I am the 2024 Joyce Lindower Wolitzer ’76 and Steven Wolitzer Seminar speaker and will be at Cornell for events connected with it. My Wolitzer talk, “Food Politics 2024: An Agenda for Action” is at 4:45 p.m. in 700 Clark Hall, followed by a book signing. No registration necessary, just come!
Yes, food is worth serious study.
Yesterday, the New York Times Magazine carried this advertisement:
It’s from the University of California’s new Global Food Initiative: “Helping the world feed itself sufficiently and nutritionally—that’s the power of public.”
I’m proud to be a graduate of UC Berkeley, a public university that provided me with an education—from undergraduate through doctoral—that was, at the time, at a cost low enough so I could take advantage of it.
If Food Studies had existed when I was a student there, I would have enrolled in it immediately. Instead, I had to wait until we could invent it at NYU in 1996.
But how wonderful that the UC system is using the Global Food Initiative to advertise the power of a public education.
And how wonderful that food education is respectable enough to be advertised in the New York Times.