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i did want to mention a couple of new titles, gluten-free, vegan-comfort food. and bridget's diet book. wild and food cook book. you see a bit of the swath we are cutting in the cooking world

. sorry? [inaudible] >> romance fiction. still in paper back. it's a great pleasure for me to introduce clark work which is the master of ceremonies for these events and thank you for coming. >> thank you all. one of the reasons we wanted to gather to be the and after 5:00 is because you -- we wanted you to have all the sunlight that you can get. i was at a book party on the upper east side, a book that marian burros had written from "the new york times". let's walk a little bit and we were on 96th, in new york or something.

before we knew it we had gotten all the way to washington square and convinced me to help her food up the nutrition department. 20 years later there are food studies all over the country and the program here is thriving. it's extraordinary that we are now helping to educate already incredibly smart people. the difference between some of the people who graduate from cooking school and someone who graduates from the food studies at nyu is vast. the headline is food studies 20 years in, what we are trying to do is get a perspective of what's been happening, what's going on and in a lot of cases what the impact what we have been learning about has been or might be or hasn't been. okay, as you know, we aring with filmed not just for archives but

and available sometimes 100 or 150,000 times a year, archives are looked at, reviewed, researched, utilized for book research, classes at other schools all over the country but we are pleased to be broadcast on c-span sometime in april. you 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 and i will name them one by one so you know who they are. first mitchell davis. applaud for mitchell. executive direct o of just food. [applause]

he's the author of very smart books, he writes vanity fair and claim to fame in this house is he is the author of now 10-year-old book the united states of arugula david camp. [applause] next we have someone doing the political work in washington, d.c. and she will tell us more about that. claire benjamin distribution matina and a gentleman who is professor and chair at nyu department of studies, let's get this right, nutrition and food studies together again where they belong dr. ray.

mitchell was in our first graduating class, our first class, a ph.d in the food study. he will graduate next thursday. [laughter] >> no. among the really interesting and valuable and fun and smart things mitchell does is he took the food expo to milan. so he dranked a lot of expresso and we will think about starbucks coming to italy. give us a moment about what it's like to be the american food guy in milan at a world expo.

sure. at first i was someone sitting in the table with a bunch of interesting small people from the food world. there wasn't a food world then. people working with food, thinking about what a food studies program could be. the following year applied as a ph.d candidate and the thing that was so exciting about that at the time was, you know, i was that food geek who would be competing on television with junior chef show but it wasn't something that a middle-class jewish kid could do with his family held high. i don't regret being a chef, but the idea that there would be academic program that would look

a food more akin to what i personally integrated the idea of food in my life. it was a cultural phenomena, important topics in politics and you can study and do something with that information. it's so funny to think with a radical idea then but you know more than everybody it was a radical idea. it's radical in academia except that you today can study food in history, you can stood food legitimate, all the places touched on food in some way but can't declare a food person. it also happened to be tied with this moment that created the garden of food we live in was planted back then.

i've seen this incredible transition from food being really a particular interest in food being rich of a certain age to to a cultural phenomena. i can't go to the university campus without the food group wanting to talk to you and meet you. and the more i traveled around, we traveled two years to digest everything so we can make accurate representation in milan about what was going on here, the prevalence of enthusiasm for food culture that's overwhelming to the point that's weird. the fact that i can't get it away from it is bizarre. i do hope all of that will recede a little bit and will calm down and will really -- the food piece will meld into a

background of what it is it means to live a good life the way i got to experience it living abroad in italy. the expo project allowed me and the team that we were working with to really try to figure out both what the world thinks about food in america because we created the american civilian at the world fair, so the first time in 156 years that the world theme was ever food, it's always industry or technology or sustainable cities or clean power, all these sorts of things and honestly no one adheres to those themes. tical ains -- the italians was what the country submitted and they wanted every pavilion to address the topic and to represent food culture.

learning both sides of that were important to the success we had. we had 6 million visitors in the course of six months and instead of try to go cohere and say this is america's food culture, we celebrated the diversity that we have, 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, giant companies, old-american regional recipe in one instance or fusion from food trucks in los angeles and everything in between. i don't know that anybody of the 6 million people left having any clear idea like this is what american cuisine is.

the idea that's represented in the food, the value of openness, all part of ideal are what we communicated and the media we got showed that a million times over. in fact, there was an article that painted the style of the american pavillion against the russian pavillion and they sort of placed our ideology, sort of authoriratarian and libertarian. that is so unique in the world and that's really what we presented, 1983 wrote a book attitude towards food and that's what we did. >> my goodness.

