Food Studies  News

When Anna Delapaz ’17 took Professor Rick Welsh’s Agroecology course as a first-year student in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, she saw a fresh new world of scholarly and professional possibilities crop up in front of her. A nutrition major from Dallas whose interest in food sprouted when she read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma as a high school student, Delapaz enjoyed learning about agricultural production and sustainable agriculture in the class—exploring everything from the science of soil quality and nutrient cycling to the socioeconomic and policy aspects of how food is grown and produced. “From a nutrition perspective, I had been studying how food affects the body, which I found really interesting. Then in the Agroecology class, I learned about agriculture and what goes into making food, especially how to grow food in a sustainable way. I really saw that what we put in our bodies affects not only us, but the whole world around us,” she says. “That idea opened my eyes and made me want to learn more about the social, economic, and political aspects of food.”

No surprise, then, that when Falk College launched its undergraduate major in food studies in fall 2014—the original such bachelor’s degree program in the United States—Delapaz was the first to sign on as an official major, complementing her major in nutrition. Since then, she has taken every food studies course she can, and looks forward to becoming a registered dietitian and delving further into her special areas of interest in sustainable agriculture, community gardens, and improving food access. She is also considering pursuing a master’s degree in food studies—another new opportunity that will be available at Falk starting this fall. “I think having a background in both nutrition and food studies is a great way to fully grasp the complexity of food,” she says.

According to Welsh, who is chair of the Department of Public Health, Food Studies, and Nutrition and director for the undergraduate program in food studies, Delapaz’s enthusiasm for all things food-related is representative of a national trend—one that helped inform the program’s development. “Food studies is one of the fastest growing majors in the country. Programs are popping up lots of places, as well as minors and concentrations, which we also offer. And we’re starting to see a degree in food studies as one of the qualifications for food-related job listings now,” says Welsh, the Falk Family Endowed Professor in Food Studies, whose research and teaching focus on social change and development with emphases on agri-food systems, science and technology studies, and environmental sociology. “One of the reasons this came about is because students let us know they were interested in taking courses in food. They were passionate about food and ‘starving’ for classes with food-related content. So the need became obvious.”

Food studies faculty member Evan Weissman G’12 points to the broad picture of food studies as a developing field of study and practice. “We are living in a moment in history when questions about the food system are at the forefront of public consciousness,” says Weissman, coordinator of the minor in food studies. “Large and complex problems are linked to the food system, everything from climate change to public health crises in the United States, to questions of immigration and labor. All are connected to the ways we produce, distribute, access, and consume food and manage food waste.”

As food-related issues have become matters of public concern, Weissman says, a similar evolution is occurring in institutions of higher education. “You have the academy responding to shifts, recognizing the emergence of social movements focused on food and new economic opportunities around food, and acknowledging the fact that, when looking at food, it’s not just a story of doom and gloom, as I like to tell my students,” says Weissman, who studies disparities in fresh or healthful food access in urban America and grassroots efforts to address those inequities. “It’s also an uplifting story of people thinking about a variety of strategies to strengthen and improve our food system so it is more tuned to questions of social, public, and environmental health.”

When it comes to food, the potential for positive change ranges from the personal to the grand—from individuals and families making slight adjustments in their consumption and purchasing practices, to broad changes in the ways large businesses operate and in governmental policy shifts that have the capacity to affect countless people. “It’s against this backdrop that we see food studies emerging,” Weissman says. “In higher education, there’s a long history of people doing food-related work. Here at Falk, for example, our sister program in nutrition is nearing its 100th anniversary. In the United States, we have a history of land-grant institutions doing agricultural research, and Syracuse University had an agriculture program at one point in time. Social scientists have long looked at food as an indicator of inequality or as a question of labor or economics, as an insight into gender, or as a cultural marker in anthropology. Given the shifts in the public and in higher education toward transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production and education, you have this groundswell leading to the growth of food studies.”

