Organiser's description (via the Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development):
It’s generally accepted that the food system contributes to a wide range of problems – climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, malnutrition, and many forms of injustice, to name. Most of us also agree that the food system needs to be transformed for the better – that it needs to be fairer, greener, healthier, more resilient. But beyond these abstractions, what does ‘better’ actually look like? What will landscapes look like? What will we eat? How will we organise our food system? What role will and should corporates, government and communities place in defining and driving the needed transformation?
Talk to different people, and you’ll get different answers. We bring to our visions not just our knowledge – itself shaped by our particular disciplinary and professional backgrounds – but our values, hopes, fears, blind spots and personal histories. In this presentation Tara looks at how these, taken together, shape our analysis of the problems we face and our visions of a good food future – and how differences in values and mindsets also drive polarisation and conflict on issues ranging from particular farming methods to alternative proteins and meat eating. She argues that we need more open, collective reflection on our own and other peoples’ values in order to achieve more more constructive and inclusive decision making.
Speaker Bio
Tara is a researcher at the University of Oxford, and the Director of TABLE. TABLE explores visions for the future of food, and provides a platform for interdisciplinary knowledge and dialogue.
Tara’s work centres on the interactions among food, climate, health and broader sustainability issues; she has a particular interest in livestock as a sector where many of these converge. She is also interested in how knowledge is communicated to and interpreted by policy makers, civil society organisations and industry, and in the values that these different stakeholders bring to food problems and possible solutions.
TABLE is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Wageningen University and Research, the University of the Andes and National Autonomous University of México. Tara is keen to collaborate through TABLE with other organisations to undertake research, organise events and build and extend interdisciplinary, intersectoral knowledge in this field.