[applause] >> so i grew up in southern california and the tangerines were on the back tree and all of that happened, i was excited that tang could be mixed with a glass of water when we can find water in southern california and innovations made it possible to my mother to make food that came in a plastic bag so that she would not have any contact with it because basically that was a bad idea. i ended up doing something called the oakville grocery where i got the find the finest foods in the world and develop for others mostly in the reflective eye of others that i sensed embarrassing and tid use. in that period of time i come to know the difference between

discovering something that has a long history and something as 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 i am eating. when i learned about social justice it was from césar chávez and migrant farm workers in the central valley of california and i knew from an early age that people got eater making food easy and inexpensive for me. i was astounded and offended by the whole thing. in the meantime, many movements developed. our next speaker is somebody who helps run an organization that looks at this at a practical level. the last time i was at one of your conferences which is coming up again 800 or a thousand people in the upper west side. we are talking in practical terms of what they were doing.

it wasn't a political movement. it was activity and alls and discussion. please help me jasmín nielsen. >> i'm thinking that those shouldn't be parallel lines. we had farms disappearing and we had people in the city who were hungry and they cast around for a while, the very first conference the very first year and what they eventually hit on as the first thing they did with csa, at the point food founded, there was a focus and a whole lot of others in the city.

from the very beginning there was a focus on making sure that that was accessible to everyone regardless of income, so you know csa involves payment funds but we encourage revolving loans, pay as you go for certain people and lobbied to make sure you could use snap benefits or food benefits. so we do that in a variety of ways, we support urban farmers and community gardeners and growing for their communities. out of that, they said, now they are growing. we teach people how to teach their neighbors how to grow and out of that, they said, now we are growing enough food that we want to formally sell it and we want to start our own farmer's markets so they told us we had to learn and learned with them along side with them and now we have 27-community run markets around the city. we also do community food

education, train the model where we train people in communities on how to cook with karabi and kind of cook in a seasonal and local manner and farm to pantry program where we have the new york state department contract and we contract with farmers up state to grow foods particularly from pantries. the pantry clients get to go up and visit the farms, the farmers come down. so it's a symbiotic relationship. so we don't say, here is what you should do to improve food situation in your community, we say, what do you see as the problem and what do you see as the solution and how can we support you in that. >> that's wonderful. [applause] >> right?

and i say that because i live part of the time in sonoma county where the farm community is very connected and there's a lo of discussion and effort and that sounds like the kind of activity that would go on in any community that carries about us anywhere. too difficult and too practical and expensive you've been doing it for 20 years. tell us when is the next conference? >> this coming sunday march 113th, food, education and policy. >> get it right. >> i always get that wrong and i put postcards in the back that you can go to justfoodconference.org. i encourage you, a great chance to network and understand the breath and equity within the food system.

you will see that the highlighted panels and keynotes are looking at racial and economic equity. >> if you ever read about the south beach wine and food festival, this is the opposite. [laughter] >> god bless. everybody should do what they want to do, right? mitch, am i right? >> yes. >> look away from the camera. 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 hand out as kind of curriculum for working with me on any of my projects. >> kind of. >> you gave me the big discount so that was good. please welcome david kamp one more time. ten years ago you published the united states of arugala.

