Institute to host spring speaker series on food policy and food politics
The St. Olaf College Institute for Freedom and Community will host a wide range of speakers on campus this spring to discuss the policy and politics of food, from award-winning chefs and restaurateurs Sean Sherman and Ann Kim to bestselling author Amanda Little.
The events are free and open to the public, and most will also be streamed and available for on-demand viewing online.
“The future of food is obviously an important issue, and the policy debates surrounding it have been gaining attention. Our goal this spring is to provide the community with a wide range of perspectives from national experts, and help our students continue to develop the skills to talk about policy and issues in a meaningful way.”
Institute for Freedom and Community Director Chris Chapp
St. Olaf Professor of Political Science Chris Chapp, the Morrison Family Director of the Institute for Freedom and Community, notes that the spring speaker series was developed in coordination with faculty members in departments across campus. In addition to public presentations, each of the speakers will visit St. Olaf classes and present students with the opportunity to ask questions and engage with their work on a deeper level.
“The future of food is obviously an important issue, and the policy debates surrounding it have been gaining attention,” Chapp says. “Our goal this spring is to provide the community with a wide range of perspectives from national experts, and help our students continue to develop the skills to talk about policy and issues in a meaningful way.”
The spring series will kick off on March 5 with a presentation by Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef often known as “The Sioux Chef,” on “The (R)evolution of Indigenous Foodways.” His talk will begin at 4:30 p.m. and will be streamed online. Registration to attend this event in person has already reached maximum capacity, but the stream will be open to all.
Sherman is the founder of Owamni, a Minneapolis restaurant showcasing modern Indigenous foods that won a 2022 James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. He also launched the North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS) and the Indigenous Food Lab, a professional Indigenous kitchen and training center that aims to establish a new food system supporting tribally operated kitchens. Last year Sherman made Time magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People and won the prestigious Julia Child Award. In his presentation he will share his journey of discovering, reviving, and reimagining Native cuisine.
The spring speaker series will continue on March 19 with a presentation by Amanda Little on “What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.” Her talk will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Viking Theater.
Little is a columnist for Bloomberg and a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of the bestselling book The Fate of Food and has written about energy, technology, and the environment for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. In her talk at St. Olaf, Little will discuss the race to secure the global food supply and how we’ll feed humanity sustainably in the coming decades. She will weave together stories from the world’s most creative and controversial innovators on the front lines of food science, agriculture, and climate change.
On April 4 the Institute will host a conversation with Baylen Linnekin titled “Still Biting the Hands that Feed Us.” The event will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Viking Theater.
Linnekin is an attorney, author, and scholar. He serves on the board of the nonprofit Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund and also served as a founding board member of the Academy of Food Law & Policy. His talk at St. Olaf will focus on navigating the legal system as a food lawyer and his view that fewer, smarter laws would make our food system more sustainable.
The speaker series continues April 9 with a talk by Sarah McKune titled “Animal Source Foods: Global Perspectives on the Ideal Diet.” The event will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Viking Theater.
McKune is a research associate professor at the University of Florida focused on global health, nutrition, and food security. For the past 20 years she has worked with global health development programs, largely in the West African Sahel, but also in Nepal, Haiti, Uganda, and Ethiopia. In her talk at St. Olaf, she will discuss her criticism of The EAT–Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health Report. The commission brought together 37 world-leading scientists from across the globe to examine what constitutes a healthy diet from a sustainable food system, and which actions can support and speed up food system transformation.
On April 18 Heather Sharkey will present a talk titled “A Guide to Modern Cooking: Tracing the History of Sudanese Women through an Arabic Home Economics Textbook.” The presentation will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Viking Theater and will be streamed and archived online.
Sharkey is a professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches Middle Eastern and North African history, and where she received the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. Her conversation at St. Olaf will focus on the cultural significance of food in Middle Eastern groups and her research on how foodways illuminate the history of Sudanese women.
The speaker series continues on May 2 with an event featuring Ann Kim and Jennifer Lin LeMesurier on “Asian American Foodways: Culture, Identity, and Rhetoric.” Their presentation will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Viking Theater and will be streamed and archived online.
Kim is the owner of Pizzeria Lola, Hello Pizza, Young Joni, and Kim’s, four restaurants in Minneapolis that have been lauded both locally and nationally. In 2019 Kim became the first woman and person of color from Minneapolis to receive the prestigious James Beard Award for “Best Chef Midwest,” which celebrated her vision at Young Joni. In 2022 Kim was featured on Netflix’s Chef’s Table: Pizza, and her work has been widely featured in outlets including The New York Times, Vogue, Martha Stewart Living, Forbes, Food & Wine, the Wall Street Journal, Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” CBS Saturday’s “The Dish,” and National Public Radio’s “The Splendid Table.”
LeMesurier is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Colgate University, where her current research focuses on how rhetoric surrounding food, eating, and cuisine influences Asian and Asian American identity and agency. Her monograph, Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption, offers a heuristic for understanding how rhetorical arguments around race are deeply interconnected with how we talk about food and consumption. LeMesurier has shared her expertise in media outlets including The Academic Minute and This American Life.
At St. Olaf, Kim and LeMesurier will have a dialogue around the cultural ties to food in Asian and Asian American identities, as well as the rhetoric surrounding those conversations.
The spring speaker series concludes on May 6 with a talk by Alex Ketchum titled “Serving Up the Ingredients for the Revolution: The 50+ Years of Lesbian and Queer Labour Behind American Feminist, Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses.” The event will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Viking Theater and will be streamed and archived online.
Ketchum is an assistant professor at McGill University’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, and she is the director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab. Her work integrates food, environmental, technological, queer, and gender history. Ketchum’s book Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. She is also the founder and organizer of a number of projects on technology, feminism, and food history scholarship. At St. Olaf she will be speaking about the integrational relationship between food, environmental, technological, queer, and gender history.
Established at St. Olaf in 2014, the Institute for Freedom and Community encourages free inquiry and meaningful debate of important political and social issues among students, faculty, and the general public. The Institute sponsors a range of programming opportunities, in addition to the lecture series, to further cultivate civil discourse within the context of the liberal arts.