Food Studies’s Updates
Plenary Session, Melanie Dupuis: Tenth International Conference on Food Studies
"A Political Ecology of Pizza"
Live Q&A Session: 18 October - Melanie Dupuis - (10:00 AM CST/ 11:00 AM EST)
E. Melanie DuPuis is a professor and the chair of Environmental Studies and Science at Pace University and a professor emerita from University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a BA in anthropology from Harvard University and a PhD in development sociology from Cornell University.
She is the author of Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink, the co-author of Alternative Food Politics: Knowledge, Practice, and Politics, with David and Mike Goodman, and the editor of two edited collections: Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution and Creating the Countryside: The Politics of Rural and Environmental Discourse. Her latest book, Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice, was published by UC Press in October of 2015. She is also the co-editor, with Matthew Garcia and Don Mitchell, of Food Across Borders.
Dr. DuPuis has been involved in environmental, energy, and sustainable food policy issues and organizations since the 1990s. She was a founding member of the Farm and Food Project, a food policy group in the New York Capital Region. Prior to coming to Pace, DuPuis held academic and administration positions at the University of California, Washington Center, in Washington, DC, and University of California in Santa Cruz, CA. DuPuis worked for 10 years with Power Economics as a member of a consulting firm management team that provided economics witnesses in energy and environmental administrative and judicial procedures, including testimony against Enron. She was also the energy and environment policy analyst for the New York State Department of Economic Development during the 1990s.
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Terrific political ecology approach to understanding one of the big shifts in our food system. Dairy management sounds boring but it isn't here. The regional economic impacts and health impacts of industrial cheese production and dumping are immense. Thank you. I share an interest in how bioengineering (products and industry) are driving some of these food management practices and food system changes. Food industries find ways to make regulations and policies work for their interests while leaving local interests (workers, producers, landscapes) diminished economically and politically. And they often do so in the name of innovation and progress, even humanitarian claims to feed the world.
Local and regional food system alternatives (CSAs, craft beverage, pastured meat) offer a different kind of economic development, but do they provide many jobs (direct and tourism) and do these efforts serve only the economically better off? I will check out your Alt Food Politics Book!
Thanks. My colleagues are doing a lot of work on bioengineering of food. Check out Julie Guthman and Charlotte Biltekoff's new article in Environment and Planning. Let's talk more about craft beer as an economic development tool. i just did a book review of Coleen Myles' Fermentive Landscapes which has some good case studies of the economic impact of local craft breweries.