Critical Studies in Food and Culture

Professor Carolyn de la Peña to speak on "Empty Pleasures"

September 29, 2010:

The University Library is pleased to sponsor an event featuring
Carolyn de la Peña
UC Davis Professor of American Studies
who will speak on the topic of her new book

Empty Pleasures
The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda

This event is open to the public and will be held in
the Peter J. Shields Library Lobby
UC Davis

Friday, October 15, 2010
6:00 p.m.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

Sugar substitutes have been a part of American life since saccharin
was introduced at the 1893 World's Fair. In Empty Pleasures, the
first history of artificial sweeteners in the United States, Carolyn
de la Peña blends popular culture with business and women's history,
examining the invention, production, marketing, regulation, and
consumption of sugar substitutes such as saccharin, Sucaryl,
NutraSweet, and Splenda. She describes how saccharin, an accidental
laboratory by-product, was transformed from a perceived adulterant
into a healthy ingredient. As food producers and pharmaceutical
companies worked together to create diet products, savvy women's
magazine writers and editors promoted artificially sweetened foods
as ideal, modern weight-loss aids, and early diet-plan entrepreneurs
built menus and fortunes around pleasurable dieting made possible by
artificial sweeteners.

NutraSweet, Splenda, and their predecessors have enjoyed enormous
success by promising that Americans, especially women, can "have
their cake and eat it too," but Empty Pleasures argues that these
"sweet cheats" have fostered troubling and unsustainable eating
habits and that the promises of artificial sweeteners are ultimately
too good to be true.

(book blurb from University of North Carolina Press)

Call for Anthology Submissions Tentative title: The Unbearable Fatness of Being: Enlarging Theories of Embodiment Publication Date: 2010-11-01 (in 26 days)
Date Submitted: 2010-07-21
Announcement H-NET ID: 177654

This edited collection seeks to publish recent scholarship that pushes at the boundaries of the existent scholarship on embodiment, from a Fat Studies perspective. As Fat Studies is an emerging field, there are copious amounts of terrain left to map out, and this collection will display the provocatively expansive ways that emergent Fat Studies scholars conceptualize the fat body and the cultural work the fat body does in various times, places, and societies. The purpose of this work includes pushing back at the “obesity epidemic” rhetorics in ways that are at once connected to affiliated work in fields like disability studies, queer studies, gender studies (to name a few), and yet uniquely their own. In conclusion, this edited collection will offer crucial new pathways for the generative field of Fat Studies, as well as offer an exciting look at the developing scholars in this field. Perhaps one might say that Fat Studies seeks to integrate within cultural studies and the academy in general a critical body of work on fatness, layering our current understandings of the material body along with metaphoric and/or immaterial ways that fatness saturates our (post) modern world.




Topics may include but are not limited to:

• representations of fat people in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts
• cross-cultural or global constructions of fat bodies
• cultural, historical, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies
• portrayals of fat individuals and groups in news, media, magazines
• fatness as a social, political, personal, and/or performed identity
• phenomenology of fat movement and be-ing in a variety of physical (and physiological) contexts
• fat as queering sex, beauty, gender, and other embodied performances
• negotiating fat within locations, space, and time
• representing weighted embodiments in such creative or abstract forms as, for example, visual art, poetry, personal narratives, and literature
• fat acceptance, activism, and/or pride movements and tactics
• approaches to fat and body image in philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology
• fat children in literature, media, and/or pedagogy
• fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, gender, nationality, and/or sexuality
• functions of fatphobia or fat oppression in economic and political systems



Submissions are due November 1, 2010. We welcome traditional and non-traditional formats, including research articles, photographs, poetry, reports of performance art, and others. Articles and papers should range between 15 and 20 double-spaced pages. Please send submissions, along with a brief biographical sketch, directly to jmccross@gwmail.gwu.edu and/or lesleigh.owen@gmail.com.
Contacts and editors: Julia McCrossin, jmccross@gwmail.gwu.edu;


Lesleigh Owen, Ph.D., lesleigh.owen@gmail.com

Call for Papers: FOOD IN ZONES OF CONFLICT, 32nd ICAF Conference 19-21 August 2011, The Hague, The Netherlands Location: Netherlands
Call for Papers Date: 2010-11-15
Date Submitted: 2010-09-01
Announcement H-NET ID: 178539

Call for Papers

‘FOOD IN ZONES OF CONFLICT’

32nd ICAF Conference, 19-21 August 2011, The Hague (Netherlands)

The International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF) and the Modern East Asia Research Centre (MEARC) at Leiden University invite proposals for papers exploring the theme of food, diet and food problems in places suffering conflicts in any geographic area of the world, regarding both the present day and the past. Possible topics might include (but should not be limited to) food security in conflict affected areas, food aid and special nutritional needs of people in refugee camps, long-term consequences of warfare on food and diet, food as a weapon of choice in war, as well as geographic, ethnic and religious factors involved in access to food in times of conflict.