World of Food

The new Falk program is built on a social science foundation, specifically one with a political economic focus. “We take a holistic and multidimensional approach to understanding food as a process—as reflecting a host of relationships between people and institutions,” Weissman says. “We’re looking at questions of power and inequality. We’re looking at social transformations and the intersection of politics and economics as it shapes and is shaped by food.”

For example, Professor Anne Bellows, who is director of the food studies graduate degree program, focuses her scholarship and activism on the relationship between food-related issues and human rights, with a concentration on women’s access to adequate food and nutrition. She joined Falk College in 2013 from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, where she was chair of the Department of Gender and Nutrition. Her new book, Gender, Nutrition and the Human Right to Adequate Food: Toward an Inclusive Framework (Routledge, 2016), identifies conditions fueling food insecurity around the world and how those conditions disproportionally affect women, children, and rural food producers. “We’re interested in food studies as an explanatory vehicle for understanding social conditions more broadly—in learning how civil society interacts to create a democratic and just process of food governance,” Bellows says.

In her work, food studies faculty member Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern examines the interactions among food and racial justice, labor movements, and transnational environmental and agriculture policy as a framework for understanding how the food system operates and how it can be improved. In her Food Movements class, for example, students learn to think through the problems with the food system and explore methods for changing it, from the perspectives of social justice, the environment, and access to food. “Students also learn to be critical of solutions we have today and to think systematically about the food system and the structural ways to make changes, which challenges them to think beyond food as a consumer issue, seeing it as a bigger social issue,” says Minkoff-Zern, whose research has been informed by her work on farms and with agriculture and food organizations in Guatemala, New York State, and California. “In all our classes, we teach about the food system. For us, food is not just about what’s on your plate, but what’s growing in the ground. It’s about the water and the air and the workers—everything from the soil and how food gets to the market to how food gets prepared and who’s preparing it.”

The food studies program has its home in the Department of Public Health, Food Studies, and Nutrition in the new Falk Complex, allowing for important relationships with faculty in the college’s well-established partner programs. Among them are collaborations with public health professor David Larsen, a global health specialist researching malaria in southern Zambia; and with Jennifer Wilkins, the Daina E. Falk Endowed Professor of Practice in Nutrition. Her work focuses on nutrition in the food system, including the creation of MyPlate Northeast, a regional food guide that emphasizes a nutritious and seasonally varied diet.

Creating spaces and opportunities for interdisciplinary partnerships—both within Falk College and across campus—was an essential aspect of Dean Diane Lyden Murphy’s vision for the program. “When you’re building a program in food studies, you’re bringing together a mix of people to have a conversation about how to study and inquire about and make a difference through food: food as culture, food as critical, food as it relates to the social and political sciences, to geography and the STEM sciences, the humanities and the arts,” says Murphy ’67, G’76, G’78, G’83. “That deep interrogation across disciplines is where we wanted to go with this, and that’s what we’re excited about.”

Another distinguishing characteristic of the program is the curriculum’s culinary component. Three full-time teaching chefs—Mary Kiernan G’12, Bill Collins, and Chris Uyehara—and professional kitchen facilities serve as valuable instructional resources and provide opportunities for hands-on food preparation labs to enhance student learning. In the course Philosophy and Practice of Locavorism, for instance, Bellows partners with chef Uyehara to provide students with an understanding of the what, why, and how of eating locally produced food year-round. Another example is Weissman’s Farm to Fork class, in which he partners with chef Kiernan in exploring the culinary theory and practice of alternative food networks through study, field trips, and a cooking laboratory. “We are also building strong collaborations with the broader Syracuse community, where dynamic shifts are happening in terms of food as an economic development tool in Central New York, and where there are a lot of grassroots efforts to strengthen our food system and improve food access,” Weissman says.

Active Learning

Such experiential learning is a key element of the food studies curriculum, both in the classroom and beyond. “We use a wide variety of teaching and learning modalities,” Weissman says. “That creates an exciting program for our students and helps them acquire the knowledge and skills needed for success beyond Syracuse University.”

