It began with a meal.
On Friday, April 4, over 100 people gathered for the sixth annual Shasha Seminar in the Daniel Family Commons over a Bon Appétit-catered dinner. Attendees included students, their parents, alumni, scholars and bright lights of gastronomy from all over the country. For the next two days they would be discussing this year’s seminar topic, “Food: Power and Identity.”
“Our food choices say a great deal about who we are,” said Ruth Reichl P’11, editor-in-chief of “Gourmet” magazine, in a statement that summed up the weekend’s spirit.
Over the course of the weekend, attendees enjoyed lectures, discussion panels and meals together.
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, began the seminar with the keynote address in Memorial Chapel on Friday night.
Nestle insisted that eating well is as simple as the maxim, “eat less, move more,” but that the complex vectors of global agricultural politics and marketing targeted to children make the supermarket a daunting place for concerned shoppers in the twenty-first century.
When grocery shopping, she suggested that consumers “shop the perimeter and never set foot in the center aisle,” where highly processed foods abound.
Nestle’s speech also raised the specter of rising food prices, an issue which seemed to haunt the seminar for the rest of the weekend.
Of particular concern were issues of agriculture—discussing the best method of land cultivation and our awareness of it.
David Fischhoff P’08, Chief of Staff for the technology division of multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto, explained that biotechnology is primarily concerned with increasing productivity and protecting yield potential.
Jimmy Daukas of the American Farmland Trust and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro talked about their work in trying to get a farm bill passed that reflected the heterogeneity of farmers’ experiences and needs across the country.
Daukas handed out a bumper sticker with the inscription, “No farms, no food.” Both he and DeLauro insisted that agricultural politics should be of concern to everyone who eats, especially in a time of questionable spinach and bad meat in public schools.
Faith Middleton, host of NPR’s “The Food Schmooze,” interviewed three student farmers from Long Lane, Tressa Eaton ’09, Jordan Schmidt ’08 and Ellie Wiener ’09. The three students also organized a farmers’ market featuring a dozen venders in Beckham Hall earlier on Friday.
“Probably most people [at the seminar] were pretty aware of the importance of buying local, but I don’t think there’s any reason not to say it again,” Eaton said.
She said she was pleased with the discussion of food in an academic setting.
“I think it’s great,” Eaton said. “There really only should be more of it…food is a really good lens to look at all sorts of things.”
Darra Goldstein, founding editor of Gastronomica and Professor of Russian at Williams College, shared the sentiment.
“You can enter any discipline through food, and it will fill out the canonical knowledge,” Goldstein said.
Goldstein presented a reading of images of food that roused in the viewer both desire and disgust and asked how “food can be used to society’s advantage when it disturbs us” and our very inability to digest it calls into question our notions of other naturalized concepts such as race and gender.
Krishnendu Ray, Assistant Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, talked about Indian restaurants in New York City and their reception by cosmopolitan critics and Bengali expats alike, searching for voyeuristic authenticity and a lost sense of home, respectively.
“Food is a commodity,” he said. “Ethnic restaurants sell culture through commodity, but culture can’t be totally commodified, so authenticity is the shadow of commodification.”
Eric Asimov ’79, wine critic for “The New York Times” and blogger of “The Pour,” who admitted to a little pouring of his own during his years at the University, offered a different perspective on the matter of authenticity.
He suggested that it is valuable to understand the standards of viniculture and its rich history. Asimov also avowed the importance of restoring wine to its place at the dinner table so that the two perceived extremes of wine drinkers— affected connoisseurs and those who feel inadequate trying to expound on the heady hints of huckleberry and leather in a wine—can both enjoy sharing a refreshing glass.
Reichl, editor-in-chief of “Gourmet” magazine, brought up the fluidity of all that had been discussed over the weekend, by charting her career from “dumpster-diving” in Berkeley, Calif. in the 1970s, to the zenith of epicurean critique at The New York Times, to her tenure at Gourmet magazine and into caring deeply about the sustainability of fish consumption today.
“Eating patterns change, not just taste, as our ideas behind the meaning of food change,” she said.
Professor of Government John Finn, who was trained at the Culinary Institute of America, ended the conference on a similar note.
“Choice through food is constitutive of human culture,” Finn said.
He explained that some people are privileged enough to get to choose what they eat, and others have choices made for them. It is the work of those who study food to understand how these relations can be changed.
In many ways, teaching was at the heart of the weekend’s seminar. Twin questions emerged: What is it important that we teach about food now? And, complimentarily, what can food teach us?
Reichl offered an answer.
“Everything. There’s nothing you can’t teach through food,” she said.
Other speakers during the weekend included Associate Dean of Continuing Studies Karen Anderson, Professor of Anthropology Gina Athena Ulysse, and Barbara Haber P’85, who shared her scholarly work on the cultural significance of food deprivation in WWII prison camps.
According to organizer Linda Secord, Director of Alumni Programs and University Lectures, the annual seminar, named for endower James Shasha ’50, is meant to foster “life-long learning…an open community for people to come together over issues of human concern.” Shasha unfortunately couldn’t attend the weekend, but a friend, Bill Wasch ’52, called this “the most successful seminar” yet.
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