2015 - Many Tables Fayre: Cuisine in Culture & Community

Elizabeth Moore and Rachael Moore are sisters and natives of Nashville, where they work as holistic health coaches. In 2014, they were certified by The Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and they now co-own and run MooreNutritious, a business that helps clients make, among other things, smarter food choices that positively affect physical and mental wellbeing. The sisters regard food knowledge as a basic right and advocate for local practices that enable healthier lifestyles.

Jeremy Barlow graduated from the Culinary Institute of America with honors, receiving the Francis L. Roth award of excellence for academic and extracurricular performance. In Nashville, Jeremy has served as owner and operator of Tayst Restaurant and Wine Bar and Sloco. Both ventures represent Jeremy’s dedication to sustainability—an emphasis on local food served in a restaurant operating with environmentally responsible practices. In 2012, Jeremy released his first book, Chefs Can Save the World, a call to action for everyone who dines, and those who cook for them, to use their collective power to change the food system and ultimately solve the most pressing crises of our time. Jeremy has won numerous awards connected to his environmentally friendly food practices, and he won an episode of The Food Network’s Chopped. He regularly speaks about the topic of food system restoration.

Michael Krondl is a New York-based writer, food historian and artist. He is the author of Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice, The Donut: History, Recipes and Lore from Boston to Berlin and other selections. He is associate editor on the recently released Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. His photo-based art installations have been exhibited internationally, and his public art work may be seen in New York City, Vancouver and Vail, CO. Krondl teaches at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and The New School.

Alice Julier is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Food Studies at Chatham University. She writes about material life, social movements, domestic life, labor, consumption, and inequality in food systems, including: “Mapping Men onto the Menu” in Food and Foodways; “Family and Domesticity” in A Cultural History of Food: The Modern Age; “The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pay All” in Food and Culture: A Reader; and “Hiding Race and Class in the Discourse of Commercial Food” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies. Her book is entitled Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality.

Marcie Cohen Ferris is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Southern Studies concentration. Ferris’s research and teaching interests include southern history and culture—particularly the foodways and material culture of the American South, the history of the Jewish South, and American Jewish identity and culture. From 2006–2008, Ferris served as president of the board of directors of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Ferris’s Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (UNC Press, 2005) was nominated for a 2006 James Beard Foundation Award. In Ferris’s current book, The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region (UNC Press, 2014), the contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty in southern history resonate in the region’s food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

For the full history of the featured speakers of the Belmont University Humanities Symposium, click here.

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