In Weissman’s Feeding the City course, which was recognized with a 2015 Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement and Scholarship, students work on semester-long, community-based projects to put their learning into action. Students partnered with the Syracuse-Onondaga Planning Agency to conduct a basic food system analysis, using an assets-based approach to thinking about Central New York, focusing not on deficits but on strengths that might be leveraged to bolster the food system and better attend to environmental, social, political economic, and public health concerns. “We’ve also partnered with Nojaim Brothers grocery store and the technology startup, Rosie—a web-based tool for food delivery—and helped the owner, Paul Nojaim, to think about marketing and outreach strategies and possibilities of using this technology to expand his customer base and increase access for individuals who otherwise would not have it,” Weissman says.

The Emergency Food Systems course Bellows teaches also creates opportunities for active learning. In January, students toured the Hendricks Chapel food pantry and considered ideas for class projects that would help the pantry better serve the SU students who periodically draw on its assistance. And in her Gender, Food, Rights course, Bellows arranged for graduate students to meet via Skype with the gender coordinator at FIAN International (FoodFirst Information and Action Network), a human rights organization with members from more than 50 countries that advocates for the right to adequate food and nutrition. “At FIAN, they are working to develop new indicators to monitor the impact of right-to-food approaches on national food and nutrition security,” says Bellows, a member of the organization’s board, who was exploring ways for students to contribute to that project.

Internships are another way students gain essential hands-on experience. Anna Delapaz, as well as being the first official food studies major, was the first to acquire an internship with My Lucky Tummy, a community organization that promotes awareness of the refugee population in Syracuse through sharing different ethnic dishes at pop-up food courts. “I volunteered with My Lucky Tummy in my sophomore year at an event held that February, and that led to an internship,” Delapaz says. “It was so much fun, cooking side by side with people from all around the world. There were three chefs there, all speaking different languages. It was such an interesting learning experience that I could never have gotten anywhere else.”

Students have also taken a proactive approach, creating BrainFeeders, the first academic food studies student organization in the country. The idea for the group originated with its co-presidents and founders, Lindsay De May ’16 and Imelda Rodriguez ’16, when they took the Human Right to Food and Nutrition course with Bellows in 2014. “We felt we needed a club that addressed food beyond health and nutrition. We wanted to look at food access and sustainability on campus,” De May says. “The inspiration came from that class, where we were learning about implementing a human rights framework into a food system and figuring out what our role is to make food more accessible. It felt very natural to want to create a student club after that.”

The group has accomplished a lot in a short time, from completing the process for becoming a recognized student organization and establishing its identity, to recruiting members from across campus and getting several projects underway. Last fall, they brought a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program to campus for the first time, partnering with a Central New York farm to bring shares of fresh seasonal produce to more than 40 members of the SU community. BrainFeeders students also organized a weekly charter bus service from campus to the CNY Regional Market, and are now working with the campus sustainability committee and Food Services to find ways to bring more sustainable, local, and organic food to campus, including the establishment of a café with such offerings in Schine Student Center. “We’ve had amazing experiences with the group and have learned a lot,” Rodriguez says. “It’s been one of the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve done at SU.”

In May, De May and Rodriguez will receive their bachelor’s degrees from Falk College as two of the four members of the first graduating class in food studies. It’s an important milestone for them and for the new program they’ve helped shape and define by their presence and contributions here. “We’ve grown very quickly, and it’s been an exciting time for us and for our students,” Weissman says. He points to upcoming additions as the program flourishes, including a partnership with Syracuse University Abroad to offer classes in Florence starting next fall, and the development of a certificate of advanced study in food studies. “We’re a brand new program and still growing,” he says, “but I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that very quickly Syracuse University is going to be recognized as the place to study food.”

