Practicing Food Studies

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Krishnendu Ray details the turn of the twenty-first century development and flourishing of food studies as a multidisciplinary field, focusing on its establishment at New York University.

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Krishnendu Ray details the turn of the twenty-first century development and flourishing of food studies as a multidisciplinary field, focusing on its establishment at New York University.

Image courtesy of interviewee. February 22, 2024

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This video video discusses the creation and purpose of a book on food studies, originally inspired by editor Amy Bentley, in the context of the Food Studies program's development and the upcoming retirement of prominent faculty member Marian Nestle. The book contains contributions from various scholars, highlighting a range of research topics within the field, such as the interplay of immigrant labor and dietary changes in the U.S. food system, as well as the significance of social movements and poetry in shaping food culture.

One focus of the authors' research is how immigrant communities significantly influence both the labor market in agriculture and food-related industries and the evolution of American tastes, with Mexican, Central American, and Asian immigrants notably impacting food preferences and availability.

This video video also emphasizes the distinct position of the NYU Food Studies program, which, unlike many agriculture-focused programs, emphasizes urban food systems and public health, leveraging its location in New York City to engage with diverse communities and stakeholders. The authors address the importance of making academic research accessible to broader audiences beyond academia, noting challenges in communicating specialized research effectively while remaining connected to local environmental and health issues.

Lastly, the text illustrates the collaborative nature of the program with other departments, stressing the potential for impactful work despite limited resources, and advocates for using existing institutional frameworks to enhance research and outreach efforts in food studies.

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It started as an idea from one of my colleague who is one

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of the editors, Amy Bentley.

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The three editors are myself, Krishnan Dure, Fabio Para,

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and Amy Bentley.

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And Amy. This was originally Amy Bentley's idea in the

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context of two events.

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Uh, one was we were moving into a time period.

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We are about 25 years,

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from when the program got started, the food studies program,

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which is a relatively new program,

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and the coming retirement of one of our,

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celebrity stars, Marian Nessel, who also writes the,

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the first chapter of the book.

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Um, and so this was a coming out

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of Amy's idea how to take stock

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while paying tribute to a very new kind of a department,

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a department that had a nutritional scientist.

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About half of our faculty are nutritional scientists.

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Many of them are public health nutritionist.

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But what is surprising is it is combined

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with people like me, Amy Bentley, Fabio,

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who are mostly social science or humanities people.

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So it's in that sense, makes it an unusual department

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and a distinctively different department.

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And this book is an attempt to take stock

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of the birth of a creative program like food studies in a

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department called Nutrition and Food Studies.

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The bigger challenge was getting all the people lined up.

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They're about about a dozen people who contribute,

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to this book.

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And it's mostly people doing their research.

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Uh, just to give you two examples.

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One is, say one of our colleagues who was one

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of our doctoral students,

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his name is Juan Carlos Herrera from Columbia,

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and he looked at the role of sugar in Colombian diet,

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especially in Colombian recipes,

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almost over a 70 year period in a popular journal.

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So he took all the recipes,

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then he subdivided them into various ingredients,

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and then he combined them into various,

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what he called network analysis,

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using a very stringent quantitative method, to,

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kind of draw out a kind of associations between

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what goes with what

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and what does not go with what, over 70 years of record of,

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recipes

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and menus, in a Colombian journal.

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So for instance, that's one example.

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And the other example say Eric Himmelfarb's,

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chapter is called Poetry

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and Literary Studies, composing,

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he writes about the composing of food studies,

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and that is a deeply qualitative chapter, which is about

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the role of poetry in social movements.

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So for instance, why do social movements have songs?

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What role do they play

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and what is the relationship between songs and poetic form?

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And so he develops this kind of a rich,

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a beautiful chapter on the role

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of poetics in a social movement tied to social justice

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and food sovereignty.

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So there are about a dozen chapters like that.

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So this project was trying to pull together a range

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of scholars who have, worked through food studies,

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graduated through food studies,

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or are professors of food studies to represent a range

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of work in terms of content and methods.

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So that was mostly the kind of mobilizing of resources

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to put the book together.

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My specific work is, in sociology and anthropology,

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and specifically in the role of immigrants,

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in, the American food studies in the American food

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system, and also increasingly elsewhere in the world.