it got obama elected twice. tell us how it came to be that book and the short story. >> my narrative ebbing oas a bit of mitchell's which is that i felt like mitchell did that i was obsessed with food and not sustenance for the under 40's that may sound absurd, rom aib and iceberg were not just new but mind blowing, this is the best thing ever and no one had written a comprehensive cultural history of how this happened and who are the people that made

this people happened. authors are insufferable narcissists. i won't fog everyone else's time. i am just going to do bullet points of amazing way that it's only gotten bigger in the last two years. the recipe page guy in "the new

york times" to 2011 to 2015 op-ed page writer. and then moves to california. the obamas who were not in office when my book was published bring pham to bring nutritional adviser. you have a president and the first lady not sidelining food but center of policy. 10-year decline of soda. i never thought that in my lifetime we would see the needle move where soda sales would decline and mcdonalds would have a management shake-up because it has declined in the quarter.

the last thing i'm going to mention just because it sets claire so nicely, one of the last people i interviewed with arugula was chef tom, he said, i don't know if i'm doing the right thing, i feel like i'm addicted to the deal like a lot of the other celebrity chefs. am i a sleaze, what's wrong with me? the flip side is he embrace it had celebrity and franchising and the branding but the flip side is he starting an organization called food policy action because he wanted to have the stake in food policies, same thing the obamas have been doing too which leads nicely to our

next person claire. >> thank you, david. sometimes i think i am in control and sometimes not. >> i seized the wheel. >> there you go. we are going to pass some 3 by 5 cards. if you have fes for the panel. i will clean it up and ask for you. write your question and and we will pass it to the front so you have a chance to have you ever your thoughts reflected. they're right here, thank you, martha. our next speaker is somebody who does it every day. thank you david for the segue but a lot of us talk about these things in terms of public opinion, the op-ed page, in terms of programs in city schools culture expositions or

possibly slightly nonfiction writing. somebody has to do something about the policy and a lot of us feel that our influence is the only thing that matters and a lot of us feel that their influence is the only thing that matters, what is the role of politics? never mind. it's too upsetting. [laughter] >> claire benjamin is executive director. welcome, claire. the brief tutorial, what is your organization and is tom any help at all, does he lick envelopes? >> a little bit of context as well.

before coming over to food policy action in 2013i spent years working for very good policy leaders. i worked for senator and peter from vermont and i worked for shelley who is really unique. she came to congress as organ an tic dorganic and we are going to be meaningful to consumers and we wrote the local job act which was the first of its act, comprehensive legislation and all of those things but not too quickly, not too much too fast,

we made good strides in the last farm bill but what we found over and over again despite enormous changes, members of congress really lack the information that their voters care about those issues. when we approach them about things like, reducing barrier for meet production they really only heard from opposition, agriculture lobbyist and they didn't understand that these were huge shift that is were happening in states across the country, around at the same time shelley and i started talking about this idea about why were we losing big fights, why were we losing big on the farm bill and child nutrition authorization when things were happening across the country and politicians were only hearing really from the opposition, people benefiting from the

status quo and one of the reasons is that despite big changes, there's nobody holding congress accountable. nobody is paying attention. while it really matters to voters, there was no one connecting the dots so similar to legal conservation voters or even the nra, we started putting together a score card so they can see how their elected officials are voting on issues that we really see as a value statement. so it's everything from legislation that would reduce hunger and we scored all of those. it's been shared more widely and we are not at the end of this by any means but we are starting to see to see real change.

to answer your tongue-in-cheek question, tom is incredibly helpful. [laughter] >> he does not lick envelopes but he came to this space as an advocate for hunger. he had worked a long time raising money for a lot of really good organizations in new york city to reduce hunger in america and new york city and what he saw a lot of things that we were seeing despite this good work, it's very important, we weren't making real change in washington. the -- he understands how all the pieces are connected and incredibly substantive on the food-range policy issue. >> that's really good news. right? okay. whole foods is going to try a program where they are selling less than perfect produce for a

lower price, something we call a natural food grocery or farmers market, right? a new program. that sounds a good idea similar to what the consumer wants or general public wants and it's wonderful to hear all of this. now we have a socialist, the boss, who is going to tell us what he sees from all of this. what are we looking at? [laughter] >> it's a small question. [laughter] >> first let me say we started with the role -- my role in this department, most importantly the the department which is a little unusual which reveals how we

