This Saturday, Feb. 23, students, faculty and community members met in Maxey Auditorium to participate in the fifth annual Global Studies Symposium. The topic of the day was food.

According to Professor of Religion and Ball Endowed Chair of Humanities Jonathan Walters, director of this year’s symposium, food came up repeatedly during the annual Global Studies Faculty Development Seminar, so it was chosen as a fruitful topic for the symposium.

Walters brought together a panel of experts to deliver lectures and engage in discussion.

There were three speakers on the panel. David Kessler, the former commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), delivered a lecture on the social, political and scientific bases of the rapidly growing trend of obesity in the United States. Peter Rosset followed with a lecture on La Via Campesina, a movement connecting the millions of small, family-run food producers of the world, outlining the challenges faced by small agriculture which still produces 70 percent of the world’s food.

Jon Rubin, the third panelist, discussed an art project that intervenes into public life. His piece, “Conflict Kitchen,” is a functioning food stand in Pittsburgh, Penn. that serves food from countries that the United States is in conflict with, literally wrapped in statements made by people in those countries.

Walters looked for a diverse group of speakers to make up the panel.

“We wanted to create some real clash, some real distinction of perspective … [The symposium] creates a forum to bring these disparate voices together,” he said.  

Each of the panelists has worked with food in extremely diverse capacities. Kessler delivered a dynamic speech covering food on the scale of the neurotransmitter dopamine, as well as in terms of our built environment. Corporations exert pressures for us to overeat via vending machines and the patterns of reward in our brains.

Rosset, on the other hand, spoke of food as the labor of the small-scale farmers around the world. He presented corporately produced food as an active force of death as it harms environments, drives traditional food production out of the market and is correlated with heart disease and cancer.

Lastly, Rubin engaged with food as his material rather than his topic. He focuses on the inherently social dimension of consuming food in a city.

“You’re the performer, and thus you’re constructing the institution itself,” Rubin said. He actively engages people just living their lives through food as art.

In addition to the three panelists, seniors Haley McLeod, Suzanne Jaszczult and William Newman-Wise; alumna Katherine Deumling ’96, chair of Slow Food USA; and Associate Professor of Politics Aaron Bobrow-Strain all offered responses to the panelists’ presentations.  

McLeod did research over the summer with Assistant Professor of Biology Leena Knight that related to Kessler’s work on how sugar, fat and salt affect patterns of the brain. She gave a response speech to Kessler’s presentation at the symposium.

McLeod was excited to add a student voice to the symposium.

“It will hopefully facilitate a discussion around food issues that might bring in some new ideas for Whitman students,” she said.

Global studies is not a course of study or a program. Walters describes it as an effort to spread this common theme––globality––throughout all disciplines of the college.

“Our idea is that global studies is something that is a meta-level kind of thing. It’s infusing the whole curriculum,” he said.

In addition to the symposium, the Global Studies Faculty Development Seminar has led to the creation of interdisciplinary courses such as “Violent Subjects” in Spring 2012, “Raw Geographies” and “Reading India,” which are being taught for the first time this year. The interdisciplinary approach exposes points of tension that might otherwise go unnoticed and demands that students grapple with the subject matter.

Walters believes that Whitman’s unique approach to interdisciplinarity is at the heart of the liberal arts approach to education, and anticipates continuing success.

“[Whitman is] ahead of the game in this. We’re actually helping shape … how this discussion [of globality] proceeds.”