New Center Strengthens Nutrition Offerings
A longtime dream came true in September for Falk College nutrition faculty and students with the official opening of the Nutrition Assessment, Consultation, and Education (ACE) Center within the Falk Complex. Made possible by a visionary gift from Falk College alumna Rhoda Dearman Morrisroe ’69, the new center is a hands-on learning laboratory designed to prepare students with traditional and emerging professional competencies critical to effective nutrition practice. “The Nutrition ACE Center simulates the types of professional settings where its graduates will work, while providing ongoing, unique learning opportunities that give students a competitive advantage,” says Dean Diane Lyden Murphy.

The center comprises two lecture rooms, one with a media-ready demonstration kitchen and one with a teaching station; two private consultation rooms; a physical assessment room featuring the Bod Pod body composition testing system; and a conference room with media screen. The counseling and physical assessment rooms are equipped with two teaching mannequins, a tube feeding placement simulator, wall-mounted height-measuring devices and electronic scales, pediatric measuring equipment with several multiethnic infant mannequins, electronic blood pressure monitors, a lactation education baby, and a variety of food models.

The center’s counseling rooms allow students to practice nutrition consultation skills, while the demonstration kitchen supports the new integrative nutrition curriculum, which uses food as medicine to support disease treatment. “We already have many things to be proud of in the SU nutrition programs,” says nutrition professor Kay Stearns Bruening G’80. “Our students have above average placement rates in the required dietetic internships they must complete to obtain their practice credentials. And the pass rate for SU nutrition grads on the national credentialing exam is well above the national average. This new facility makes it possible for us to embrace and incorporate new initiatives being pursued by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, particularly around nutrition-focused physical examination and emerging areas in integrative and functional nutrition.”

According to Bruening, the Nutrition ACE Center also enhances research opportunities for faculty and student research at Falk. “The potential is tremendous, and with our current group of nutrition faculty with complementary interests, and our growing graduate program, the new facility and equipment can be put to use right away,” she says. “It also strengthens our position for collaborative and interdisciplinary research with health researchers at nearby universities and in the community.”

Bruening also points to a national initiative concerning inter-professional education—learning experiences designed to be completed by students from several health care disciplines working together. “With our new facility, we are well-positioned to reach out to health professions education programs in our area to design such learning experiences,” she says. “We’re very excited about and grateful for the new center, and what it means for the future of our nutrition programs.”

Food Studies Figures

Food Hubs

• Since 2006-07, the number of regional food hubs—firms that aggregate local/regional food—throughout the United States has increased by 288 percent.*

Organic Sales

• Sale of organic products increased 72 percent from 2008 to 2014, from $3.2 billion to $5.5 billion, with growth occurring in every sector.*

Farm to School

• Between 2006 and 2012, there was a 430 percent increase in farm-to-school programs, with more than 4,000 school districts in the United States using locally sourced food in school meals.
• Farm to school programs now exist in more than four out of 10 school districts in the United States.*

Farmers’ Markets and CSA Programs

• In 2014, there were 8,268 farmers’ markets operating in the United States, up 180 percent since 2006.
• 64 percent of farmers’ markets reported increased customer traffic; 63 percent reported increases in their number of repeat customers and in their annual sales.
• According to 2012 data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 12,617 farms in the United States reported marketing products through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) arrangement.*

Gardening

• More than 42 million households in the United States (35 percent of all U.S. households) participated in food gardening in 2013, an increase of 17 percent in five years (source: garden.org).
• In 2008, there were eight million millennial food gardeners; in 2013, there were 13 million, an increase of 63 percent (source: garden.org).
• In Syracuse, the number of community gardens and urban farms has grown from three operating in 2007 to 23 in summer 2015 (source: syracusegrows.org). *

*Information provided by Evan Weissman. Source is the U.S. Department of Agriculture, except where otherwise indicated.

Food (and sport) for thought

Patience and prioritization-that’s what two food studies majors at the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics say it takes to succeed in both the classroom and Division I sports.

Eli Silvi Uattara ’16 came 4,800 miles from Voronezh in the Russian Federation to study and compete at Syracuse University. She played outside hitter on the volleyball team, which she captained the past two years. During her career, she was twice named First-Team All-ACC.