look at things including marian's work which is absolutely crucial. one of the department which is nutrition and studies, public health just got moved to a new school, school of health, that's the institutional at nyu. what's interesting is this, we do want to pay attention to nutritional science and we -- often what we see with increasing skepticism developing is sometimes skepticism without limits, skepticism without reason can end you up in a place where, for instance, you're spending a ton of money spending zero calorie water. water has always been zero

calories. it's almost the pathology of too much doubt and skepticism and conspiracy where you will end up like the climate denies if you have too much. we want a department in which they are informed about the science but within reasonable limits understanding how science happens, that science happens with all kinds of revisions, but we know a few things well. we know some things marginally and some things we don't know anything about at all. think about modern medicine, think about -- some have used the metaphor is like the doughnut. at the heard -- heart of it is

is the placebo affect, the reason they are double bind is because we don't know how placebos work. what we do know is the doughnut. what we know is we expand outwards, in a sense we want to be in a department that is -- has -- understanding the science, understands the limits of the science, understands the politics of the signs but also learns from the social sciences and the humanity. okay, in fact, that is the instigation behind the department in a sense where nutritionists had a pretty good sense of what is good for people but people didn't seem to be following them. so maybe we don't understand people, so how do we understand people, we have to understand behavior and how do we

understand behavior, we also have to understand motivations, okay, which goes back to a theological question, good has to be good to eat. in some ways the problem is paying too much attention to nutrition and nutritionism. maybe it's us the problem of the food system and the way we pay attention or ignore things. our mission is to work on the science, understand the science but also understand the limits of the science and then look at what we can learn from the social sciences and the humanities and so that's the kind of the big picture sense of it. you want me to stop here? >> i want you to stop for a moment. this is academic program of liberal arts and sciences. this is about being properly educated. to me everything you said makes complete sense and what is

shocking is that that's not what people always thought. >> it's a bifurcated culture we live in. we don't always talk to each other or we are not always nice to each other when we talk to each other but we are building a culture specially amongst the students and which is a sense to take culture seriously to take the science seriously. >> what's interesting is that some years ago and i was involved with the american institute i was asked the half-day institution and it was -- the museum of natural history and what they -- what we did is they gathered everybody together, scientists and people who make diramist, those people are really fun and at the beginning, i didn't know what

the heck they were talking about. i was there to move conversation and ask questions and at the beginning they had stated that anthropology is here and culture development is us and we are over here and studied that. at tend of the day they decided it had to be studied together because we probably killed the bird at the very least. that's really what you're talking about. talking about the last 20 years, how much of a movement have you seen as a what we would call the food movement which is really not academics. the academics have responded right in kind or as appropriate but what do you see of what we call the food movement? >> i don't think academics can take credit, they're usually 20 years behind. that's the way it should be

because it's in fact, a conservative institution, an institution that conserves knowledge. in other ways it has to be behind. nothing wrong with it. what's fascinating and partly what the other commentators have said specially coming from the james beard foundation, my most recent book the ethnic restauranter it tends to this question that food is good and important and we should pay attention to it but we should pay attention to questions of livelihoods, what i see as liveliness and livelylihoods and

in some ways that is the two parts of this movement. i think some degree of context. sometimes obsession to good food can lead to unjust food and you can also reverse that question good thing don't want to live miserably and justice is important and the lessons we learn is precisely that. some degree of conflict. my students are invested in food the way they are invested in their music and i don't exactly understand that.

>> can i say something? >> it's self-defining and context making. it's who i am listening to it, it's why i am bing-watching girls. go ahead, mitchell. >> come on, right? >> to that point -- >> hold on, mitchell, marvin is going to go down the center of the aisle and he's going to collect any of those 3 by 5 cards with questions. i see he has some already. don't be shy, marvin, that's a great shirt. >> just to pull a couple of things together from the panelists, i think when i said that we are in the moment right now that it's almost a moment to seize is partly because of the very idea that we are at this time good food and just food and

gastronomically and let's say a hundred years ago, you ate food you grew and went to restaurant for something else. a moment when just food, ethically produced food, delicious equals good food that's why we are in a powerful moment. >> i'm going to ask david this question, corby wrote he had a conversation about dallas waters about the fact that farm to table has been overdone and kind of over. i wrote a polite letter that was actually printed the next month saying stop it, we spent 40 years someone to get attention that food should come from farms. david, how important are words?

