NOV. 4, 2010

Food Summit encourages researchers to collaborate across disciplines

BY ERIN DIGITALE

More than 350 members of the campus community attended the inaugural Stanford Food Summit Nov. 3 for a day of cross-disciplinary intellectual ferment about food-related problems.

Researchers from all seven Stanford schools gave presentations describing the top food questions in their fields and suggesting ways the university's affiliates could collaborate to address them. Two research-development workshops gave all participants the opportunity to brainstorm how to turn their ideas into concrete research proposals.

"The entire university is uniquely poised to drive this effort," said Christopher Gardner, PhD, the associate research professor of medicine who organized the summit. He initiated the summit to bring together researchers who think about food through many lenses, examining questions from how Stanford's food services can serve sustainable meals, to how to use food on a national scale for better education and social justice, to how to relieve hunger halfway around the globe.

In his presentation, Gardner, who works at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, described the frustrations that led him to rethink his approach to his own nutrition research. For one thing, he realized that "knowledge of the 'optimal diet' does not generally lead individuals to make healthy behavioral changes." His "big food question" is how to motivate people to adopt healthy behaviors — and the answer, he suspects, lies in using motivators other than health knowledge, such as people's passion for environmental sustainability, food ethics, food economics, food education and food policy.

Among other presentations, Debra Satz, PhD, who is senior associate dean for the humanities and arts and the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of ethics in society, spoke about food ethics.

"In many cases our food choices as individuals and in aggregate matter for other people," Satz said. Others subsidize rising health costs if we choose poor diets; the food industry contributes to climate change; and the food consumption patterns of average American households are likely not to be sustainable for the whole world, she said. "This all forces us to think differently about food choices. The ethics of food consumption is complex, and competing values are at stake — autonomy, equity and well-being."

Among the big questions in food ethics, Satz said, one of great importance for the next decade is "not what we eat, but what so many don't eat — what responsibility the developed world has in the face of hunger around the globe."

Rob Reich, PhD, associate professor of political science, in his presentation on food politics, described a moment of awakening to the big questions of food when author Michael Pollan inscribed Reich's copy of Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, with the phrase, "Vote with your fork."

"My reaction, as a political scientist, was, 'What happened to voting with your vote, too?'" Reich said. Food issues are a concern that spans the political spectrum, he added, not just a "Marin County, wine-swilling-elite issue."

Reich called on conference participants to establish a food justice movement that would address "how we can change where, what and how food is produced, distributed and consumed." The movement should target the state to influence public policy and large multinational corporations that procure much of our food.

"Food politics is not just an idea of personal responsibility and not just a matter of taste," he added.

Local chef Jesse Cool, owner of three restaurants including the Cool Café at the Cantor Arts Center on campus and a frequent collaborator on Stanford-related food projects such as the recent effort to bring organic food choices to Stanford Hospital patients, gave a presentation in which she urged researchers to "remember always that real people need to appreciate and savor real food."

Cool spoke from her experiences collaborating with Stanford's School of Education to help teachers-in-training figure out how they can use food and cooking in their classrooms.

"The medium of food makes learning easier," Cool said, giving examples of using recipes to teach math and weaving discussions of heirloom crops into history lessons. And food can impart larger lessons, she added: when tackling people's fear of cooking, "we should teach children and friends that failure is a part of life, and do it through food."

Finally, Cool said, amid the push to find academic solutions to the world's food problems, it's important to include the views of those with daily, hands-on experience with growing and preparing good food. "When forming your research teams, I hope you may consider including a farmer and a cook at each one of your think tables," she said.

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. For more information, please visit the Office of Communication & Public Affairs site at https://mednews.stanford.edu/.