“Patience is probably the most useful quality for a student athlete, because there are always going to be difficult moments in sports and in academic and student life,” Uattara says. “It’s hard to manage everything, but who said it was going to be easy?”

That’s why you get your priorities straight, says Deirdre Fitzpatrick ’16, who rows port on the SU women’s crew and whose trip home to Cheshire, Connecticut, is only 200 miles. Her honors include 2015 First-Team All-ACC, Second-Team All-American, and Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association (CRCA) National Scholar Athlete.

“Being a student athlete has really taught me about organization and prioritization,” she says. “You need to balance school and athletics with sleep, cooking and eating, homework, and social life. All are equally important in order to be good at both sports and academics.”

Uattara says she’s always been interested in food, “not only its consumption but all aspects, from food chemistry and microbiology through the cooking process, quality, and distribution.” For Fitzpatrick, “I simply love food and think that everyone should be informed about the risks and benefits of certain foods and how to access good, healthy, sustainable food.”

Both say sports powers stronger academics. “Sports makes people be more dedicated to what they do, whether it is the sport or academics,” Uattara says. “Athletes cannot perform if they give less than 100 percent, and this benefits my school work as well.”

Fitzpatrick concurs. “I think the lesson you learn from sports is that you have to practice to be good at something. It’s the same for school. To do well, you can’t just go to class and take the test. You need to do the readings, understand the concepts, and apply the knowledge.”

Uattara wants to play professional volleyball after college. Fitzpatrick is applying to Teach for America, saying, “I think I will finish my rowing career here at ‘Cuse.”

Both have met a big challenge. Fitzpatrick figures practice takes 17 hours a week; she studies three hours nightly. Says Uattara, “There are lots of nights where I stayed up to finish one thing or another, then made it to practice the next day. Athletes are probably the busiest people in college.”

The outside hitter and port rower-and food studies majors-wouldn’t want it any other way.

Leveraging the study of food into a dream job: Co-founders of Good Food Jobs visit campus February 24

Motivated by a strong belief that food is the perfect outlet for fulfilling employment because of its potential impact on culture, economics, and the environment, Good Food Jobs.com co-founders Taylor Cocalis Suarez and Dorothy Williams-Neagle will present “A sustainable approach to finding a good food job” on February 24, 3:45 p.m., 104 Falk Complex. The presentation is free and open to the campus and local communities.

Since its founding in October 2010, Good Food Jobs has registered 35,000 users and posted over 8,000 jobs across all disciplines, for full- and part-time, volunteer, apprenticeship, and other out-of-the-box jobs. The site educates people about the multitude of ways one can embark on a food-related career that is satisfying, empowering, and beneficial to others.

Graduates of Cornell University, the co-founders’ common goal was to build community around a subject that they knew had power: the individual desire to find fulfillment through one’s day-to-day work. Through their in-depth knowledge of the food industry, they will offer Syracuse University students first-hand insights and insider tips on how to find sustainable roles in the food world. Both have presented widely on topics including conservation and environmentalism, farm living, food entrepreneurship, nurturing human connection through food, and reviving American food culture through sound economics.

Professor Bellows’ new book explores the human right to adequate food, nutrition

Professor of food studies, Anne Bellows, introduces the human right to adequate food and nutrition in her recently released publication, Gender, Nutrition and the Human Right to Adequate Food: Toward an Inclusive Framework. The book identifies structural disconnects fueling food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers: the separation of women’s rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health.

The book explores conditions arising from these disconnects: structural violence and discrimination frustrating the realization of women’s human rights, as well as their private and public contributions to food and nutrition security for all; many women’s experience of their and their children’s simultaneously independent and intertwined subjectivities during pregnancy and breastfeeding being poorly understood in human rights law and abused by poorly-regulated food and nutrition industry marketing practices; and the neoliberal economic system’s interference both with the autonomy and self-determination of women and their communities and with the strengthening of sustainable diets based on democratically governed local food systems. The book calls for a social movement-led reconceptualization of the right to adequate food toward incorporating gender, women’s rights, and nutrition, based on the food sovereignty framework.

