Good afternoon. Im marvin taylor, the director of the library. It is a pleasure for me to welcome you here to our next critical topic in foods. Food studies 20 years. Is the Movement Really changing food . Im delighted that you all joined us here. We have one of the largest collections of cooks in the country. We have over 60,000 at this point. The collection has largely been built on donations and i would like to thank meryl evans who is here who gave up some of her collection. We continue to build that collection. People always ask how the collection is accessible. We have about half of the books cataloged. You can check there. We also have archival materials. You can find it in our website. And important papers there. Groups from the 70s and 80s. We welcome people, it at the affiliated with nyu to make an appointment. It is here to be a resource for everybody interested in food. Wanted to mention a couple of titles that have come in. Who would come up with the vegan, glutenfree the comfort food . Im not making that up. Feasting, a field a wideo wild food. Swath of the cook book world. [applause] one of the reasons we wanted to gather tonight and particularly after 5 00 is wanted you to have all the sunshine you could get. It is astounding that we would have a day like this to been celebrating the 20th anniversary of food studies as an Academic Program. I was at a book party on the Upper East Side and there is a book she had written for the New York Times and we started walking, we knew each other a little bit, i said lets walk a little bit. We were on 96 come up before we had gotten all the way here to Washington Square and she convinced me to help her food up the Nutrition Department and 20 years later, there who study there were Food Studies Programs all over the country. The program here is thriving. It is extraordinary that we are now helping to educate already incredibly smart people. The difference between some who graduate from a Cooking School and the Food Studies Program is vast. Were going to talk about the first in a series of conversations. Three of them this year. The headline is food studies 20 years and. We tend to get a perspective on what is happening. Where we are and what is going on. And in a lot of cases, what the impact of what a lot of us have been discussing in learning about has been or might be or hasnt been. As you know, we are being shown not just for archives accessible to everyone, whats this get edited, and such is available when hundred 50 thousand times here, these archives are looked at, reviewed, research, utilized for book research, classes, were pleased to be broadcast on cspan sometime in april. If you would like to see the back of your head late at night, this is the place to be. We have a collection of very smart people. I will just them one by one see you know who they are. I will ask them to tell about their work and their thoughts. First, Mitchell Davis come executive vice president. Applause for mitchell please. [applause] then nielsen, executive director of just foods. [applause] and then an author of a number of very amusing and smart books, he writes for vanity fair and his claim to fame in this house is he is the author of the now 10yearold book, United States of arugula. [applause] next we have some of whose actually doing the political work in washington and she will tell us more about that, executive director of food policy action, claire benjamin. [applause] and the current chair of the department, professor of nyu department of nutrition and food studies. Nutrition and food studies together again where they belong. Dr. Krishnendu ray. [applause] some of this as we have our conversations is a little bit about how i spent my summer vacation. Mitchell was in our first graduating class, first class and is a phd from this study. It took him a little longer than some. I just graduated in the first class. [laughter] among the many interesting and fun and smart things that mitchell does, he took the food expo for American Food to milan for six months. He drank a lot of espresso. We are going to ask him what he thinks about starbucks coming to italy. First, give us the helicopter view of food studies since he started in this program and give us a moment or two to be the American Food guide at milan. Sure. I was at the first meeting that marion told you to convene about starting this department. I was someone sitting around a table with a bunch of smart people in the food world. There wasnt really a food world back then. Just people working with food. Thinking about what a program could be was amazing. I thought i have to sign up. And started the following year and applied as a phd candidate. The thing that was so exciting about that at the time was i was the food geek would be competing on television with a junior chefs show and i was always interested in food but not something that a middleclass jewish kid could do with this his head held high. I dont regret not being a chef. The idea that there would be an Academic Program that would look at food which was more akin to how i personally integrate the idea of food into my life which is that it is a cultural phenomenon, their experts and artists and important topics related to food in a place where you could perhaps study that and do something with that information and cultivate that information was exciting to me. It is so funny to think that it was a radical idea but as you know, it was an incredibly radical idea. For a lot of people, the radical idea and academia more than anywhere else, except that today you can study food and history, food legitimately in sociology, anthropology, all these places have touched on food but you could not declare yourself a food studies person. This program had a tremendous amount to do with