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About CGS
Events
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Friday, February 25, 2005 3:00pm
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Levis Faculty Center, Music Room
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Description:
Many critics of globalization present a nightmare scenario of a future food system dominated by fast food retailers, centralized food processing, and impoverished workers on factory farms, producing an unhealthy delocalized diet of tasteless "Frankenfoods." The alternative, we are told, is to relocalize agriculture, educate consumers to value "slow food," and build alternative market channels for whole, healthy, and ethically-certified produce. While I am sympathetic to the goals of this alternative food movement, I conclude that it can have only limited effect. In particular, it does not address the problems and needs of both farmers and consumers in poor and peripheral countries, a point I make using examples from my research in Belize. Paradoxically, globalization itself offers opportunities for the relocalization of agriculture, but only if we pay attention to the crucial role of processing and packaging in the world food system.
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Full Text of Paper (pdf)
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Speakers:
Richard Wilk, Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana University
Discussant: Zsuzsa Gille, Sociology, UIUC
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Biography:
Richard Wilk is professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University. He has done research with Mayan people in the rainforest of Belize, in West African markets, and in the wilds of suburban California. His teaching at Indiana University, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and New Mexico State University has been complemented by consulting work for development agencies, including over a year with USAID. He has published on topics as diverse as beauty pageants, household organization, power and decision-making, economic anthropology, and the effects of television on culture. Most of his recent work concerns the global environmental impact of mass consumer culture, gender and consumer culture, and the history of the global food system. He is now working on a book about globalization and localization of food and cuisine. His most recent book is The Anthropology of Media, co-edited with Kelly Askew (Blackwell). He is past president of the Society for Economic Anthropology, and held an ESRC fellowship in London in fall 2004.
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