The World That Food Made
Raj Patel
Dickinson to Host Award-Winning Author and Expert on the Food System
Dickinson will host a lecture focusing on our food system and solutions for feeding the world by award-winning author and activist Raj Patel. The lecture, “The World That Food Made,” will take place Thursday, Sept. 8, at 7 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium.
According to Patel, everything we understand today about the food system, from its influence on wage work to the nation-state, has its origins in the 15th century. By looking at these origins, and 21st century ways of re-imagining them, it becomes easier to see how food’s impact on the social fabric of everyday life too often remains hidden. Patel’s talk draws on world history and the science of crop production and will feature footage from his latest documentary project, Generation Food, which he created with Steve James, the award-winning director of Hoop Dreams.
Patel is a research professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and a senior research associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa. He is a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First, and co-taught the 2014 Edible Education class at the University of California at Berkeley with Michael Pollan. He regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Times of India and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His latest book, The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times bestseller. His forthcoming Seven Cheap Things focuses on world ecology.
The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Churchill Fund, First-Year Seminars, the Center for Sustainability Education and the departments of environmental studies, international business & management, anthropology, archaeology and policy studies. It is the first event in the Clarke Forum’s 2016 fall semester theme, “Food.” It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty series.
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Published September 2, 2016