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PRESENTERS
 

Keynote Speaker

Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, which she chaired from 1988–2003. She also is a professor of sociology at NYU and a visiting professor in the department of nutritional sciences at Cornell University. Her degrees include a PhD in molecular biology and an MPH in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley. She has held faculty positions in the department of biology at Brandeis University and at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, where she was associate dean for Human Biology Programs. From 1986–88, she was senior nutrition policy advisor in the department of health and human services and managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. She is currently a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

Professor Nestle is the author of the award-winning books Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. In 2004, she received the David P. Rall Award for Advocacy in Public Health from the American Public Health Association, and in 2005, she received the Health Quality Award from the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and the Bridging the Gap Award for Excellence in Science and Public Policy Writing from the Northern California Public Health Association. Her latest book, What to Eat, won the James Beard Foundation award for best reference book.
   
 

Facilitator

John E. Finn is a professor of government at Wesleyan University, where he teaches courses on constitutional theory and the rule of law. He also teaches courses on cuisine and popular culture. His recent works in the field of food studies include a review essay on Julia Child in Gastronomica, and “The Kitchen Voice as Confessional,” in Food, Culture, and Society. He is a graduate of Princeton University, Georgetown Law School, and the French Culinary Institute.
   
 

Presenters
Karen Anderson is associate dean of continuing studies and director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University, where she also has taught courses on Hinduism, creation mythology, anthropology, and history of religions. She earned her BA in philosophy from Hunter College and her PhD in history of religions from the University of Chicago. Her research focuses primarily on India, studying how Hindu and other cultures understand the physical body in relation to the cosmology of heaven and hell.
   
Eric Asimov ’79 is the chief wine critic of The New York Times, a position he assumed in June 2004 after having covered wine with The Times’s tasting panel and in his Tastings column for the Dining section. Mr. Asimov created the $25 and Under restaurant review section in 1992, which he wrote through 2004. He is a co-author of The New York Times Guide to Restaurants 2004, the fifth edition of the guide. He also has reviewed takeout food for The Times in his “To Go” column and has offered commentary on food and wine on WQXR since 1999. His writing previously appeared in Food and Wine, Details, and Martha Stewart Living. His first book, $25 and Under: A Guide to the Best Inexpensive Restaurants in New York, was published annually by HarperCollins from 1995–98. At The Times, he was editor of the Living section from 1991–94 and editor of “Styles of The Times” from 1994–95.
   
Jimmy Daukas has been with American Farmland Trust since 1997 handling communications, marketing, and project management responsibilities. In his position, Mr. Daukas oversees AFT’s campaign to transform U.S. agriculture policy, coordinating efforts throughout the organization including policy research and design, alliance building, legislation, and communications. Before joining AFT, he had been the director of marketing and later acting vice president of marketing and communications for Earth Force, a children’s environmental action organization. From 1988–1994, Mr. Daukas was vice president of marketing with Working Assets, a San Francisco-based company offering innovative, donation-linked services that raise money for nonprofit organizations.
   
Rosa DeLauro, Hon. ’07 was first elected to Congress from Connecticut’s Third District in 1990, and is currently serving her ninth term. She is a member of the House Appropriations and Budget Committees and serves as chairwoman of the Agriculture-FDA Appropriations Subcommittee. In that position, she has worked to provide funding for a safe food supply, for a healthy agricultural economy, and for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate thousands of products we use everyday. As chairwoman of the Appropriations Agriculture Subcommittee in the 110th Congress, she has worked to restore the oversight functions of the subcommittee by examining the nation’s food safety system and ensuring that federal agencies such as the FDA and USDA prioritize science and the public interest. She also has worked to expand rural development programs and support specialty crop initiatives. Congresswoman DeLauro is a member of the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education and Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittees, and has served as co-chair of the House Steering and Policy Committee since 2002. In 1999 and 2000 she was elected assistant to the Democratic leader by her colleagues, making her the second highest ranking Democratic woman in the House of Representatives. Congresswoman DeLauro received an honorary degree, doctor of humane letters, from Wesleyan University in 2007.
   
David Fischhoff P’08 is vice president for technology strategy and development, and chief of staff for the technology division at Monsanto Company, where he has responsibilities in the areas of scientific strategy, new technology acquisition, and management of Monsanto’s portfolio of research-and-development projects. Dr. Fischhoff invented and developed insect resistant transgenic crop plants that are among the leading products of plant biotechnology. He created the “synthetic gene” approach for expression of insecticidal Bt genes in plants, which is the scientific foundation for insect resistant plant biotechnology traits. He and his team were the first to develop insect resistant cotton and corn plants. Today, these plant biotechnology products based on his work are planted on more than 60 million acres annually in more than 10 countries where they control damaging insect pests and have led to significant reductions in the application of chemical insecticides. Dr. Fischhoff was instrumental in developing the first paradigms for safety assessment of plant biotechnology products, as well as in helping to ensure trait durability through proper insect resistance management.
   
