Food Study Group Conference:  Plenary Speakers

We are delighted to announce the plenary sessions/speakers for this event are:

Commensality and Society

Claude Fischler, CNRS, Paris

At the 2008 Food, Society and Public Health conference, Claude Fischler presented empirical evidence in his plenary lecture on ‘Commensalism vs. Consumerism – ‘Public’ vs. ‘Private’ eating’.  He showed how, for example, Americans perceived food and eating as an individual, private issue, equating food within a nutrition or health discourse.  Italians, on the other hand, prioritised the freshness and quality of food and the French emphasised ‘conviviality’, i.e. the social aspects structuring experiences of food and eating.

In his 2010 plenary address, Claude will again focus on commensality, this time presenting a theoretical review of the concept, on the nature and function of commensality in social structure and formation.

Changing Food Systems: A bridging proposal

Harriet Friedmann, Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto

As the local food movement grows, a frequent slogan is “think globally, buy locally”.  While this is a good enough rule of thumb for environmentally and socially conscious shoppers, food systems do not change by shopping alone.  However, it does raise a key problem, conceptually and politically: how to think and act across multi-scalar food systems?  Theoretically, food system change is better understood through a timely Latourian revision of food regime analysis.  This builds a useful bridge between Actor-Network Theory and Political Economy, and provides a point of departure to consider food system change through a lens of organizational ecology.  This perspective, which is emerging in several disciplines, suggests a move away from the polarity of “dominant” versus “alternative,” which rests on a modernist machine analogy.  Instead, an analogy to ecosystem change allows for interpretation across nested and overlapping scales of organization.  A conception of distinct trajectories, each of which reflects a unique constellation of natural, social, and political elements, is a more useful guide to action as well.  Those wishing to change food systems may find it useful to shift discourses, for instance away from “resistance” and towards “thresholds,” and to shift strategic directions, for instance to create multiple bridges between equity and sustainability.  I illustrate these points with examples from the Southern Ontario foodshed.