Saturday, 17 October Welcome Remarks - Kathleen LeBesco, Associate Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, Professor of Communication and Media Arts, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, United States Plenary Session - Melanie Dupuis E. Melanie DuPuis is a professor and the chair of Environmental Studies and Science at Pace University and a professor emerita from University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a BA in anthropology from Harvard University and a PhD in development sociology from Cornell University. She is the author of Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink, the co-author of Alternative Food Politics: Knowledge, Practice, and Politics, with David and Mike Goodman, and the editor of two edited collections: Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution and Creating the Countryside: The Politics of Rural and Environmental Discourse. Her latest book, Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice, was published by UC Press in October of 2015. She is also the co-editor, with Matthew Garcia and Don Mitchell, of Food Across Borders. Dr. DuPuis has been involved in environmental, energy, and sustainable food policy issues and organizations since the 1990s. She was a founding member of the Farm and Food Project, a food policy group in the New York Capital Region. Prior to coming to Pace, DuPuis held academic and administration positions at the University of California, Washington Center, in Washington, DC, and University of California in Santa Cruz, CA. DuPuis worked for 10 years with Power Economics as a member of a consulting firm management team that provided economics witnesses in energy and environmental administrative and judicial procedures, including testimony against Enron. She was also the energy and environment policy analyst for the New York State Department of Economic Development during the 1990s. *This is a pre-recorded virtual plenary session. The link to the plenary will be sent on the first day of the conference to registered participants. Plenary Session - Mireya Loza Mireya Loza is an assistant professor of food studies in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies. She earned her doctorate in American studies and an MA in public humanities at Brown University. In addition, she holds an MA in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of research include Latinx history, social movements, labor history, and food studies. Her book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (UNC Press), examines the Bracero Program and how guest workers negotiated the intricacies of indigeneity, intimacy, and transnational organizing. She is currently carrying out research for her second book project tentatively titled, The Strangeness and Bitterness of Plenty: Making Food and Seeing Race in the Agricultural West, 1942-1965. Her first book won the 2017 Theodore Saloutos Book Prize awarded by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. She was also named a distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Mexico-North Research Network, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU she was a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and an assistant professor in the Department of Latinx Studies and the Department of History at the University of Illinois. *This is a pre-recorded virtual plenary session. The link to the plenary will be sent on the first day of the conference to registered participants. PARALLEL SESSIONS Saturday, 17 October PARALLEL SESSIONS Toward Sustainable Communities The Wisdom of the Mountains: Traditions of Fermentation and Entomophagy in Rural Japan Aiko Tanaka, Co-Founder, Food Studies Research Institute (FSRI), Japan Japan is an island nation made up of 75% mountainous regions. When we think of traditional Japanese food, our minds are drawn to the culinary styles of Kyoto with its elegant ryōtei restaurants and kaiseki cuisine. Yet within the mountain ranges a bit further to the north are communities who face the long, cold winters with heartier, wilder food made at home. The need for prolonged storage resulted in a long history of eating fermented foods, and the proximity to nature has nurtured a lasting tradition of wild herb and insect consumption. In Nagano prefecture, where the intake of salt in preserved foods had led them to being the population with the shortest lifespan in all of Japan, recent food education and eat-local promotions have helped them to weather the difficulties of the current year with more success than their urban counterparts. Through my focus on the eating habits of this area, I explore both the pros and cons of such a lifestyle and what we can learn from it in the Post-COVID era. 2020 Special Focus—Making The Local: Place, Authenticity, Sustainability Trading on "Terroir": Fostering Artisanal Cheese and Alcohol Production through Specialized Agrarian Industrial Districts Mariel Collard, Harvard University Graduate School of Design Stefan Norgaard, Student, PhD in Urban Planning, Columbia University We introduce and critically engage Specialized Agrarian Industrial Districts (SAIDs), geographically bounded zones that produce distinctive agricultural products, with localized-producer networks and regional inter-firm relations. We define characteristics that animate these zones, and their social/ecological opportunities and pitfalls. We examine the role that public actors—specifically nation-states—and local institutional arrangements play in supporting and enabling SAIDs as counters to global agro-industrial consolidation. Moreover, we consider SAIDs as new spatial sites, or geographical arenas for critical study. Our investigation examines cheese in the Franche-Comté, France and in Minas-Gerais, Brazil; and alcohol in South Africa’s Western Cape (wine) and Jalisco, Mexico (mezcal). Cheese and alcohol often require artisanal, centuries-old production and storage techniques; their biophysical properties and longstanding cultural traditions explain why SAIDs produce these commodities. Regulations and specific “denominations of origin” bound SAIDs, protecting them from pernicious, “race- to-the-bottom” globalization. SAIDs relate to land and property systems with long histories (agrarian reform, collective ownership, natural protection, and cultural/touristic heritage) and distinctive “terroir” (physical geographies with climate, topography, and soil central to production). SAIDs offer regional-development opportunities, negotiated relationships between workers and producers, and quality food. SAIDs cannot be created, but can be fostered where nascent. Yet concerns abound: exclusionary divisions that privilege “insiders” over “outsiders”; informal and exploited labor; nation-states that promote SAIDs at the expense of long-marginalized communities and social justice; and mass producers who deceive consumers by imitating SAIDs’ appeals. Nevertheless, if done right, SAIDs represent an urgently necessary alternative to “cheap food,” and a just, sustainable regional-development strategy. 2020 Special Focus—Making The Local: Place, Authenticity, Sustainability Authenticity and the Politics of Food in the Face of Climate Change Jody Beck, University of Colorado Denver Claims of authenticity, sustainability, and locality are often grounded in concepts of place as a stable foundation, with the capacity to generate a consistent set of material facts over time. The key to these material facts – from dishes to cuisines – is a consistent suite of ingredients, which in turn requires a consistent climate. It is therefore clear that we can no longer ground authenticity on previous concepts of place. However, authenticity is still a useful and valid concept within food discourse. The wedge that climate change is driving between authenticity and place, as we’ve used these terms, foregrounds that, at least within food discourse, authenticity is properly a descriptor of relationships, and not of material facts. This shift in turn directs us to unpack the concepts we often entrain with authenticity, which can only make a claim about representation, and can make no claim regarding moral or aesthetic value. Ironically, the common reasons for discussing food in terms of authenticity, sustainability, and locality is explicitly to make moral or aesthetic claims. In order to do this, however, we must first think about what kind of relationships we value. This very quickly takes us to the need to ground our discussions of the authenticity, sustainability, and locality of food in consideration of right political relationships. This paper explores the concept of right political relationships in relation to authenticity and food through the work of Arendt, Agamben, Marx, and Taylor. 2020 Special Focus—Making The Local: Place, Authenticity, Sustainability Pastel Maya: Processed Foods and the Re-appropriation of Mayanness Lauren Wynne, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Anthropology and Sociology, Ursinus College The food of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has been having a moment for at least a half of decade, exemplified by René Redzepi’s pop-up Noma outpost in Tulum and David Sterling’s two James Beard Awards for Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition. While anthropologists and allied scholars have worked to critique the category of