The Humanities Center at Texas Tech will present food studies scholar/sociologist Alice Julier in a lecture entitled “Food and Place: Marketing the Local, Gentrifying the Neighborhood.”  Julier’s talk will be the first in the Humanities Center’s 2017-2018 series of events organized around the theme “Food and . . . .”  Ways into the “what” following the ellipsis in “Food and…” include culture, literature, politics, environment, technology, health,  malnutrition, access, education, inequities, media representations, depictions in fine art, sustainability, ecology(s), local food, small scale agriculture, agribusiness, taboo, packaging, eating disorders, marketing, terroir, and gastronomy.  We all eat, yet what counts as appealing, nourishing, traditional food in one culture is repulsive in another.  What is cheap and ordinary in one time and place is luxury in another.  

Alice Julier is a sociologist who focuses on food, material life, and inequality. She is the founding director of the Food Studies program at Chatham University and the Director of CRAFT, the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation. She writes about food systems, domesticity and family meals, and labor in food systems. She is the former president of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and a council member for the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. Her most recent book is Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality. She is also the co-editor of the upcoming edition of Food and Culture: A Reader.