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So there are two things to note about, the role

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of immigrants and transnational migration in the making

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of a food system and the making of a food culture.

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To give you a sense, say, in the United States,

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we have pretty good data on say who works on farms.

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There are about 2 million workers on farms,

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and almost half of them are family,

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workers related to the family unit, household unit.

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And the other half are immigrants,

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often transnational migrants.

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In the American case, they often tend to be Mexican

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or El Salvador or Guatemalan, workers.

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So if you take, say, farm workers in the United States,

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it's dominated by immigrants

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and especially undocumented immigrants.

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The estimation is almost 70% of labor is,

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mostly undocumented.

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Then if you take people

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who work in the food processing system, people who work,

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say in restaurants, okay, to give you a sense,

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about 16 million people work in,

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the restaurant business and the food service business.

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Again, the dominant category of people in it are immigrants,

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and the immigrants tend to come in the United States.

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Today from two parts of the world,

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it is either Latin America or Asia.

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Okay, China, south Asia, et cetera.

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So we have pretty good record on the American food

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system, on birthplace

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And occupation since the 1850 census.

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And we know that the foreign born dominated

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the American food system.

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They used to be Germans

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or Irish, eastern European Jews,

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excuse me, Eastern European Jews, Italians,

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and after 1965, mostly Latinx, and Asians.

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So that's one part of it that the food system from the farm

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to the restaurant, in fact is worked,

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has been worked substantially by immigrants.

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The other part of it, which my work also shows, is

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how American tastes changes.

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Like right now, avocados,

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racha has,

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salsas have become more common than in fact even ketchup.

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Okay? And that has happened repeatedly in American history.

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Like say, when Italian immigrants were dominant, 1880s

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to the 1920s, Americans learned to, use olive oil.

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Americans learned to use wine, Americans learned

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to use various salad greens, broccolini, et cetera.

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And that's happening right now, post 1965,

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that we are learning to eat a lot more of Asian food

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and Latinx food.

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And you can see that in our cities in terms of tacos,

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you know, tamales

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or say Korean food, bi bim, bap,

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or, other Asian foods like say sushi has become very

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popular, et cetera.

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So throughout American history,

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there's always been this dynamic relationship between labor

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of immigrants and taste of immigrants,

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and they have changed both sides of the equation.

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That's true. Also, I also work on India

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and the Indian ocean world.

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In India, for instance, it's not

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so much transnational migrants,

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but it is largely intranational migrants,

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migrants from Eastern India who are traveling

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to northern India, to western India, to southern India.

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Uh, like in Mexico, that migration from countryside

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to small town, small town to the big city in China,

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that's also happening.

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So even in places like say India

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and China, where transnational migration does not play

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as substantial a role rural to urban, urban,

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peri-urban to urban migration continues

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to play an important role

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and in both ways in providing labor for the food system

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and in transforming the taste of what is good to eat.

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So that is kind of my interest in this whole question

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of migration, mobility,

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and changes in the food system.

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And in the food culture. For instance, in our department,

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we do not do direct work on climate change.

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And that is an interesting, in fact, lesson from this book.

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Partly,

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because we have another department, environmental studies

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that concentrates on, basically climate change.

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Okay? So we partner with them,

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and the one of the chairs of

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that department is Sonali McDermott.

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Uh, they, they do a lot of work on, for instance,

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the cost of agriculture in terms of climate change

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and, kind of various kinds of,

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contribution to carbon emissions for almost 10%

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of contributions to carbon emission comes from agriculture.

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So we partner, in fact with, we have a,

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a separate department of sociology.

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We have a separate department of anthropology

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and a separate department of environmental studies.

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So generally, we tend to collaborate

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with our colleagues in these other departments to talk about

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specifically issues of climate change, pesticide use,

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herbicide use, and fertilizer runoffs.

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Most of what we work on in our department

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is partly shaped by economics.

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Uh, the economist we have comes from the USDA,

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Caroline Demetry, who works on largely sustainable ag,

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agriculture and environmental change.

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And then the rest of our work is mostly at the consumption

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end of it, consumption, health and public health end of it.

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And what we specifically concentrate, given our location

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in New York City in a department called nutrition

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and food studies in a school called Steinhardt School,

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which is related to the school of Education,

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which it's prehistory is a school of education.

