Charlotte Biltekoff - Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge

SFIS Speaker Series presents Charlotte Biltekoff

Since the early 21st century many people have become concerned about the health and environmental impacts of processed food. As is clear from a walk through any grocery store, the food industry has adapted to these changing “consumer demands” with product reformulations and marketing strategies deploying terms like real, natural, and simple. Less visibly, trade associations representing the food industry have also framed the public’s disaffection for processed food as irrational and sought to contest it through science-based education and information campaigns. Real Food, Real Facts first explains how good food became "real" in the early 21st century due to a confluence of legitimate public concerns about food, the food industry, and scientific authority. Then it explores the political stakes of the food industry’s efforts to reframe those concerns as rooted in misinformation and to contest them through education and information campaigns that reassert scientific authority over both meaning and policy in the food system, not to mention eating habits. Real Food, Real Facts provides a way of thinking about contemporary disagreements about the uses of science and technology in the food system that refrains from demonizing or further polarizing, instead attending to the worldviews that shape the perspectives of both experts and the public, which include contradictory assumptions about the role the public should play in the food system.

Biography

Charlotte Biltekoff is Professor of American Studies, Professor of Food Science and Technology, and Darrell Corti Endowed Professor in Food, Wine, and Culture at the University of California Davis. Her research, teaching and service builds bridges between scientific and cultural approaches to questions about food and health. She is author of Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge (2024) and Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (2014). She was recently a Co-PI on the UC AFTeR Project, a multidisciplinary research project examining the Bay Area Agri-Food Tech sector. Biltekoff has published work in academic journals that span a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary terrain and frequently collaborates across disciplinary differences. At UC Davis she teaches classes on food and culture as well as innovation in the food system.

You can find out more at her website https://www.charlottebiltekoff.com/