Lecture on
Food (especially chicken and eggs) in environmental history

by Mart Stewart

Saturday | 28th April 2018 | 5.00 pm – 6.30 pm

Organised by The International Centre Goa

Entry Free & Open to All

Mart Stewart was a forester in his first career, working in the mountains of the American West. He now teaches courses in environmental and cultural history at Western Washington University, and is also an affiliate professor in Huxley College of the Environment. Currently a Fulbright Senior Scholar at BITS Pilani-Goa, Stewart is researching the development of environmental history as a field of scholarship in India. He is the author of What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (University of Georgia Press, 1996; 2003), the co-editor of Environmental Change and Agricultural Sustainability in the Mekong Delta (Springer Scientific, 2011), and many essays and articles. In 2009 he was appointed the Thomson Distinguished Visiting Chair in Environmental Studies at Davidson College. He has held three Fulbright appointments in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi and traveled several times to Vietnam for teaching, research and conferences/workshops. Stewart has also held several editorial positions and is currently the founder and editor of an environmental history series, Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Food (especially chicken and eggs) in environmental history
We are what we eat and eat what we are: the talk will review in general food and history, food and economics, food and culture, food and identity – and food as a fundamental component of every human’s relationship with the environment. It will also summarize the history of food production – from subsistence to industrial production. But it will concentrate on several exemplary histories – of apples, corn, and potatoes, but especially on the history of chickens as a component of human diets – both for eggs and for meat. Changes in the production of chickens world-wide have in the last 75 years encapsulated the larger history of food production – and have been foremost in revealing some of the problems with industrial production: voracious consumption of scarce water resources; problems with agricultural pollution; overuse of antibiotics; the homogenization of taste; the loss of traditional breeds and agricultural biodiversity; and the domination of production by a few large global companies and a single technology of large-scale production. The question is: what can we do about it?