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Food at Sydney series
SEI explores how individuals and communities can redesign their food systems in this series. Join us to learn how to tackle food insecurity and create healthier, more sustainable food systems in different spaces.
Series Chair: Dr Alana Mann, Department of Media and Communications Alana Mann joined the University of Sydney in 2007 after a professional career in the media and non-profit sectors. Her teaching and research focus on how ordinary citizens get voice in policy debates regarding wicked problems such as food security and climate change. Her book Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift (http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137341396) was published in 2014. Currently, Alana is involved in cross-disciplinary research projects concerning food systems with colleagues in the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) and the Charles Perkins Centre. She is on a Faculty-wide project team exploring the crisis of ‘post-truth’ discourse, funded through the Sydney Research Excellence Initiative (SREI, 2017), and is co-CI on an Education Innovation project based in Glebe, the Social Justice Learning Lab. Her international collaborations include a comparative study of ‘land-grabbing’ with researchers in Brazil and South East Asia. Alana regularly speaks about her research at public events such as Sydney Ideas, Raising the Bar and Outside the Square, and has been an invited speaker at events such as Food and Words. She is Chair of the SEI Food@Sydney seminar series.
This series of events was hosted at the University of Sydney from April to July 2017 in partnership with Sydney Ideas.
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The series
What can be done to enable individuals and communities to redesign their food systems?
Food [at] Sydney will bring together city planners, public health advocates, food system scholars, urban developers, food producers, retailers and eaters to discuss how food is woven through the fabric of everyday life in this increasingly urban century, connecting the many social and environmental injustices in the world around us. From Sydney to Zimbabwe, our modern food system is broken. From production and processing, to distribution and consumption, profits are put before the health of people and planet. These seminars will explore what can be done to enable individuals and communities to redesign their food systems—to eat with and within their environments. We will investigate how ecological farming practices and social enterprise can be used to empower rural women in the Global South, how university campuses are a living lab for food systems change, and how cities will play a key role in building more socially just and environmentally sustainable food systems.
Speakers:
- Dr Sinead Boylan, School of Public Health
- Tracey Ho, Campus Infrastructure Services
- Sophie Lamond, Fair Food Challenge
Exploring how universities can build more healthy and sustainable food systems.
Universities have long been advocates for more healthy and sustainable societies. Across Australia, though, campus food systems are anything but, being saturated with unhealthy options sourced through unsustainable supply chains. How can we make universities walk the talk on building more healthy and sustainable food systems? What role do students have to play in mobilising to demand fair food environments in Australian Universities? And how can universities become a living lab to show better food can help us all lead better lives?
Speakers:
- Dr Sinead Boylan, School of Public Health
- Tracey Ho, Campus Infrastructure Services
- Sophie Lamond, Fair Food Challenge
How can small scale agro-ecological methods of farming empower women, benefit the environment, and contribute to food sovereignty and security?
Early in her life Chido Govera realised the importance of food to community. Mushroom farming enabled her not only to feed her family in Zimbabwe and attain independence, but to create a healthier environment through managing food waste. For many years Chido has shared her unique skills and experiences with women throughout Africa and globally as an educator and mentor.
Chido will join Sydney Ideas for a conversation with University of Sydney researcher Alana Mann to discuss how engagement in small scale agro-ecological methods of farming can empower women, benefit the environment, and contribute to food sovereignty and food security.
Speaker:
- Chido Govera
How do we address Sydney’s food insecurity problem?
Too many Australians are going hungry in the City. Recent research from the City of Sydney found that a staggering 8% of residents were food insecure, struggling with the challenge of putting good, healthy, and sustainable food on the table. What is being done—and what more can we do— to help address this problem? What food-related urban planning policy actions are required to promote food justice? Join our panel of experts to explore this question, and to anticipate what Sydney’s urban food system will look like in the future. What is being done, and what more can we do to help address this problem?
Speakers:
- Professor David Schlosberg, Sydney Environment Institute
- Allison Heller, City of Sydney
- Rhiannon Cook, New South Wales Council for Social Services
Exploring the past, present, and future for urban food production.
Australian suburbs have been a site of food production for over one hundred years. This seminar explores the past, present and future for urban food production. Who are the suburban harvesters? What do these histories tell us about the cultures and values of suburban Australia? In an era of rapid social, environmental and economic change, how can the suburban harvest contribute to a vision of a more just and sustainable urban food system?
Speakers:
- Dr Brian Jones, Sydney Institute of Agriculture
- Dr Jennifer Kent, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning
- Dr Laura Fisher, Sydney College of the Arts
- Ananth Gopal, University of Wollongong