Colonial Consumers within and beyond the British Empire”

Randall Grahm talk and book signing

That same day, there was a wine reception, public lecture and book signing by Randall Grahm in celebration of his book, Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology.  Randall Grahm is the founder of Bonny Doon winery and entertaining writer.  A schedule of the event is below.  For more information on the book, see http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11286.php.

Randall Grahm Event schedule:
5-6 p.m. Private student tasting (RSVP required)

6-7 p.m. Open wine reception at the Robert Mondavi Institute (RSVP required)

7-8 p.m. Public Lecture at RMI Sensory Theater

8-9 p.m. Reception continues with book signing in RMI Lobby

Click here to view this event flier.

Directions

For directions from San Francisco to UC Davis campus, click here.

The meeting took place in the at the Robert Mondavi Center South building room 1207, on the first floor.  There is a parking structure with a day rate of $6 located across the street.  The Robert Mondavi Institute South Building is located just off the I-80 exit for UC Davis campus.

In Attendance

Fall 2009

Presenters

Alison Alkon
Introduction to edited volume, The Food Justice Reader: Cultivating a Just Sustainability

Julie Guthman
Too much food and too little sidewalk? Interrogating the ‘obesogenic environment’ thesis

Location

• Parking is available along the streets with marked spaces on Bancroft Way at your own risk.
• There are public pay parking lots and structures available along Bancroft Way and Durant Avenue between Dana Street and College Avenue (see Map of Barrows Hall)
• If you have permission to park in the Hearst Gym parking lot you can find the lot located underneath the tennis courts along Bancroft Way between Hearst Gym and Kroeber Hall

Attendees:

Spring 2009

Time: 10:30am – 1:30pm
Location: UC Berkeley in the CRG Conference Room

Charlotte Biltekoff
The Ethics of Eating Right in the Post-War Era: Alice Waters and the “Delicious Revolution”

Ryan Galt
Farmers’ Bodies, Consumers’ bodies: exploring unequal geographies of exposures to agro chemicals

Alongside the Tasting Histories Conference, the book proposal of Julie Guthman was discussed at the Winter quarter meeting hosted by UC Davis.

Winter 2009

Alongside the Tasting Histories Conference, the book proposal of Julie Guthman was discussed at the Winter quarter meeting hosted by UC Davis.

Fall 2008

Melissa Caldwell presented her research on coffeehouses.

Julie Wyman (UC Davis) reviewed a version of her documentary, “Strong!” about Olympic weightlifte, Cheryl Haworth.  The conversation discussed the representation of Cheryl’s diet and
eating habits in relationship to her body weight and the politics of athleticism and food.

Location: University of California, Santa Cruz

Spring 2008

Location: UC Santa Cruz: Oakes Mural Room

Works Presented:

Melanie DuPuis will be presenting her work on “sanitationism” with co-author Aaron Bobrow-Strain.

Industrialization of agriculture was built in part on the rise of what some scholars refer to as “sanitationism,” an ideology that feared bacteria as germs and placed its trust in industrial agriculture and the state as protector against germs. New Food Movements have re-embraced bacteria as fermenters, particularly those that focus on hunter-gatherer diets and colonic health. This paper will begin with the work of scholars who interpret this new digestive politics in relation to Donna Haraway’s work, seeing digestive microbiota as a kind of microbial companion species. The paper will build on these ideas but from a more contested “not in my body” political framing, looking at the discourse over one probiotic — inulin — in relation to the larger and longer history of digestion and its relation to the history of US political culture.

Carolyn de la Peña will be presenting her working paper “Diet Divas: Reconstructing Power and Pleasure for the First Women of Low Calorie Foods”

We typically think of “diet food” as a response to consumer demand. Women simply wanted to be thin, the logic argues, and so food companies responded to the need by creating diet beverages and low-calorie foods. This chapter from a book in progress suggests the story was more complicated. Female entrepreneurs in the canning industry, in women’s magazines, and in diet clubs saw opportunities for profit and prestige in creating and marketing diet foods. This chapter looks at the complex role of science, gender, and popular culture played on supply side of the first U.S. diet foods.

Winter 2008

Time: 11:00am – 1:00pm
Location: UC Davis: DHI Conference room Voorhies 228

Works Presented:

Melissa Caldwell presented a new chapter for her Russian gardening book, which focuses on the bodily aspects of gardening as a form of meaningful living.

Charlotte Biltekoff presented a new chapter from her book, Hidden Hunger: Food, Health and Citizenship from the late nineteenth century to the Obesity Epidemic, which explores the relationship between dietary ideals and social ideals in domestic science movement.