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Today Show turns to Andrew Knowlton '97 for fall food trends

Jay Burns — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:10:17 +0000

Bon Appetit food editor Andrew Knowlton ’97, a philosophy major at Bates, appears on a Today show segment about hot food trends for the fall, mentioning “super versatile” Tuscan kale “for people who think they don’t like kale,” and pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika), a spice for almost anything. “On birthday cake it’s so-so, but it still works,” he says, to laughter. In a Bon Appetit story, he praises Portland, Maine, the “Foodiest Small Town in America,” citing the city’s fresh seafood, local beers, artisanal bakeries, and “the best breakfasts in the country.” In the Today segment, Knowlton appears at about the 4:15 mark. (View video.)

Stonyfield Farm chairman to speak at Bates screening of 'Food, Inc.'

Bates News — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:30:37 +0000

A Bates College screening of the food-industry exposé Food, Inc. will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the director of Bates Dining Services and with Gary Hirshberg P’13, head of organic yogurt producer Stonyfield Farm.

The screening begins at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, in Olin Arts Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. The film is 90 minutes long.

Hirshberg appears in the film, which scrutinizes the food we eat and how it is produced. He’ll be joined in the Bates event by college Dining Services Director Christine Schwartz. The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6476.

Produced and directed by Robert Kenner, Food, Inc. aims to reveal the inside story of American food, the corporations that often place greater value on profit than consumer health, and the regulatory agencies, like the USDA and FDA, that oversee the industry.

Called “an essential, indelible documentary” by Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, Food, Inc. features interviews with such respected experts as Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan. Food-industry figures striving to change the status quo, like Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin and Stonyfield’s Hirshberg, are featured describing their efforts to improve the quality of the food Americans consume.

Now chairman, president and “CE-Yo” of Stonyfield, Hirshberg came to the organization in 1983 as director of the Rural Education Center, the small organic farming school (with only seven cows) that spawned the yogurt operation. A renowned speaker on topics such as sustainability, organic agriculture and socially responsible business practices, Hirschberg is author of the 2008 book Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World (Hyperion).

The Londonderry, N.H.-based Stonyfield joined forces with Groupe Danone in 2001 to create Stonyfield Europe, of which Hirschberg was named managing director in 2005. Today, Stonyfield Farm makes an estimated $320 million in annual sales while always keeping its social and environmental missions square in its sights.

The Farmer's Father

Phyllis Graber Jensen — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:08:36 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Blind from birth, Steve Hoad, Bates College Class of 1972, was raised by a mother who “understood that children were children,” he says. “It was expected that I would do things children do.” His outdoors experiences as a child and a desire to conserve land solidified Hoad’s dream to one day live with his family on a farm.

Today, on Emma’s Family Farm in Windsor, Maine, Hoad and daughter Rose sell vegetables from a stand and include rare heirloom breeds among the chickens and turkeys they raise for customers’ holiday tables.

And to the Hoads, “good food” and “high prices” needn’t be synonymous. “We have a really basic philosophy that says everybody has a right to good food, and everybody, if they want, should know where their food comes from,” Steve explains. “That philosophy includes helping out wherever we can, keeping our prices low, and at the same time, protecting the earth that gives us the food that we need.”

Lecture explores psychology of food choices

Bates News — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:57:11 +0000

Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, presents his findings on the moral, psychological and social factors involved in food choices in a lecture at Bates at 4:15 p.m. Monday, Sept. 29, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road.

Titled “The Psychology of Food and Eating,” the talk is part of the Department of Psychology’s “Diversity and Domains of Life” lecture series, supported by the Mellon Innovation Fund at Bates. The talk is open to the public at no cost.

Rozin is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of Psychology at Penn. He has researched food attitudes and the function of pleasure from food in several cultures, including France, India, Japan and the U.S., where food and consequently obesity have become headline issues.

“I love food and that is why I work on it,” he said in a 1999 article in the Penn campus newspaper. Rozin, the Daily Pennsylvanian writer reported, “is seeking to discover ‘why Americans worry so much about food — instead of just the old-fashioned enjoyment of food.’ ”

One of Rozin’s goals is to shed light on these cultural differences and on the politics that influence scientific consensus about what is healthful.

“I want people to respect science as the best show in town for establishing truth, for establishing knowledge — but as one that is imperfect and takes a while to get everything right,” Rozin said in an article on the Mount Holyoke College Web site. “I don’t want people to think either that it’s worthless or that it’s perfect. And that’s very hard to do.”

Rozin is the former editor of the journal Appetite and is associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Penn. In 2007, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, which rewards psychologists for their contributions, both theoretical and empirical, to the basic research of psychology. That same year he received the French Food Spirit Award in the science category.

Rozin earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. He began as a member of the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, and in 1997 was named the Kahn Professor.

Supported by a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mellon Innovation Fund at Bates is dedicated to curricular innovation, adoption of new pedagogical tools and the further development of scholarship as part of a long-term career plan.

Rozin’s talk coincides with Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food, a dominant theme of the 2008-09 academic year. Including a Web site, events and other programming, Bates Contemplates Food is an initiative to raise consciousness about the consequences of our food choices and, in particular, about Bates’ own efforts to feed the campus in a healthy, sustainable way.

Anthropologist to discuss new cultural imperialism in China

Bates News — Mon, 05 Mar 2001 20:36:24 +0000

James L. Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and professor of anthropology at Harvard University, will discuss The New Cultural Imperialism: McDonald’s in China at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 14, in the Keck Classroom of Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

Watson is an editor of and contributor to Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, which features case studies of fast-food consumption in Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo. “At a time when academics regularly write impenetrably about abstruse irrelevancies, this book is engaging and arises from straightforward questions,” said The New York Times.

Currently at work on a book about worldwide food scares, including reactions to bioengineered food, Watson also teaches courses on Chinese society, transnational global culture and comparative food systems at Harvard University. He and his anthropology graduate students are investigating the impact of transnational food industries in East Asia, Russia and Europe.

Watson specializes in Chinese rural society with a focus on southern China. He learned to speak Cantonese in the Hong Kong New Territories during the late 1960s and has subsequently worked in many parts of post-revolution China. His research has focused on Chinese migration, agricultural development, family life and village organization, food systems and the emergence of a post-socialist culture in the People’s Republic of China.

A prolific scholar, Watson’s publications include Emigration and the Chinese Lineage, Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain, Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolution China and Death and Ritual in Chinese Society.