Falk College Announces new Master of Science (MS) degree in Food Studies

Syracuse University’s Falk College is now offering a new Master of Science (MS) in Food Studies. This 36-credit hour Food Studies MS program provides students with a foundation in the political economy of food systems, including human rights, food governance, and food justice and health. Food Studies continues to emerge as one of the fastest-growing fields of study in North America. The MS in Food Studies complements Falk College’s existing bachelor and minor in Food Studies.

Students earning the MS in food studies are prepared for professional opportunities in local and national government work associated with food regulation and industry relations; non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement in advocacy and policy associated with the human right to adequate food, food sovereignty, food and nutrition security, and trade and food-oriented labor; economic and social development work at the community, national, and international scales; and food production and distribution companies, services, and vendors in established or start-up modes.

The Master of Science in Food Studies through Falk College provides students with a deep understanding of multi-scale, global-local constructions of human rights and civil society claims, trade and food aid, and related public policy as they together influence human health, nutrition, and the environment. The program purposefully introduces students to multiple discipline-oriented research methods and emphasizes analyses that consider social justice, race, ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. Falk College’s unique departmental intersection of Food Studies with long-standing professional programs in public health and nutrition offers students critical capacity to engage in food systems research.

Teaching and student research is enhanced by active faculty engagements in these fields. The graduate food studies program encourages these transdisciplinary associations across Syracuse University with African American studies, geography, sociology, history, public affairs, international studies, environmental studies, women and gender studies, law, planning and architecture, as well as with public health and nutrition.

Syracuse University’s Falk College Highlights Graduate Studies at November 6 Information Session

Faculty, staff, students available to talk about programs, coursework, student life

Syracuse University faculty, staff and current students will welcome potential graduate students interested in the Falk College’s graduate programs in child and family studies, public health, marriage and family therapy, nutrition science, social work and sport management during a special Fall Information Session for graduate studies on Friday, November 6. The presentation begins at 4:00 p.m. at Falk College, Room 200.

Detailed information will be provided on graduate programs in addiction studies, child and family studies (M.A., M.S., Ph.D.), food studies (M.S.), global health (M.S.), marriage and family therapy (M.A.), social work (M.S.W.) as well as the dual degree program (M.A./M.S.W.) in marriage and family therapy and social work, nutrition science (M.A., M.S.), and sport venue and event management (M.S.). Details on our Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) program in trauma-informed practice will be available along with information on other Falk College CAS programs in, dietetic internship, and global health.

Falk College names three faculty to endowed Falk Professorships

As part of their visionary and purposeful commitment to academics as a path to success, Syracuse University alumni David B. and Rhonda S. Falk established a series of endowed professorships in each of the seven academic disciplines of Falk College. Today Falk College announced the following three faculty have been named Falk Endowed Professors:

Alejandro Garcia, M.S.W., Ph.D., Jocelyn Falk Endowed Professor of Social Work
Jaipaul Roopnarine, Ph.D. ,Pearl Falk Endowed Professor of Child and Family Studies
Rick Welsh, Ph.D., Falk Family Endowed Professor in Food Studies.

“We are grateful to David and Rhonda Falk, and the Falk family, for their vision and commitment to create an endowed faculty professorship in every academic program in Falk College. Alejandro, Jaipaul and Rick are internationally recognized leaders in their respective fields and exemplary scholars and teachers. The Falk College and the Falk family are privileged to support their efforts,” notes Diane Lyden Murphy, dean, Falk College.

The Falk endowed professorships allow Falk College to support internationally recognized faculty to enhance the research, academic and experiential components of its programs to advance its mission rich in teaching, research, scholarship, practice and service.