that. That was also time for this moment that began the current garden foodstuff we live in. That was planted back then. The timing of all that happened. I have seen this incredible transition from food being a particular interest in following of folly of the rich and the rich of a certain age to being just a cultural phenomenon. I can go to University Campus without the food Group Running to talk to him each year and the more i travel around and for the expo project we travel around for two years try to digest everything happening in food so we could make an accurate representation in the long milan. Their prevalence of enthusiasm for food culture was overwhelming. To the point that is weird. The fact that i cant get away from food is bizarre. I appreciate it. I do hope one day for another panel, all of that will receive recede a little bit and calm down and will meld into the background of what it means to live a good life the way i got to experience it. The expo project allowed the team we were working with to try to figure out both what the world thinks about food because we created the american cuisine at the world fair. The first time in 156 years that the welfare had really seen food. Industry are technology or sustainable cities. Honestly known adheres to those being anyway and people do what they want to do. The italians this year, it was italy wanted the countries to focus on food, the only right to be doing anything because of International Treaties was the thematic statement that the country submitted and they wanted every pavilion to address the topic of how we will feed the future and represent food culture. I will be done quickly. We traveled around the country trying to figure out what on earth we could present and were up against the idea of what does everyone expect to see and trying to negotiate that and learning about size of that was important to the success we ultimately have to we were the most popular pavilion at the expo. We had 6. 5 million visitors in the course of six months. What we did was and try to make it American Food or American Food culture, we actually celebrated the diversity that we had that we sometimes take for granted and represented the voices from across the whole spectrum of food in america whether they were grassroots political activists or old american regional recipes. Or fusion mashup of food trucks. I dont know that anybody of the 6 Million People left having any clear idea of this is what american cuisine is. I dont that it think that is a question that should even be asked. The idea of the attitude that is represented in the food, the openness, all the things that are part of the american ideal are what we communicated in our exit surveys and immediately got shows that a million times over. There was an article that pitted the style of the american presentation against the Russian Pavilion which was next to us. The architecture, it placed our ideologies as authoritarian versus democratic. That is what our food is. It is open, we take for granted that we are not just open to change, but we expect it. We dont expect todays meal to be the same as tomorrows. That is so unique. That is something we presented. In an essay, we presented that attitude more than a cuisine. My goodness. [applause] i grew up in Southern California and the tangerines were off the back trees and the roses were fragrant and the apricots were ripe and all of that happened. I was excited that tang could be mixed with a glass of water. In all these new innovations made it possible for my mother to make food that came in a plastic bag so that she would not have contact with it. As i moved to northern california, ended up in a tea shop in the debate of the grocery where i got to find the finest foods in the world and develop for others mostly in the reflected eye of others, a sense of connoisseurship that have since found incredibly embarrassing and tedious. In that period of time ive come to know the difference of the discovered something with a long history in the noting something at the best of something as a very odd cultural statement. In the meantime, it turns out that there are other reasons to care about what im eating. When i learned about social justice, it was from cesar chavez and migrant farmworkers in the Central Valley of california. I knew from an early age that people got hurt making food easy and inexpensive for me. I was somewhat astounded and mesmerized and a little bit offended by the whole thing. In the meantime, many movements developed. Our next speaker is somebody who helps to run an organization that looks at this at a very practical level. The last time i was at one of your conferences which is coming up again, 8001000 people in the middle of a rainy saturday afternoon were talking in really practical terms about what they were doing. It was not a political movement. It was activity and action and discussion. Please help me welcome jasmine nielsen, executive director of just food. We do not mean only food, we mean food with a sense of social justice. Tell us about what that means and what you are doing. Just food was started 20 years ago by a group of people that were looking at the Movement TowardsSustainable Agriculture and the antihunger Movement Thinking that there should not be parallel lines. We had farms disappearing and we have people in the city were hungry. They convened the first conference the first year and what they eventually hit on was the first thing they did which was csa. Community supported agriculture. At the point that just food was founded, there was one csa in new york city. There are now 130 in our network. From the beginning, there was a focus on making sure that was accessible to everyone. Regardless of income. Csa often involves payment upfront and loans