Upcoming Colloquia, Fall 2009

Speakers:

• Ben Cohen
• Mary Frank Fox

Ben Cohen

(STS, UVA)
Thursday, November 12; 3:30-5:00 PM (Thornton Hall Rodman Room)
"The Proper Use of Nature: Fake Food and Real Adulteration in the Industrial Age"
Abstract: What is natural, what is artificial, and who cares? What role does scientific analysis play in determining the answers? And how are those questions addressed in the midst of changing industrial agricultural practices? The questions speak to current issues about genetic modification, organic food, and the place of chemical contaminants in the food chain. They were first brought to the fore, however, through debates about food adulteration and safety in the early industrial age of the nineteenth century. In that forum, new food-making techniques challenged cultural concepts of “nature” and “natural.” This talk will explore how critical responses to new foods and new agricultural practices were shaped by a deeper moral debate about the dominant key term “adulteration.” While chemists sought to introduce better means for defining and then detecting adulterants as early as the 1820s, it was the increasing disconnect between consumers and producers of food that gave credence to concerns about the merits of new industrial products and a changing agro-environmental system. In the face of new products, defining what was natural and what was artificial or adulterated took on widespread immediacy. At stake then, as today, were no less than the moral boundaries of proper human intervention in nature.

Mary Frank Fox

(School of Public Policy, Georgia Tech)
Friday, November 20; 3:30-5:00 PM Thornton Hall Rodman Room
(Topic TBA)

Past and Present Colloquium Schedules