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So a lot of our work is with, schools, churches,

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and especially immunity kind of initiatives

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around climate change.

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So climate diagnostics, climate imaginaries,

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and climate experience

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and climate solutions as worked through at the level

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of the city and at the level of the neighborhood.

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In some ways, NYU food studies is born very specifically in

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the institutional network, as I said

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before, with other departments

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or department of history, a department of anthro,

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environmental studies.

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So we had to, in some ways carve out an area of work

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that was specific to us, related to mostly consumption

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and especially the urban environment.

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Uh, for instance, compared

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to other colleges like say Cornell University

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or land grant universities, which much work much closer

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to the agricultural production side,

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we work much clo much in closer proximity

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to basically what's going on in the city in terms of,

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provisioning, distribution or waste, et cetera.

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Uh, so, so that's the first set of issues.

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The second set of issues is we are in a department of

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where we have nutritional signs and public health.

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So we tend to be closer to consumption, closer to questions

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of health than to, for instance, in terms

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of agricultural production.

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So taking these two kind of dimensions of

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what is food studies

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and embedding it institutionally

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to the institutional home, which is we are in New York City,

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we are NYU in New York City, so we tend to be closer

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to the urban environment, schools, hospitals,

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you know, and those kinds

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of environments rather than the farm.

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Uh, and then, embedding it in a larger context

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of a department which has nutritional science.

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And there are other departments like sociology, like anthro,

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like environmental studies.

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And basically I think what this book does very well

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is arguing about how to build a program

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with modest means in a context

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where the institution already exists, where you have to,

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in some ways slot yourself into what already exists

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and what you can get synergies from

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with other neighboring institutions.

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I think that's what we have been good at.

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And this book in some ways

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specifies I think a couple of things.

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One is this very question of what can you do

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with modest means?

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So say food studies.

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We are just five faculty member,

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with five faculty member in nutrition.

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At one point of time, we had five faculty

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members in public health.

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So instead of planning a huge new institution,

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like say a typical history department has 40

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faculty members, okay?

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A typical sociology department would have a very large

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number of faculty members.

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So our first goal is to show ways in which

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with modest resources, you can make a big impact

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if you are aligned with basically the strategic vision of,

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in this case, an institution like NYU in New York City,

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where we take full advantage of, for instance,

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the very solid media market, newspapers, you know,

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social media world, that we take full advantage of it

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with modest means, how to craft a program, how

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to build a program.

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And I think the second dimension of it is a program that,

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speaks to an audience

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outside of the campus.

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So what we call, in some ways an esoteric audience compared

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to an esoteric audience.

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So anthropologists are very good at communicating

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with other anthropologists.

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Sociologists are very good at communicating

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with other sociologists,

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but sociologists and anthropologists

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Are not that good at communicating with a wider public as

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to what is the research in anthropology of food,

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what is the research in sociology of food

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that could be useful to learn

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for the larger, wider audience?

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That's where we come in as a food studies program

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and especially our, founding chair,

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Marian Nessel has been very good in,

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in articulating this esoteric external audience, audience

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that is external to the academy,

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where we can bring the research into the public domain.

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I think that's the second most important lesson

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that we get out of this book, how we have done it,

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and what are some of the challenges.

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And there are some challenges.

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For instance, how do you do specialized research

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and also speak to a wider audience

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that is not always easily done,

15:43.105 --> 15:45.485
but this book articulates different ways

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of both conducting research

15:48.105 --> 15:52.525
and articulating our findings to a wider audience

15:52.825 --> 15:57.405
and much more fully engaged with the urban, wider

15:57.965 --> 16:01.685
audience in a large city with a large media market.

