Focused Discussions
Food Justice : Pedagogical Practice for Embedding Food Justice in Post-secondary Education
Focused Discussion Colin Dring
In this session, I invite instructors, students, practitioners, and scholars to participate in a facilitated discussion around how to embed food justice concepts, empirical studies, skills and dispositions, and community engaged scholarship into formal and informal educational practice in post-secondary institutions. This session will uncover what others are employing in their own formal (e.g. courses, labs, tutorials, online and blended learning spaces) and informal (e.g. mentorship, community's of practice, social gatherings) educational practices that embed food justice. Additionally, I aim to collaboratively develop a shared syllabus identifying key learning competencies, learning objectives, core food system and food justice concepts, reading lists, best practice for community engaged and involvement, strategies to link concepts to reflection and practice, and creation of a shared community of learners.
Cooking for a Sustainable Future: Alternative Foods
Focused Discussion Stacy Mirabello, Jon Poyourow
As the world's population grows and natural resources dwindle, the sustainability of our food systems is in our hands. We as chefs are the leaders in the food industry and we are able to use our platform to influence and change the mindset of our society in the way that food is viewed. This presentation will cover how to incorporate plant based and protein alternative foods to meet and maintain nutritional standards that also supports a sustainable future. We will utilize recipe booklets and interactive app based software to ask and answer questions about cultural cuisine, nutritional standards and ingredient usage that will help the attendees understand the accessibility, sustainability and ease of use of products such as; jackfruit, tempeh, legumes, nuts, seeds, and algae based superfoods.
Digital Projects and Global Food Cultures: Food Films in a Latin American Literature Course
Focused Discussion Kathryn Dolan
Aided by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, in spring 2018 I taught an experimental course: “Sustainable Foods in Latin American Literature.” In this literature course, we read novels and poetry focusing on the subject of food and culture: the work of Laura Esquivel and Pablo Neruda, for example. The primary project of the course was for students to form groups and prepare film clips—three to five minutes long—of themselves cooking specific Latin American dishes. I feel this multi-modal assignment allowed my students to more fully integrated with global cultures and their foods—specifically with Latin American nations and cultures. Cooking clips are popular on the internet and in social media. I am translating this familiar mode of presentation into another cultural context. My class studied the authenticity of their chosen dishes—including issues of sustainability, researched their ability to purchase needed ingredients locally or adapt them—a process that involved their producing a grocery store ethnography, learned enough about media production to create a clean film clip, and analyzed the process in terms of their appreciation of another culture through their food in a final essay. I propose a pedagogical presentation on this assignment to discuss what we learned in terms of global cultural competencies. I will present samples of the student films, as well as samples of their response papers.
Understanding the Access, Utilization, and Impact of Farmers' Markets among Bronx Residents
Focused Discussion Elys Vasquez-Iscan, Monica Stanton Koko, Antonia Perkins, Tamara Grant, Herve Fossou, Barbara Amonoo
Over the past 7 years The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings has rated Bronx County as having the poorest health and social outcomes from all of the counties in New York State. Although in the past 4 years there has been an increase in farmer's markets citywide, the Bronx has experience a 10% decline. During this same period the Bronx residents have had a 5% annual decrease in the consumption of fruits and vegetables. The Bronx is also noted to be one of the poorest congressional areas in the United State causing it to have pockets of extreme poverty where individuals are more likely to suffer disproportionate levels of negative health outcomes. Such as in the South Bronx where nearly 1 in 3 (31%) adults is considered obese and 15% of the adult population reports being diabetic, due to structural barriers including historical and contemporary structural racism as well as modifiable risk factors such as diet. As an example of structural barriers the Bronx is inundated with fast food establishments and bombarded with with fast food marketing. This proposed discussion will be guided by the findings of a farmer's market survey that accessed eating and food purchasing behavior among Bronx residents. The proposed discussion will uphold a socio-ecological framework that will facilitate a group discussion on the proximal and distal factors influencing individual behavior.
Investigating Urban Food Consumption by Mixing Different Visual Data
Focused Discussion Julia Fülling, Linda Hering
In our interdisciplinary research project, we investigate from a sociological and geographical perspective the spatial knowledge of consumers and traders when buying and selling fresh vegetables and fruits. Therefore our empirical analysis combines different visual methods such as photo documentation and mappings on several sales locations (supermarkets, grocery stores, discounter e.g.) in four different Berlin quarters with contrasting building structures (prefabricated building settlement, old building area, detached housing area) as well as social compositions. In the focused discussion, we want to invite other participants to trace together with us the specific spatial knowledge inscribed in the build and material environment that constitutes and is constituted by the daily practices and routines of consumers and traders. Through the joint analysis of the different visual data, we want to find out how actors refer to different spatial arrangements when interacting. Furthermore, we want to study the decisive role the food store itself plays for the communication and construction of knowledge considering incomplete information within the value chain. Questions we want to address might be: How are the stores embedded in the quarters? What kind of clusters of different company forms are established? To what kind of knowledge (e.g. about the origin of the fresh produce, the resident population, competitors …) do traders refer to when they select the goods? What information do consumers receive through the visual representations and the arrangement of a different store about the sorts of products and qualities they can purchase?
Food Photography Apps Using Deep Learning Algorithms: Design of Apps for Food Photography
Focused Discussion Jia-Hong Lee, Mei Yi Wu
Social networks such as Facebook and Instagram are now full of pictures of people's food and drink images. But it’s not easy to create a successful photography when we take a picture of a great-looking meal. We often shoot unappealing images though the food may look amazing. Food photography is an art not an exact science. There are many food photography apps providing specific functions with a great range of editing features you can adjust anything from exposure to saturation on specific points of the image. In this study, we plan to discuss the tips of guidelines that will help us get better pictures of food. We also want to use deep learning algorithms to learn to judge whether a food image is shot good or not. More than 300 food images captured from social networks are collected as dataset. And each image is marked as one of three different levels: good, fair and poor by experts. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is applied to assess image quality of these food images after manual training. The future application of this study is to design an APPs which can assess the food image quality when users take the camera of mobile phone to shoot a meal.