Dr. Alejandro Garcia he has taught in the areas of gerontology, social policy, and human diversity for over 35 years in the School of Social Work where he served as director. He is the co-editor of three books, including Elderly Latinos: Issues and Solutions for the 21st Century (with Marta Sotomayor) (1993), HIV Affected and Vulnerable Youth: Prevention Issues and Approaches (1999) (with Susan Taylor-Brown), and La Familia: Traditions and Realities (1999) (with Marta Sotomayor). He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including being named a Social Work Pioneer by the National Association of Social Workers and being elected a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. This fall, he will receive the 2015 Association of Latino and Latina Social Work Educators’ Lifetime Achievement Award.

A professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies, Dr. Jaipaul Roopnarine’s  areas of research include father-child relationships, Caribbean families and childhood outcomes, early childhood education in international perspective, children’s play across cultures, and immigrant families and schooling in the United States. An adjunct faculty member in the School of Education, he is an adjunct professor of education and senior research scientist, Family Development Centre, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He was a Distinguished Visiting Nehru Professor at M S Baroda University, Gujarat, India. Among his many books is the recent publication, Fathers across Cultures: The Importance, Roles, and Diverse Practices of Dads, with two additional titles to be released in 2015. He is also the author of over 100 articles and book chapters on childhood development across cultures. He recently finished a three-year term as editor of the journal, Fathering.

Dr. Rick Welsh is a professor of food studies who serves as chair of the Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition.Under his leadership, Falk College created undergraduate and graduate programs in food studies. Prior roles have included professor of sociology at Clarkson University, policy analyst with the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture and the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program for the Southern Region. He also serves as editor-in-chief for the journal, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. His research and teaching focus on social change and development with emphases on agri-food systems, science and technology studies and environmental sociology. Welsh is co-editor of the volume, Food and the Mil-level Farm: Renewing an Agriculture of the Middle published by M.I.T. Press. He has received grant funding from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, among other organizations.

Meet Falk College's first food studies major

Once she took her first food studies course, she discovered there is so much to know about food. So when Falk College announced its newest undergraduate major in food studies, it was no surprise that Anna Delapaz ’17 signed on as the first official major in the program. A double major in nutrition, her career plans are focused on becoming a registered dietitian. She hopes to delve further into her interests in community gardens and improving food access. “I think having a background in both nutrition and food studies is a great way to fully grasp the complexity of food,” says Delapaz.

This semester, she is the first intern for My Lucky Tummy, a community organization that works to promote awareness of the refugee population in Syracuse through sharing different ethnic dishes at pop-up food courts. Earlier this year, she worked side-by-side with people from all over the world. “It was really amazing to see food’s ability to bring people together and share a passion and love for food through My Lucky Tummy. This has been a great way for me to connect to the Syracuse community and appreciate the diversity it has to offer.”

Her advice to students thinking about a major in food studies is simple: “Try it out! FST 102, Contemporary Food Issues, is a great introductory class. Talk to the professors. Everyone in the department is so eager to share their passion. There is such a range in classes, from understanding sustainable agriculture to learning about worker’s rights. I’ve never taken a Food Studies course that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy. Each class has something new and unique to offer,” she says. The course, Urban Food Systems, with Professor Evan Weissman, centered around a semester-long project that involved working with community members. “This was a great opportunity to step outside of the classroom and apply what we learned in class. I really appreciated Professor Weissman’s interest in getting students to see the Syracuse community. It was awesome being a part of a class that felt like so much more than just a class,” she says.

“The food studies courses are all the more thought-provoking and impactful because of the faculty. I’m almost done with the major but I joke with my advisor, Dr. Rick Welsh, that I’m going to take every course. I’m only partly joking”

Brainfeeders brings locally grown vegetables to campus

BrainFeeders, a student organization in Falk College’s Food Studies program, is working to establish long-lasting food access and justice programs throughout the SU/ESF campus. The group is partnering with Common Threads CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to have SU’s first-ever CSA drop off location on campus, which started in August. BrainFeeders has also partnered with the Student Association to provide free transportation from campus to the Regional Market on Saturdays in the fall. View schedule for Regional Market Shuttle. BrainFeeders’ faculty advisor is Professor Rick Welsh, who is department chair of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition.