>> words are really important to someone who makes a living as a writer. [laughter] >> well, you're talking about -- a lot of people. when rem was banned in the early 80's, i'm aging myself by using this reference but there were certain band of indy people that thought this was ours and suddenly the indy people and government make-up and long trench coats sold out. i think the word hype gets thrown in around a negative way. the food seemed to have become so hyped. it really hasn't. can i talk about -- >> go ahead. >> the restaurant critic of the new york city in the 70's. bless you.

>> she lived in a building at the very space that she complained because she had 625-dollar control, anyway. but she's a great journalist and when mark wrote the fair-well column, she wrote a letter which is basically saying a legitimate point and making more americans think about food and food policy and consciousness but she concludes, letter has been taken seriously in all aspects, every since people gathered with corruption, treatment of workers, poverty and the rest f awareness is more spread now it

is simply due to mass media. simply due to mass media, mass media equals awareness. meaning this greater amount of mass media is a wonderful thing in advancing the argument, hype is not a bad thing. hype for stupid things like the black burger in japanese burger king is stupid. >> it's a double-edged sword. i want to ask jasmín how would the movement both provide living wage and make food-system changes and contributions, actually these are good practical questions? >> i wanted to pick up on our last -- are we really changing the food system, right? probably a lot of people in this room eat what they consider an

ethical way, probably most of the people in this room get to be here at 5:00 p.m. i'm getting paid to sit at this table to be totally honest. to really achieve what we are seeking we have to open up the movement and not just by virtue of being here are an elite. that's going to be about feeding some control. i think we are going to have to engage in a meaningful way and give some power over to the people that are most impacted and allow them to define the problem and support them in finding solutions and i think that out of that, we will see the food movement -- the food system overall start to change in bigger way that is will create job opportunities than just jobs. >> you can applaud. let's applaud. come on. claire, doing the right thing

about food be monetized for the regular folk, i guess that's the big question, as you look at the political world and as you look at particular policies, is it considered that this will create more jobs or job that is are better for people to live better lives? >> i think there's a couple of ways to look at that question. currently seven out of ten worst paying jobs are related to the food system. there's a real problem and as the food movement engage in the justice issues that jasmín is talking about today. we need to be part of the fight for 15 and get rid of the subprime minimum wage for restaurant workers, we need to engage in bigger food fight that is impact people, mostly impacted by the harms of the food system. first of all, all of that. the justice issues that -- fair wages for work but then i think there's a broader question of

people in academic studying the work system and what the future of what that looks like and just from a personal perspective when i started working on food issues in washington 15 years ago, there wasn't really like food issues in washington. something like 1500agribusiness lobbyist which is almost the size of defense lobbyist in the country. there are a lot of people working to keep the status quo just like the way it is. in the last 15 years as the country has started to emerge and the food system issues are more important, that is being slowly reflected in jobs in washington as well. so while we don't have the numbers that, you know, our counterparts do in agribusiness there are tremendous organizations like the environmental working group and people who spend 9:00 to 5:00 working for better food policy and i've only seen that growth and stride over the last

couple of years and as we look at the next we will see fights grow more and more. >> how do you think people can be motivate today view everyday food choices as political or power choices? i'm going to ask that as another question? a lot started 15 to 20 years ago where it was the hot thing to be a chef and get on a tv show and open a small restaurant and go out of business, classical. how important is a political education to a culinary education or other jobs, efforts in the food system. i dare you. >> we hear from chefs that are trying to do the right thing, treating their employees more equitably, using bertin agreed

ients which has a cost on food and then the food credittic comes and knows nothing about sustainability and doesn't ask questions about the practice of the restaurant and give them a star without considering the value of ratio of quantities served and price. and there's no education broadly about the values added to those experiences that could be incorporated to everything about food. someone i know well had a meal recently with someone who was the food editor of one of the largest papers in the word who said we don't want to put food issues on our food pages, we don't want to touch that. it should be a place to celebrating, how do you celebrate that and not take these things into account. i think it's irresponsible to separate those two.