We aim for this event to be truly cross-disciplinary and hope that the theme will attract social, cultural, biological and nutritional anthropologists, as well as archaeologists, historians, agriculturalists, sociologists, dieticians, geographers, representatives of aid agencies and others.

The conference will be hosted by Leiden University College The Hague (www.lucthehague.nl), and will be organised jointly by ICAF and MEARC. See the websites of ICAF (www.icafood.eu) and MEARC (www.mearc.eu) for more information about these organisations.


DETAILS
Location: Leiden University College The Hague (Netherlands)


- The conference will open on Friday, August 19 and sessions will continue until noon on Sunday, August 21.

- No registration fee for the conference will be required for paper presenters.

- The conference is open to the public, but please register in advance by sending an e-mail to info@mearc.eu with ‘Registration: Food in Zones of Conflict" in the subject line.

- Organizers will strive to provide meals and accommodation for paper presenters. However, depending on the funding, speakers might be asked for a contribution towards accommodation.

- The language of the conference will be English.


SUBMISSIONS OF PROPOSALS
- Deadline: November 15, 2010

- Submit your abstract of 200-300 words in an email (no attachments) to info@mearc.eu

- Put ‘Abstract: Food in Zones of Conflict’ in the subject line

- Include a brief biographical statement (max. 150 words).


We will notify you by December 15, 2010 if your proposal was accepted


Esther Truijen
Modern East Asia Research Centre
Leiden University
Email: info@mearc.eu

"Race and the Food System” Call for Papers Deadline: 2011-01-10
Date Submitted: 2010-09-07
Announcement H-NET ID: 178717

Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts
Volume 4, Number 4 (Summer 2011)
"Race and the Food System”
Papers must be received by January 10, 2011 to be considered for publication in this issue.
Please send manuscript submissions to the editor: shortlidge.2@osu.edu See Style Guidelines (www.raceethnicity.org/styleguide.html) to prepare your document in accordance with the style guidelines of Race/Ethnicity.
Submission of artwork for the cover that relates to the theme of the issue is welcome. See website at http://www.raceethnicity.org/coverart.html for submission guidelines.

Call for Papers:
The U.S. and international food system,¬ from the ground to the grocer,¬ rests on a racial construct that has historically had, and continues to have, severe adverse impacts on producers, consumer, and workers of color. Structural racism shapes the development of the food system in the new century, not unlike it has in the past, and demands new, creative, and strategic thinking and action in response. Some of the questions we would like to address in this issue include:
• How does race intersect with the production, processing, and provision of food in the domestic and international food system?
• How does structural racism in the food system impact communities, particularly communities of color?
• How does structural racism in the industrial food system rest on and continue to impact low-wage food system workers, most of whom are people of color?
• As the industrial food system continues to transform food production, what can be done to assure structural equality for food producers of color?
• What creative, new responses are needed in the 21st century to organize a racially just food system that equitably serves workers and communities?
Sample topics could include but are not limited to the following:
• Black land control/food production/black farms in the 21st century, the black cooperative movement
• Black-led urban food production movement;
• Latino farm/food production;
• Hmong farmers/food production;
• The worker/race construct of the meatpacking and poultry processing industry;
• An overall racial analysis of the food production, processing, distribution sector which would focus on the industrialization process, race, and low-wage labor;
• A racial analysis of US international food policy: benefits primarily to white farmers, food costs, “foreign aid,” and the impact on farmers in other nations;
• Dumping impacts on farmers of color in other nations, particularly in Africa;
• The racial structure of the restaurant industry;
• The racial structure of poultry production (contractors, catchers, plants);
• The racial structure of field and fruit cropping;
• The emerging racial/immigrant labor structure of the dairy industry;
• The sustainable agriculture movement and worker/racial justice;
• Community-based worker of color organizing in the food sector;
• Union organizing among workers of color in the industry;
• Building a race-based, worker movement in the food sector, the Food Chain Workers Alliance;
• The racial construct of forced migration, climate change impact on food production and distribution
We welcome the viewpoints of activists, advocates, researchers, and other practitioners working in the field

Leslie Shortlidge
The Kirwan institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
433 Mendenhall Lab
125 South oval
Columbus Ohio 43210
Email: shortlidge.2@osu.edu
Visit the website at http://www.raceeethnicity.org