The Daily Orange recently highlighted the BrainFeeders student organization. Click here to read the full article.

In the article, students mention FST 403–The Human Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition, which is a course in the food studies undergraduate core. This class introduces the international human rights legal framework into the food system, with relevance both in the national and international context. According to Professor Anne Bellows, director of the graduate program in Food Studies who teaches this course, “the point is to understand human rights as a(n additional) legal and practical strategy in addressing challenges and contradictions in the food system. The universality and interdependence aspects of human rights mean that we can and must insist on a democratic system that endows us with the political and civil rights to demand our economic, social and cultural rights, including the human right to adequate food and nutrition. Simplified, we have the legal right to engage with others and the state to imagine and work toward ever evolving and (hopefully) improving visions of what human rights, like the right to adequate food and nutrition, can be. This is one way of understanding that activist engagement is powerful.

Professor Bellows adds, “the transformative potential (e.g. through public interest civil society engagement) inside human rights has relevance beyond food studies majors. The interdependence and indivisibility of human rights (e.g., you cannot realize the right to adequate food and nutrition without human rights of free speech, assembly, health care, decent work, as well as women’s rights, children’s rights, disability rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, etc.) means that learning about human rights legal frameworks in the food system has relevance beyond food studies.

Syracuse Food Justice Symposium October 2-3

“Taking Back Our Health through Community Gardens and Urban Agriculture,” the first-ever Syracuse Food Justice Symposium, will focus on grassroots urban agriculture and food justice. Scheduled to take place October 2-3, it is organized by a broad coalition of grassroots organizations, not-for-profit agencies, community gardeners, interested stakeholders and Syracuse University partners, including the Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition in Falk College, the Department of African American Studies and the Humanities Center in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Canary Lab in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, the School of Education, and SUNY ESF’s Department of Landscape Architecture.

Sessions during the two-day conference will explore food justice, regional food systems frameworks, and engaging community youth in good food work, among many other topics. A dinner prepared by local chefs using regional and local farm products will be prepared on October 2, followed by the keynote address by Malik Yakini, founder and executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), which operates a seven-acre urban farm and is leading efforts to open a co-op grocery store in Detroit’s North End.

The Saturday, October 3 agenda includes a morning address by Carolin Mees, Ph.D., entitled, “The Built Environment and the Urban Garden.” Dr. Mees is an architect, writer and educator currently teaching the Designing for Resilient, Sustainable Systems class at Parsons The New School, School of Design Strategies.

The symposium is focused on jump starting efforts to create an Onondaga County Food Policy Council to coordinate long-term efforts at creating a just and sustainble food system.

In Central New York, and across the United States, people are working to create a cultural shift in how food production, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste are addressed. Growing support for community gardening and urban farming strengthen a regional food system to support food justice—that is, where all citizens can afford nutritious food throughout the year, and local communities benefit from all facets of the food system.

According to event organizers, community gardens and urban farms are a natural place to help consumers, producers, markets and decision makers find common ground to build more sustainable and locally beneficial food system opportunities. This event welcomes policy makers, planners, community gardeners, school administration and staff, elected officials, nutritionists and medical professionals, health departments, community organizations, philanthropists, educators, students and the general public to hear nationally renowned speakers, local and regional experts, community activists, and growers discuss how community gardens and urban agriculture can strengthen communities.

This event will take place at All Saints Church, 1342 Lancaster Ave, Syracuse, NY. It will be free for attendees, with a suggested donation of $20 to help offset costs for those who can afford it. Additional support for this symposium is provided by the National Institute of Food & Agriculture, USDA Award # 2014-68004-22166, and the U.S. Green Building Council. For more information visit the symposium website or contact Jessi Lyons at (315) 424-9485, x-233.