Part of the Fairbank Center’s “Environment in Asia” series:

CHINESE FOOD - Culture, Economy, Ecology

April 27, 8:30am-6:30pm, CGIS South Room S153
April 28, 8:30am-3:30pm, CGIS South Room S250

Organizer: Ling Zhang (Boston College); Elizabeth Lord (Harvard University)

Sponsors:
Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment (Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
Boston College Institute for the Liberal Arts

Conference Program

April 27, Friday

8:45-9:15 Opening
Ling Zhang (Boston College)
Elizabeth Lord (Harvard University)

Panel One: Food and Knowledge
9:30-10:15

E. N. Anderson (University of California, Riverside)
“Learning Is Like Chicken Feet: Medieval China Studies West Asian Foodways in the Emerging Asian World-system”

Abigail Coplin (Yale University)
“The East is ‘Scientific’: Scientists, the State, and Credibility Crises During China’s GMO Controversy”

10:15-10:30 Coffee Break

10:30-12:30 Robban Toleno (Columbia University)
“Buddhists, Meat Analogues, and the History of Vegetarianism in China”
Discussion: Peter Perdue (Yale University)

12:30-13:30 Lunch

Panel Two: Political Economy and Ecology

13:30-14:15
Mindi Schneider (Erasmus Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Humanities)
“Food and Power: A Food Regime Analysis of Contemporary China”

Mark Frank (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
“Food and Accommodation: Chinese Grain Governance in Eastern Tibet, 1908-1940”

Brendan A. Galipeau (Rice University)
“Free in the Mountains or Home in the Vineyard: Resisting Plantation Labor on a French Vineyard in Tibet through Valuable Fungi Collection”

15:30-15:50 Coffee Break

15:50-18:30
Elizabeth Lord (Harvard University)
“Making Pollution Invisible — An Exploration of Soil Surveys in Contemporary China”

Alexander F. Day (Occidental College)
“The Political Economy of Socialist Food Production: The Work of Labor and Fertilizer on a State-Owned Tea Farm”

Discussion: Ellen Oxfeld (Middlebury College, 20 minutes)

* * *

April 28, Saturday

Panel Three: Materiality, Culture, and Identity

9:00-9:45
Miranda Brown (University of Michigan)
“On Bird’s Nests and Bean Curds: Reflections on the Rise of Tofu Connoisseurship”

Caroline Merrifield (Yale University)
“Jiangnan Luxe”

9:45-10:00 Coffee Break

10:00-12:00
Jin Feng (Grinnell College)
“The Battle of Noodles”

Benny Shaffer (Harvard University)
“Shapeshifting Fields: The Moving Image Work of Mao Chenyu”

Discussion: Eileen Chow (Duke University)

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-15:00 General Discussion and Conclusion