Ours is the world of many forms of food crises and food disorders. Both food production and food consumption are tainted with smaller and bigger injustices, which sociologists, economists, lawyers, and activists all try to correct and mend. We will explore relevant topics in lectures and panel discussions.

February 8 (Tuesday)

The Right to Be Fat
Yofi Tirosh, Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law, Israel (Dock 11 EDEN)
10:15 – 12:00
What does it mean to be a fat citizen today? This paper explores the various ways in which current law actively and passively shapes the life of people who are considered overweight, thus infringing their rights to equal opportunity, dignity, and basic liberties. By challenging the mind/body dualism, and relying on phenomenological accounts of fat bodily experience, this paper argues that modern legal systems should recognize and protect the right to be of every body size.

The Impact of Food/Chocolate and Child Labour
Victoria Rietig, Fairfood Berlin (P98a. Lecture Hall)
16:00 – 17:30 / 19:00
Victoria Rietig’s workshop “The impact of food: Theory and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability” will introduce the concepts of CSR and sustainability and the work of an NGO in this area. Participants will engage in an interactive role-play in which they have to negotiate the CSR duties of an enterprise producing chocolate, and into a discussion on potential job opportunities in the area of CSR and development cooperation.

Amartya Sen’s Famines and Other Crises, Population, Food and Freedom
Michael Weinman (P98.1.12)
16:30 – 18:00
Sen’s main goal in Development as Freedom is to argue that development (often understood as a merely economic, or socio-economic, phenomenon) is truly a political question: that no human being can be considered “developing” if they are not free to participate in social and political, as well as economic, activity. The two chapters from this work that we will discuss tackle the issue of food crises from this perspective, claiming that famines are not the result of deprivations in the supply of food, so much as deprivations of purchasing power, the latter being far more under the control of human agency than often credited. Having made this case, Sen goes on to argue that famines do not and will not occur in democracies, but will be all-too-common in authoritarian systems.

Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal
Bartholomew Ryan (P24.U.00)
16:30 – 18:00
Jonathan Swift’s short essay A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Public (1729) is one of the great satires in the English language. We will take a look at how Swift draws us into a grim and concise depiction of visible poverty before unleashing on the reader his suggestion that the poor Irish should sell their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies for the “public good” of the country. By doing this he mocks the authority of the ruling officials. The text also alludes to the issue of cannibalism and how it was and is viewed today.