• Go to Center for Design Innovation’s site to learn about this year’s host for the Design, Arts, and Technology Symposium.
• For Food Geography panel and participation topics, click here.
“Food has no ethnicity, only geography.” —Musa Dagdiviren
DATS 2010 (Design, Art, and Technology Symposium) has made food its theme. The event is scheduled to be hosted by the Center for Design Innovation to take place at the Sawtooth Center in Winston-Salem in October 10, 2010, possibly with some additional activities in Greensboro. Past DATS hosts include High Point University, UNCG, and UNC School of the Arts. This year will be a breakout event: DATS will move out of academia and into the real world!
To introduce the idea of food and its relation to culture, I’ve assembled several sources to get you and potential participants thinking about possible symposium events, discussions, and activities. We want to find a way of talking about food that connects the ideas of organic, ethnic, industrial, fast, slow, snack, dessert, vegan, vegetarian, health, recipes, nutrition, local — the list goes on.
What I rarely hear is discussion about food in its most inclusive form, as it relates to culture. Maybe it’s because we’re not too sure about what our Piedmont culture is or what it means. While I believe food is deeply connected to memories, especially childhood, it is inseparable from place. Thus my interest perked up when I came across the above quote by a Turkish chef. Food and culture. Food and history. Food and geography.
Points of Departure
• Musa Dagdiviren’s remarkable quote is from “The Memory Kitchen” by Elif Batuman in the New Yorker, April 19, 2010. The full article isn’t available yet, so buy the magazine or check out the audio link.
• What does the world eat? See the photo essay excerpts . Notice the preponderance of packaging and processed foods in the families of industrialized, "advanced" countries.
• If you were a pig, would you choose to live in an industrial farm? Watch Dan Barber in chapter 6 of “What’s for Dinner: Food and Politics in the 21st Century” on Fora TV and listen how he explains foei gras.
• Read about Will Allen, MacArthur grant winner, in the Sunday NY Times’ “Street Farmer”. Notable quote, If there’s no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, says Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms, “we’ve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right — that this is a consumption club for people who’ve traveled to Europe and tasted fine food.
• Does the Piedmont’s refugee population have a place at our table? Read about local farmer Daniel Woodham’s work to incorporate the agriculture experience of Montagnard refugees into the local economy as reported in the Greensboro News-Record. And check out great photos by Max Holder of his ESOL class at work in Luke and Tobi's garden. And a few more pictures of Montagnard participation at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s Black Mountain conference. On a related note, read about the opening of the area’s largest Montagnard-owned food store.• Alice Waters’ school food projects work on a $5 per pupil model. From American Public Media’s Splendid Table, a talk with Jean Ronnei of the St. Paul, MN public schools reviews the hard problem of feeding kids school lunches for less than $3 per pupil.
• On dumpster diving and urban farming, watch “Education of an Urban Farmer: Novella Carpenter”.
• Arnold Pacey’s “Technology in World Civilization”, 1991, MIT, credits ancient native American farmers for their important work in the development of corn, potatoes, and other agricultural products, their gift to the world that allowed populations to grow and modern societies to emerge.• See as much as you can of Wade Davis’ “Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World” on Fora TV and check out “Sky in Motion” that precedes it, also on viewable on YouTube.
Do you have an inspiring source to share? Please notify me and I’ll put it up.
