Ashlee Adams, Penn State University

Ashlee Adams, Penn State University: Intermediaries of Sustainability: how market women influence the decisions of farmers in Bolivian quinoa production and their impact on livelihoods Much work has criticized the dominant development prescriptions heralding greater participation in world markets as the way to higher incomes and improved living standards. Women have also been emphasized as critical players in realizing development goals. Economic liberalization and female empowerment have produced limited advancements for the poor in developing countries. Since the boom in price and world demand, quinoa is an increasingly attractive option for Andean peasant farmers as a means to capture profits and climb the socioeconomic ladder. Market women play an important role in commercializing the crop and may act as pivotal figures in creating access to markets, alleviating poverty, and increasing food security for smallholders. However, market participation may induce peasants to abandon locally-adapted varieties in favor of popularized monocultures, jeopardizing long-term resilience, particularly in the context of climate change. I interrogate the short- and long-term impacts on livelihoods and socioecological resilience for previously unincorporated smallholder farmers transitioning into the world economy, using the lens of market women to better understand how market participation interacts with development outcomes and longterm livelihood sustainability. Comparative case study surveys of two quinoa-producing communities in Bolivia that have begun producing commercially since the quinoa boom examines both the current impacts of market integration and long-term impacts on biodiversity loss and environmental sustainability. This paper explores the role of market women in shaping local quinoa markets and in influencing farmer decision-making leading to more and less sustainable livelihoods and farming practices. Polly Adema, Arts Mid-Hudson Folk Arts Program: From Neighborhood to Nationhood: Gastrodiplomacy in Theory and Practice Food exchange has been part of cross-cultural encounters since the beginning of such contact. In various contexts, food has served as an instrument of cultivating beneficial diplomatic relations, as a tool of hegemonic intimidation, and as a souvenir of visits to or conquests of people and places. What has come to be known as culinary or gastro diplomacy is garnering increasing attention among scholars of and practitioners in public diplomacy, as well as among those in tourism and place branding. Without calling it that, food professionals and culture professionals have long been engaged in what can be understood as culinary diplomacy. This presentation considers examples from ach of these professions where food is employed to foster cross-cultural understanding and compassion. Specific examples range from the very local to the staged global, from regional folklife multicultural programs in rural New York State to the United States’ area at Expo 2015, for which the area's organizers situated their iteration of the Expo theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” as gastrodiplomacy. Bill Allman, Lebanon Valley College: Changing a Culture of Food Waste in College Dining The goal of the presentation is to demonstrate how a trash can full of edible food waste in a college dining hall inspired an idea to create a post-consumer food waste program that has changed students dining habits. Our transformation journey began in the spring of 2013 and we will present how a corporate business entity, partnered with the Lebanon Valley College student body and college faculty to make measurable change in reducing waste in the dining hall. We will share details of our Post-Consumer Food Waste rewards program which focuses on social and environmental sustainability issues while creating an educational space outside the classroom in our dining hall. In addition, we will share details of how the program has grown over this time. We will also share quantitative results from Fall 2013 through Spring 2015 that exhibit how real culture change continues to be a student-driven reality at Lebanon Valley College and that sustainable habits continue to be maintained. The length of the program will be around an hour with room for questions and discussion. Stephanie Assmann, Hokkaido University The Return to a Culinary Heritage: The Food Education Campaign in Japan In 2005, the Fundamental Law on Food Education (shokuiku kihon-hō) was enacted in Japan in response to a rise of lifestyle-related diseases such as overweight and obesity. These health problems were linked to the persistence of unbalanced nutritional patterns including frequent snacking and the consumption of fast food and ready-made meals. The enactment of this law was followed by a nationwide food education campaign – termed shokuiku - in collaboration with the ministerial bureaucracy and a number of food-related NGOs as supporters. Domestically, balanced eating habits are associated with a return to a culinary heritage which includes an emphasis on rice, Japan’s major staple food. Transnationally, the Japanese state conveys an image of an elaborate haute cuisine and promotes foods such as sushi and tempura that are internationally recognized as refined Japanese foods. Thus, the aims of the shokuiku campaign are twofold. This paper describes how the Japanese state applies a nationalist food education initiative in order to contain the realities of Japanese culinary globalization on the ground through advocating „tradition“, while it simultaneously tries to gain recognition for a kind of pristine Japanese cuisine globally. Nurcan Atalan-Helicke, Skidmore College: Globalization of Taste, Markets and Livelihoods: Conservation of Siyez Wheat Bulgur (cultivated einkorn) The cultivation of hulled wheat, wheat varieties with non-threshable grain, such as emmer and einkorn, began in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years ago. The hulled wheat has almost disappeared throughout Europe and the Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century—surviving only in isolated areas in the face of agricultural modernization, market forces, high yield expectations, and national regulations that limit availability, desirability and marketability of hulled wheat. The loss of these varieties has profound implications not only for agricultural biodiversity, but for regional and global food security. Small farmers in Turkey’s mountainous areas in the northwest have grown einkorn for household consumption, markets and animal feed. In recent years, the areas cultivated to einkorn have increase slightly. Some of the factors for the revival and renewed interest in hulled wheat in Turkey can be linked to market mechanisms, direct marketing to domestic urban consumers who look for healthy and minimally processed food, the emergence of niche markets and rising market prices for hulled wheat, particularly due to branding and the declaration of einkorn, Siyez wheat bulgur, as Turkey’s first presidium by Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. Relying on ethnographic and archival research in Turkey, this paper argues that market-mechanisms, especially in the form of marketing traditional crop products, provide an opportunity for the conservation of agricultural biodiversity. However, the emergence and maintenance of markets also depends on external interventions to manipulate consumer demand at national and global scales. Kristy Athens, Marylhurst University : Voting Rights: How the Fetishization of Organic Compromises Food Justice Organic food has become fetishized. As Americans refine their food choices, the term "organic" has come to mean, simply, "good." Further, the notion of "voting with your fork" has been added to the American imaginary as a mechanism of advocacy and even social justice. This has created a system that ignores important realities within agriculture and compromises food justice. Discourse about organic agriculture has, sometimes innocently, sometimes willfully, limited the public’s understanding of organic food— how’s it’s grown, where it’s grown, and by whom. This compromises food justice because it ignores crucial elements of the food system: industry realities, workers’ rights, and individuals’ food rights (often referred to as "eaters’ rights"). Arlene Avakian, University of Massachusetts Amherst: The Maternal Kitchen? Representations of Mothers in Four Feminist Food Memoirs A wide variety of authors are now writing food memoirs, a few feminists among them. Using an intersectional lens, this talk will analyze two feminist food memoirs, Annia Ciezadlo's A Day of Honey and Diana Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava, with a particular focus on the representation of Arab women. Junko Baba, University of South Carolina: Politics and Discourse of Food during World War II in Japan This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine how the “carrot-and-stick” food policies under the tyranny of a militaristic government affected the social order and lives of Japanese citizens during World War II. The study incorporates the sociocultural elements of food studies and explores how these elements impacted the interpersonal relationships and psychology of the Japanese people during the war. Some examples of the Japanese government’s “carrot” manipulation can be seen in the food incentives and preconditioning used in testing biological weapons on human subjects and food used as an extrinsic motivation to attract poor, young volunteer soldiers. Conversely, the “stick” food policies

Load more