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:

• 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

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

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

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.

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.