OXFORD, Miss. – Warren Belasco, food scholar and renowned sociologist,
speaks Tuesday (Oct. 13) at the University of Mississippi on the
economic, historical and cultural impact of food studies.
Belasco, professor of American Studies at the University of
Maryland, delivers the free, public address “Why Study Food?” at 6:30
p.m. in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory. The program is the
second annual Viking Range Lecture, sponsored by the Southern Foodways
Alliance, an institute of UM’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Belasco is the author of “Appetite for Change: How the
Counterculture Took on the Food Industry” (Cornell University Press,
1993), “Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food” (University of
California Press, 2006) and “Food: The Key Concepts” (Berg Publishers,
2008). He is also the editor of the journal Food, Culture, and Society.
Belasco will, in part, answer the question, “Why study food?” by
saying that “food is the first of the essentials of life, the world’s
largest industry, our most frequently indulged pleasure, the core of
our most intimate social relationships.”
The SFA’s mission is to document, study and celebrate the food
cultures of the American South. That mission is grounded in the notion
that food is a lens through which a region as vast and diverse as ours
can be seen and understood. Simply put, what and where and how a
Southerner eats speaks volumes about who he or she is.
In “Key Concepts,” Belasco argues that food is not just a device
for understanding a culture. Food is the culture. To fully understand
food requires a complex interdisciplinary understanding of
anthropology, sociology, economics, politics and agricultural science.
The Viking Range Lecture series, underwritten by the Viking
Range Corp. of Greenwood, brings scholars, writers, and artists to the
Ole Miss campus. Each lecturer, regardless of discipline, uses food as
a vehicle for a greater understanding of self, community and culture.
For more information on the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, visit http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/