History, Technology, Gastronomy
Monday, 22 October 2007
LaSells Stewart Center - C&E Auditorium, 7:00 PM
The development, testing, and marketing of crops that are rich in carbohydrates, proteins, and vitamins, while resistant to viruses and other pests, is a huge challenge for scientists and societies aiming to deter malnutrition and disease in poor countries. The science, informed by the ongoing revolutions in genomics and biotechnology, is exhilarating yet daunting given the complexity of living organisms. Meanwhile, the controversies over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) makes it extremely difficult to get even potentially life-saving crop varieties into the field for evaluation, and thus into the hands of poor farmers who stand to benefit from them. This lecture addresses scientific, commercial, and legal issues in the biotechnology of genetically-modified crops, with a focus on the staple crop cassava, which sometimes is called the potato of Africa .
Dr. Roger Beachy is the founding president of the non-profit Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis , Missouri , and a pioneer in research on developing virus-resistant plants through biotechnology. He has held academic positions at Washington University at St. Louis and at The Scripps Research Institute at La Jolla , where he was co-founder of the International Laboratory for Tropical Agricultural Biotechnology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the 2001 Wolf Prize in Agriculture. Dr. Beachy’s earlier research led to the development of the world’s first genetically modified food crop, a virus-resistant tomato. His laboratory conducts basic research on plant biology, and recombinant DNA-based improvement of crop plants grown in developing countries, including rice, sweet potato, and cassava.
"How to Cook an Egg and Other Lessons from the Kitchen-Lab:
A History of Molecular Gastronomy"
Rachel Ankeny
University of Adelaide, Australia
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Memorial Union Lounge, 4:00 PM
Although the term “molecular gastronomy” was coined only in the late 1980s, investigations of the application of science to culinary practices have a long history. So what distinguishes recent efforts, and more generally, what is molecular gastronomy as opposed to food science? This lecture explores the concepts underlying molecular gastronomy and particularly its connections to the content and rhetoric of molecularization in the late twentieth century.
Rachel Ankeny is Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Politics and Manager of the Graduate Program in Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide. She holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master of Arts degree in Gastronomy from the University of Adelaide.
Dr. Ankeny’s research interests and publications range over topics in food ethics and the relationship of science to cuisine; ethical and policy issues in genetics, reproduction, and stem-cell research; and the roles of models and model organisms in science. She currently is co-investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on “Big-Picture Bioethics: Policy Making and Liberal Democracy.”
"The Role and Rule of Law in the Global Development
of Food Biotechnology"
Gary Marchant
Arizona State University
Thursday, 15 November 2007
LaSells Stewart Center, C&E Auditorium, 7:00 PM
Are genetically modified (GM) foods safe? Should biotechnology products have special labels? Under what circumstances can nations restrict imports of GM foods? Should genes and modified organisms be patented? These and other difficult questions about biotechnology are ultimately decided by the law. This talk will examine the capability of law to decide such issues in a fair, scientifically credible, and socially acceptable manner. We will see that the rule of law is essential to the orderly development of biotechnology, but the complexity and variability of the technology fundamentally challenge the ability of law to deal with the very many, and very great, benefits and risks.
Gary Marchant is the Lincoln Professor of Emerging Technologies, Law and Ethics at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. He is also a Professor of Life Sciences at ASU and Executive Director of the ASU Center for the Study of Law, Science and Technology. Professor Marchant has a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of British Columbia, a Masters of Public Policy degree from the Kennedy School of Government, and a law degree from Harvard. Prior to joining the ASU faculty in 1999, he was a partner in a Washington, D.C., law firm where his practice focused on environmental and administrative law. At ASU, Professor Marchant teaches environmental, food, genetic, and drug law, and has studied the legal aspects of risk assessment, biotechnology, and nanotechnology.
"Planet Taco: The Globalization of Mexican Cuisine"
Jeffrey Pilcher
University of Minnesota
Thursday, 24 January 2008
LaSells Stewart Center, C&E Auditorium, 7:00 PM
Mexican food has joined Chinese and Italian as one of the three most popular ethnic varieties in the United States, although many people know that the tacos and burritos they eat are no more representative of the cuisines of Mexico than chop suey and pizza are of Chinese and Italian. Not only have the Mexican foods changed significantly in the United States, they have also spread globally, to the chagrin of Mexicans who find Tex-Mex wherever they travel. In this talk, Jeffrey Pilcher will examine early encounters with Mexican food, including the chili “queens” of San Antonio and the taco shops of Southern California. He will also attempt to show how the resulting stereotypes have been carried around the world.
Jeffrey M. Pilcher grew up in the Midwest and is now a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. He has been fascinated by Mexican cuisine since his first visit to New Mexico, when a mouthful of salsa sent steam boiling out his ears. He won the Thomas McGann prize for the best book on Latin American history for ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998), based on a dissertation completed at Texas Christian University in 1993. His other books include Food in World History (2006) and The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917 (2006). His current research project, to eat Mexican food in as many countries as possible, provides the material for “Planet Taco.”