Quick Answers

Celebrating Food Studies: A Unique Perspective

00:00:00 - It started as an idea from one of my colleague who is one of the editors, Amy Bentley. The three editors are myself, Krishnan Dure, Fabio Para, and Amy Bentley. And Amy. This was originally Amy Bentley's idea in the context of two events. one was we were moving into a time period. We are about 25 years, from when the program got started, the food studies program, which is a relatively new program,
00:00:36 - celebrity stars, Marian Nessel, who also writes the, the first chapter of the book. and so this was a coming out of Amy's idea how to take stock while paying tribute to a very new kind of a department, a department that had a nutritional scientist. About half of our faculty are nutritional scientists.
00:01:06 - But what is surprising is it is combined with people like me, Amy Bentley, Fabio, who are mostly social science or humanities people. So it's in that sense, makes it an unusual department and a distinctively different department. And this book is an attempt to take stock of the birth of a creative program like food studies in a department called Nutrition and Food Studies.
00:01:38 - They're about about a dozen people who contribute, to this book. And it's mostly people doing their research. just to give you two examples. One is, say one of our colleagues who was one of our doctoral students, his name is Juan Carlos Herrera from Columbia, and he looked at the role of sugar in Colombian diet, especially in Colombian recipes,
00:02:10 - So he took all the recipes, then he subdivided them into various ingredients, and then he combined them into various, what he called network analysis, using a very stringent quantitative method, to, kind of draw out a kind of associations between what goes with what and what does not go with what, over 70 years of record of,
00:02:41 - and menus, in a Colombian journal. So for instance, that's one example. And the other example say Eric Himmelfarb's, chapter is called Poetry and Literary Studies, composing, he writes about the composing of food studies, and that is a deeply qualitative chapter, which is about the role of poetry in social movements.

Immigrants' Impact on Food Systems and Culture

00:03:15 - What role do they play and what is the relationship between songs and poetic form? And so he develops this kind of a rich, a beautiful chapter on the role of poetics in a social movement tied to social justice and food sovereignty. So there are about a dozen chapters like that. So this project was trying to pull together a range
00:03:48 - graduated through food studies, or are professors of food studies to represent a range of work in terms of content and methods. So that was mostly the kind of mobilizing of resources to put the book together. My specific work is, in sociology and anthropology, and specifically in the role of immigrants,
00:04:16 - system, and also increasingly elsewhere in the world. So there are two things to note about, the role of immigrants and transnational migration in the making of a food system and the making of a food culture. To give you a sense, say, in the United States, we have pretty good data on say who works on farms. There are about 2 million workers on farms,
00:04:48 - workers related to the family unit, household unit. And the other half are immigrants, often transnational migrants. In the American case, they often tend to be Mexican or El Salvador or Guatemalan, workers. So if you take, say, farm workers in the United States, it's dominated by immigrants and especially undocumented immigrants. The estimation is almost 70% of labor is,
00:05:19 - Then if you take people who work in the food processing system, people who work, say in restaurants, okay, to give you a sense, about 16 million people work in, the restaurant business and the food service business. Again, the dominant category of people in it are immigrants, and the immigrants tend to come in the United States. Today from two parts of the world, it is either Latin America or Asia. Okay, China, south Asia, et cetera.
00:05:55 - system, on birthplace And occupation since the 1850 census. And we know that the foreign born dominated the American food system. They used to be Germans or Irish, eastern European Jews, excuse me, Eastern European Jews, Italians, and after 1965, mostly Latinx, and Asians. So that's one part of it that the food system from the farm

Immigrants and Evolving American Food Trends

00:06:29 - has been worked substantially by immigrants. The other part of it, which my work also shows, is how American tastes changes. Like right now, avocados, racha has, salsas have become more common than in fact even ketchup. Okay? And that has happened repeatedly in American history. Like say, when Italian immigrants were dominant, 1880s to the 1920s, Americans learned to, use olive oil.
00:07:03 - to use various salad greens, broccolini, et cetera. And that's happening right now, post 1965, that we are learning to eat a lot more of Asian food and Latinx food. And you can see that in our cities in terms of tacos, you know, tamales or say Korean food, bi bim, bap, or, other Asian foods like say sushi has become very popular, et cetera.
00:07:34 - there's always been this dynamic relationship between labor of immigrants and taste of immigrants, and they have changed both sides of the equation. That's true. Also, I also work on India and the Indian ocean world. In India, for instance, it's not so much transnational migrants, but it is largely intranational migrants, migrants from Eastern India who are traveling to northern India, to western India, to southern India.
00:08:07 - to small town, small town to the big city in China, that's also happening. So even in places like say India and China, where transnational migration does not play as substantial a role rural to urban, urban, peri-urban to urban migration continues to play an important role and in both ways in providing labor for the food system and in transforming the taste of what is good to eat.
00:08:39 - of migration, mobility, and changes in the food system. And in the food culture. For instance, in our department, we do not do direct work on climate change. And that is an interesting, in fact, lesson from this book. Partly, because we have another department, environmental studies that concentrates on, basically climate change. Okay? So we partner with them,
00:09:08 - that department is Sonali McDermott. they, they do a lot of work on, for instance, the cost of agriculture in terms of climate change and, kind of various kinds of, contribution to carbon emissions for almost 10% of contributions to carbon emission comes from agriculture. So we partner, in fact with, we have a, a separate department of sociology.