and payasyougo for certain people. We also successfully lobbied to make sure you could use snap benefits or food stamps over stands. Over time it really evolved to become Community Given solutions to bringing fresh fruit and neighborhoods that did not have that. We do that in a variety of ways. We support urban farmers and Community Gardeners and growing for the communities. Out of that they said, that we are growing. We did the train the trainer model. We teach people how to grow. Out of that they said we are growing enough food that we want to be able to formally sell it. We want to start our own farmers markets and the told us we had to learn and we went out in large and learned alongside them. We now have about 27 Community Run farmers markets around the city. We also do Community Food education. A train the trainer model where we train people in the communities of cope with special ingredients. How to cook in a seasonal and local manner. We also have a farm to Pantry Program where we contract with farmers up state to grow food specifically for pantries. This is not leftover food. This is food that has grown for them. They get to go and grow. Farmers start to growth and that the pantry clients like. It is a symbiotic relationship. Over time we have evolved into a Capacity Building organization. We dont say heres what you should do to improve the food situation, we say what you see as the problem and what you see as the solution . How can we support you . That is wonderful. [applause] i say that because in northern california, where the Farm Community is very connected. That sounds like the activity that would go on in any community that cares about their food anywhere. The fact it is going on in new york city is really started. Something that i thought without having, but you been doing it for 20 years. Tell us when the next conference is. This coming sunday on march, 13. I put postcards at the back that you can go to. Justfoodconference. Org. It is about 800 people from all aspects of the food maven. Movement. A great chance to network and understand the particulars of the food system. If you have ever read about or thought about the south beach wine and food festival, this is the opposite. God bless. Everybody should do what they want to do. Mitchell. Am i right . The next gentleman writes about a lot of things. He tells wonderful stories. He reveals delightful or painful truths, and he wrote a book that i now handout as kind of curriculum for working with me on any of my projects. Kind of . Kind of. You gave me a big discount so that was good. Please welcome david kamp. You started writing this book some time ago. 10 years ago you published United States of arugula. The title of your book got barack obama elected twice. Tell us how that came to be in the short story. My narrative echoes a bit of mitchells, which is that i felt like mitchell, i was obsessed with food and i saw it not just sustenance, but as cultural history, American History and i was looking for this book to read, a book to explain how we made such great strides. For the under 40s in the room, this may sound absurd, but theres a time for us over 40 when things like Holding Coffee wholegrain coffee and balsamic vinegar and guccis and salad greens other than remain iceberg were mind blowing. No one had written a comprehensive history on how this happened. Some of the people you have heard of like james beard and julia child. In the early 2000s, i started working on this book and it came out in 2006. Authors as im sure you all know our are insufferable narcissists. When i finished the book, when naturally things of the author because i am publishing this book and we reach some sort of historical endpoint. History cannot proceed from here. I wont take everyone elses time. I will give you some bullet points. Some of the amazing ways it has only gotten bigger in the last two years. Solid example but a telling one, mark bittman was a cookbook author migrated from the New York Times over the course of 2006 to the present from being the recipe page from 20112015 to being the oped page writer. Suddenly food is on the oped. Then he did a meal kit start up in california. The obamas who were not in office when the book was published brings the National Nutrition policy advisor. You have a president and first lady not sidelining food, but making it an essential part of their policy. 10 year sustained decline in soda sales. We have to give some credit to nyu who has been beating the drums about this. I never thought seriously in my lifetime that we would see soda sales to climb. The American People were aware that there is better tasting food. The last thing i will mention because it sets up claire nicely, one of the last people i interviewed was the chef tom teleglobe. He was feeling ambivalence about expanding his restaurants outside of new york city. He said i dont know if im doing the right thing. I feel like im addicted to the deal. What is wrong with me . Two funny things happen, he became a celebrity tv star. He embraced the celebrity and the franchising. The flipside of that is he started this Organization Called food policy action. He wanted this stake. And that leads nicely to the next person, claire. I guess it does. [applause] sometimes i think i am in control. I seized the wheel. Marvin, were going to pass out some three inch by five inch cards. If you have questions you want asked, i will clean it up for you and ask the question. Write your question on the car and pass it up front. They are right here. Thank you. Our next speaker is somebody who does it every day. Thank you david for the segue. A lot of us talk about these things in terms of Public Opinion and the oped page. In terms of cultural expositions and entertainment and in terms of Popula