"Getting Biofuels Right: The Biofuel vs. Food
and the Environment Dilemna"
G. David Tilman
University of Minnesota
Monday, 25 February 2008
LaSells Stewart Center, C&E Auditorium, 7:00 PM
Concerns over rising oil prices and greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have caused biofuels to be touted as a solution to both our energy and climate change dilemmas. Current biofuels, however, offer no real solution. Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel provide small energy gains, but both directly and indirectly release more greenhouse gas than fossil fuels. Moreover, any food-based biofuels made by converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands release substantially more carbon dioxide than the annual greenhouse gas reductions that these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels.
In this lecture, ecologist David Tilman suggests solutions: Biofuels can be produced from perennials grown on agriculturally degraded lands without displacing food production or causing loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction. Similarly, biofuels made from waste biomass, manure, corn stover, forest slash, or thinnings offer immediate and sustained advantages and net energy gains.
G. David Tilman is Regents’ Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology
at the University of Minnesota, and Director of the University’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. His research explores how managed and natural ecosystems can sustainably meet human needs for food, energy, and ecosystem services. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Tilman was the Founding Editor of the journal Ecological Issues. His many awards include the Ecological Society of America’s Cooper Award and its MacArthur Award, the Botanical Society of America’s Centennial Award, the Princeton Environmental Prize, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He has written or edited five books and published more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed literature that made him the world’s most highly cited environmental scientist for 1990–2000 and for 1996–2006, according to the Institute for Scientific Information.
"The Apples of Our Eyes:
Innovation, Art, and Ownership in American Fruits"
Daniel J. Kevles
Yale University
Thursday, 10 April 2008
LaSells Stewart Center, C&E Auditorium, 7:00 PM
Innovation in fruits turned from a pastime of gentlemanly amateurs into a commercial business by the middle of the nineteenth century. The innovators grew eager to obtain what they increasingly termed the rights of “originators,” or what we can recognize as intellectual property protection (IP), for their new fruits. Yet how could the innovators uniquely identify their inventions? Special names were inadequate, since nothing prevented a thief from selling a fruit under a different name, and verbal descriptions were inevitably inexact. A number of innovators thus tried to protect their fruits more precisely in colored lithographs and watercolors. The practice gave rise to an industry of fruit illustrations that soon comprised an abundant and often exquisite body of commercial and, in connection with a kind of registration system, federal art. However, registered illustration proved ineffective for IP protection in fruits, and horticultural innovators resorted to alternative arrangements that included pricing, contracts, legislation, and in our own day, patents on genes.
Daniel J. Kevles, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, teaches and writes about issues in science and society past and present. He is currently writing a book on the history of innovation and ownership in the stuff of life. His previous works include The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character; In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity; and The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. He has also published numerous articles, essays, and reviews in scholarly and popular journals such as The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Kevles has received various honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Page One Award, the Watson Davis Prize, and the History of Science Society’s George Sarton Medal for career achievement.
"Eating Good in the Neighborhood:
The Medical and Moral History of Dietary Localism"
Steven Shapin
Harvard University
Thursday, 15 May 2008
LaSells Stewart Center, C&E Auditorium, 7:00 PM
Is local food tastier than food from far-away places? Is it preferable on ethical grounds? Is it healthier? How old is this preference for eating locally? Steven Shapin, the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, discusses these and other questions in this lecture.
Shapin notes that Oxford University Press anointed "locavore" the 2007 Word of the Year. The word was made up in 2005 by some San Franciscans who thought it a good idea to eat only foods produced within a 100-mile radius. In their view, we should be locavores because it is good for the palate and good for the planet. They also tend to believe that we should reject modern globalization and return to the local ways of the past.
But have locavores gotten their history right? asks Shapin. This lecture explores how medical and moral traditions from antiquity to recent times have thought about local and exotic diets and reflects on changing conceptions of the self and the place of food in our lives.
Shapin completed his undergraduate degree at Reed College and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Shapin taught at the University of California at San Diego and at the University of Edinburgh. Much of his pioneering work has focused on the social processes by which valid scientific knowledge is constructed. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life and Wetenschap is cultuur (Science is Culture), both written with Simon Schaffer, and A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England and The Scientific Revolution. Shapin’s newest book, The Life of Science: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation, will appear with the University of Chicago Press in September 2008. His current research interests include historical and contemporary studies of dietetics, the nature of entrepreneurial science, and modern relations between academia and industry. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and recently for The New Yorker.
Shapin’s many awards include the J. D. Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science (for career contributions to the field), the Robert K. Merton Prize of the American Sociological Association , and, with Simon Schaffer, the 2005 Erasmus Prize, conferred by HRH the Prince of Orange of the Netherlands, for contributions to European culture, society, or social science. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview in April 2007 with Steven Shapin can be found online at http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html.