Collaboration in Climate and Food Studies

00:09:39 - and a separate department of environmental studies. So generally, we tend to collaborate with our colleagues in these other departments to talk about specifically issues of climate change, pesticide use, herbicide use, and fertilizer runoffs. Most of what we work on in our department is partly shaped by economics. the economist we have comes from the USDA,
00:10:10 - agriculture and environmental change. And then the rest of our work is mostly at the consumption end of it, consumption, health and public health end of it. And what we specifically concentrate, given our location in New York City in a department called nutrition and food studies in a school called Steinhardt School, which is related to the school of Education, which it's prehistory is a school of education.
00:10:44 - and especially immunity kind of initiatives around climate change. So climate diagnostics, climate imaginaries, and climate experience and climate solutions as worked through at the level of the city and at the level of the neighborhood. In some ways, NYU food studies is born very specifically in the institutional network, as I said
00:11:11 - or department of history, a department of anthro, environmental studies. So we had to, in some ways carve out an area of work that was specific to us, related to mostly consumption and especially the urban environment. for instance, compared to other colleges like say Cornell University or land grant universities, which much work much closer to the agricultural production side, we work much clo much in closer proximity
00:11:46 - provisioning, distribution or waste, et cetera. so, so that's the first set of issues. The second set of issues is we are in a department of where we have nutritional signs and public health. So we tend to be closer to consumption, closer to questions of health than to, for instance, in terms of agricultural production. So taking these two kind of dimensions of
00:12:14 - and embedding it institutionally to the institutional home, which is we are in New York City, we are NYU in New York City, so we tend to be closer to the urban environment, schools, hospitals, you know, and those kinds of environments rather than the farm. and then, embedding it in a larger context of a department which has nutritional science. And there are other departments like sociology, like anthro,

Building Effective Programs with Limited Resources

00:12:46 - And basically I think what this book does very well is arguing about how to build a program with modest means in a context where the institution already exists, where you have to, in some ways slot yourself into what already exists and what you can get synergies from with other neighboring institutions. I think that's what we have been good at. And this book in some ways
00:13:17 - One is this very question of what can you do with modest means? So say food studies. We are just five faculty member, with five faculty member in nutrition. At one point of time, we had five faculty members in public health. So instead of planning a huge new institution, like say a typical history department has 40 faculty members, okay? A typical sociology department would have a very large number of faculty members.
00:13:51 - with modest resources, you can make a big impact if you are aligned with basically the strategic vision of, in this case, an institution like NYU in New York City, where we take full advantage of, for instance, the very solid media market, newspapers, you know, social media world, that we take full advantage of it with modest means, how to craft a program, how
00:14:22 - And I think the second dimension of it is a program that, speaks to an audience outside of the campus. So what we call, in some ways an esoteric audience compared to an esoteric audience. So anthropologists are very good at communicating with other anthropologists. Sociologists are very good at communicating with other sociologists, but sociologists and anthropologists
00:14:55 - to what is the research in anthropology of food, what is the research in sociology of food that could be useful to learn for the larger, wider audience? That's where we come in as a food studies program and especially our, founding chair, Marian Nessel has been very good in, in articulating this esoteric external audience, audience that is external to the academy,
00:15:24 - I think that's the second most important lesson that we get out of this book, how we have done it, and what are some of the challenges. And there are some challenges. For instance, how do you do specialized research and also speak to a wider audience that is not always easily done, but this book articulates different ways of both conducting research and articulating our findings to a wider audience

Engaging Urban Audiences through Media Strategies

00:15:57 - audience in a large city with a large media market.

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