Darra Goldstein is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Russian at Williams College and founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Since earning her PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University, she has published numerous books and articles on Russian literature, culture, art, and cuisine, and has organized several exhibitions, including Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age and Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005, at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She also is the author of four cookbooks: A Taste of Russia, The Georgian Feast (winner of the 1994 IACP Julia Child Award for Cookbook of the Year), The Winter Vegetarian, and Baking Boot Camp at the CIA. She has consulted for the Council of Europe as part of an international group exploring ways in which food can be used to promote tolerance and diversity, and under her editorship the volume Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue was published in 2005 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the European Cultural Convention. Ms. Goldstein is currently food editor of Russian Life magazine. She serves on the board of directors of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and is general editor of California Studies in Food and Culture, a book series published by the University of California Press. 
   
Barbara Haber P’85, culinary historian, served as curator of books at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, where she developed a major collection of more than 16,000 volumes on cooking and food. She is the author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals and served as senior advisory editor and contributed entries on culinary history to the Cambridge World History of Food and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. She currently serves on the Awards Committee of the James Beard Foundation and is on the board of Spoons Across America, a source for children’s culinary education. She was elected to the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who in American Food and Beverages and received the M. F. K. Fisher Award from Les Dames d’Escoffier.
   

Faith Middleton For more than 25 years, radio, television, and print journalist Faith Middleton has served as host and executive producer of The Faith Middleton Show on Connecticut Public Radio, WNPR. She has twice received the “Pulitzer” of national broadcast journalism, the Peabody Award, as well as the coveted Ohio State Award. In 2006, Ms. Middleton was recognized as the annual Connecticut Bar Association Distinguished Person of the year, joining such notables as Richard Rodgers, Wally Lamb, and Dr. Henry Lee. She has been named Best Talk Show Host in Connecticut by the readers and editors of Connecticut Magazine for the past ten years.

Ms. Middleton is dedicated to preserving farmland in Connecticut and has served for the past five years as the honorary co-chair of Celebration of Connecticut Farms along with Jacques Pepin, Meryl Streep, Paul Newman, and Sam Waterston. This event supports Connecticut Farmland Trust, an organization dedicated to preserving Connecticut farms and supporting farm families. She also has co-chaired the Connecticut Audubon Society Eagle Festival with Phil Donahue.

Her articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, and she is the author of The Goodness of Ordinary People, a diverse collection of remarkable true stories from her callers. She is an associate fellow at Yale University.
   
Krishnendu Ray is an assistant professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. Born and raised in India, he moved to the United States at the age of 27 and taught for a decade at The Culinary Institute of America. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households and Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking: Indian Food in Manhattan. He is working on his next book, Taste and Toil: Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Ethnic Tastes.
   

Ruth Reichl P’11 joined Gourmet magazine as editor-in-chief in 1999. She came to the magazine from The New York Times, where she had been the restaurant critic since 1993. As chef and co-owner of The Swallow Restaurant from 1974 to 1977, she played a part in the culinary revolution that took place in Berkeley, California. In the years that followed, she served as restaurant critic for New West and California magazines, and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, where she was also named food editor.

Ms. Reichl began writing about food in 1972, when she published Mmmmm: A Feastiary. Since then, she has authored the critically acclaimed, best-selling memoirs Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, and Garlic and Sapphires, which have been translated into 16 languages. She is the editor of Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, The Gourmet Cookbook, and History in a Glass: Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet. Her lecture “Why Food Matters,” delivered in October 2005, was published in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 27, in 2006.

Ms. Reichl is a regular host with Leonard Lopate for a live monthly food show on WNYC radio in New York. She has been honored with four James Beard Awards and with numerous awards from the Association of American Food Journalists. In 2007, she was named Adweek’s Editor of the Year.
   
Gina Athena Ulysse is an assistant professor of anthropology and African American studies at Wesleyan University and a poet and performer. Her interests include ethnography, political economy, gendered representations, and performance within Black diaspora contexts. She is the author of several articles on class and color in Jamaica, fieldwork conflicts, and reflexivity. Her first book, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importing, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, focuses on the dialectic between Jamaican female independent international traders’ economic agency and self-making practices. Her poetry has been published in The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States; Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism; and Ma Comere, Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Her work also is included in the anthropological anthologies, Women on the Verge of Home and Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights.