The European Parliament advocates a complete ban on such items while the Commission, as the more pragmatic institution that has to balance the interests of many in its decision-making, is willing to put only a temporary and limited ban on such items. The Commission wants to ban directly cloned animals and exclude meat and milk that comes from the offspring of these cloned animals. The debate is extremely current and both institutions discussed the issue on Tuesday, February 15th.

In addition to its context of ethical and consumer rights issues, this conflict takes on additional importance with respect to the new legislation on new and unusual food that the EU aims to pass this March. Therefore it seems that the final decision will probably be influenced by more than just ethical arguments on the matter at hand, although it is interesting to point out that an ethical verdict on this issue has already been given.

The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies has concluded that the consumption of products from cloned animals cannot be justified. This decision seems to have been echoed by a large part of EU’s citizens as well, where 58% consider cloning for food production unjustifiable and 61% not moral, although the measuring categories seem to provide for another topic of discussion — what is to be understood by justified and what by moral?

Although this may be a tempting topic to discuss, the practical figures show that regardless of the particular meaning of justifiable or moral, cloning is not approved of by the EU’s citizens. In this regard then one can say that the European Parliament is doing its job well in representing the people.

Therefore the final outcome of such discussion could be perceived as a political example of the success of democracy. However the opponents are far from being insignificant, since the Commission in addition to its own accord is paradoxically (based on the above-mentioned figure it would seem as though the national governments are not following their people.) being supported by many Member States.

The position of the Commission and Member States concurs with the statement of the European Food Safety Authority as well as that of the European Livestock and Meat Trading Union. The latter advocates the consumption of cloned animals and their products in the name of sustainability of production. As to what this sustainability means, one can only wonder. Is it sustainability of our never ending needs and appetite because in this case although the literal meaning of the word sustainability fits, the context in which it is used turns it rather into supply of demand.

To be a vegetarian or not is a personal choice and as such has a direct effect only on the practitioner regardless of the conversation of ethics that surround it. Can the same thing be said about the current issue – cloning – which is expected to affect all of the EU’s citizens and probably many others around the world as well?

If these cloned products pass the test and find their way in the nearest supermarket, are we still speaking of personal choice? It is worth wondering what kind of classification system will keep track of the offspring of the cloned animals, if any at all. Could we at some point find ourselves consuming a product derived from the offspring of a cloned animal, and if so what would be wrong with it? What would make the consumption of such products morally wrong, if wrong at all? Do we start from our own health when making this conclusion or rather from the morality of life creation?

The moral dimension of the discussion of such a topic also makes me to think of the necessity of such a phenomenon. Why exactly is it that we need to clone these animals? If our technology was not this advanced maybe we would be required to come up with other creative options of feeding the world, if indeed this was the actual purpose. Meat becomes the sub-product of another product which contrary to tradition does not owe its existence to nature but to science. Less effort is required in finding the solution to a problem when you try to work around the problem then when you try to understand the reason behind the existence of the problem in the first place. We need more so we make more. This certainly says something about the state of the mind of the world.

Entry by Blerina Fani
Academy Year 2010-2011

As this year we’re expecting more guests and participants than before, we decided to go out of the familiar ECLA campus perimeter. EDEN is a new space for art and contemporary dance in Pankow, and will host our daily lectures and discussions. And what shall we eat during this special week? Lunches at EDEN will be provided by Otto Pfeiffer, and the week will culminate with the student cooking competition and a special buffet dinner.

To start off the week, we will visit a place, where practice and theory go hand in hand – Domäne Dahlem, an organic farm and a museum.

Download the schedule here.

Roger Scruton, Uomo Universale

Roger Scruton is the author of a great number of philosophical books, more recent publications include “On Pessimism”, “On Beauty”, and “Understanding Music – Philosophy and Interpretation”. He gave a lecture at ECLA in the past on “Hegel’s conception of private property and its critics”. Roger Scruton lives on a farm in the English countryside, where he and his wife have been enhancing the ancient field patterns by replanting hedges, restoring ponds and growing trees to encourage wildlife. He writes on his website: “I graduated from Cambridge University in 1965, spent two years abroad and then pursued an academic career in philosophy, first in Cambridge, and then in London, until 1990, when I took a year’s leave of absence to work for an educational charity in Czechoslovakia. (This charity grew from the ‘underground university’ which colleagues and I had established in the last decade of communism.) I then taught part-time at Boston University Massachusetts until the end of 1994, while building up a public affairs consultancy in Eastern Europe. Since then I have been a free-lance writer and consultant, taking on short-term contracts when necessary. I currently hold three positions: visiting professor (unpaid) at Oxford University, where I am also a Fellow at Blackfriars Hall; visiting professor (part-time) in the Philosophy Department at St Andrews, where I shall be from the end of March until the beginning of May; and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, where I am currently pursuing a project on the cultural impact of neuroscience. Since 1996 I have been married to Sophie, and we have two children, Sam, born in 1998 and Lucy, born in 2000.”

Yofi Tirosh, Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law

Dr. Yofi Tirosh earned her LL.B. from the Hebrew University Faculty of Law, and her LL.M. and doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School, where she served as a fellow at Michigan’s Humanities Institute. Before joining the Israeli Bar, she clerked for Hon. Justice Mishael Cheshin at Israel’s Supreme Court. After spending 2007 at NYU Law School, where she was a Hauser Global Research Fellow, she joined Tel Aviv University’s Buchman Faculty of Law, where she teaches employment and labor law, jurisprudence, antidiscrimination law, food law, and feminist legal theory. She is a board member of Israeli human rights NGOs, including Itach-Maaki: Women Lawyers for Social Justice, and Tmura: The Israeli Antidiscrimination Legal Center.

Andrea Pieroni, University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenza

Andrea Pieroni is Professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenza since 2009, and held posts at the University of Bradford, in the Netherlands and in London before. His research interests concern the common boundaries of Human Ecology, Medical and Food Ethnobiology/Ethnobotany, and Anthropology of Food/Medical Anthropology, i.e. the interdisciplinary studies on the perceptions and uses of plants in local diets and in traditional medicines, and their impact on the environment, the human and animal health, and the society at large. In particular, he is interested in food ethnobotany (the traditional knowledge of uses and management/ecology of food plants, esp. wild and neglected taxa); traditional medicines (use of medicinal plants, “food-medicines”, and other biological and ritual remedies, provision of health care within the households via diets and emic healing strategies; ethnoveterinary (the traditional knowledge of plants used as fodder, for healing animals, or for improving the quality of dairy and other animal-derived food products).

Jim Cohn, Quest University Canada

Dr. Jim Cohn is the Chief Academic Officer at Quest University Canada, and serves as tutor for the arts and humanities. Before coming to Quest he had been teaching in the St. John’s College Great Books program for fifteen years. Adept in the Socratic method of questioning students, Jim has led courses in math, lab science, music, art, languages, literature and philosophy. For his Ph.D. Jim attended the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he worked under the direction of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and wrote his dissertation on Proust and Saint-Simon. Jim graduated summa cum laude in French and German from Dartmouth College. As an undergraduate, he studied abroad in Toulouse, France and in Mainz, Germany. Outside of class, he wrote a column for the college newspaper and participated in canoe club expeditions. After graduation, he held a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Cologne, and later studied Russian in Moscow. When he’s not working, Jim is likely to be skiing at Whistler or hiking or mountain biking in Squamish. He enjoys writing and woodworking, and always has furniture projects pending for his wife and two daughters.

Frank Armstrong, Oxford

Frank Armstrong is currently researching a book on Irish food culture, and has been writing on the subject of food for the Spectator as well as for the London Magazine. Frank likes to incorporate aspects of history, anthropology and sociology into his writing. He is an experienced teacher, and currently teaches British history and the sociology of food in St Clare’s College in Oxford, as part of a special Liberal Arts programme.

Paolo Tullio, Dublin

Author, critic, chef, actor and broadcaster, Paolo Tullio is the former chef/proprietor of the Michelin-starred Armstrong’s Barn restaurant in Wicklow. Paolo is also the host and the author of “Foodandwine.net”, a site dedicated to the joys of food and wine. He is the restaurant reviewer and wine correspondent for the Irish Independent newspaper and regularly contributes to Food & Wine magazine. He has published three books, North of Naples, South of Rome – an anecdotal tour of his part of Italy, mushroom.man, a novel set on the internet and most recently Paolo Tullio Cooks Italian, a book of his favourite Italian recipes. Paolo presented the television series “North of Naples, South of Rome” on RTÉ and has featured in many films such as The Butcher Boy, The General, The Tailor of Panama and most recently John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tale.

Melanie Rehak, New York

Melanie Rehak is the author of Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers and One Picky Kid (2010) and Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (2005). She writes a column of food books for Bookforum, and has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Vogue, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and many other publications. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two sons. She spent the 2008-2009 academic year in Berlin, and hopes to return for a long visit again soon.

Victoria Rietig, Fairfood Berlin

Victoria Rietig is the project leader at Fairfood International, an NGO working in the area of fair trade and sustainable development. She is in charge of building up the organization’s Berlin office and is responsible for Fairfood’s communication on sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility in Germany. Prior to this, Victoria worked as a consultant for the New York Office of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), where she developed and implemented seminars on international law and policy. Victoria received her M.A. degree in American Studies, History and Psychology after studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina), and New York University.

Dan Fennelly, Dublin/Galway

Dan Fennelly has worked in food and wine in Ireland for over a decade. He first developed his passion for food during his studies at Trinity College Dublin where he read History. He also holds a Masters of Science in Sustainable Development from the Dublin Institute of Technology and is a graduate of the renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School. Dan’s career in artisan food began in earnest when he became manager of Sheridans’ Cheesemongers in Dublin in 2003. Hitherto he had worked as a chef and ran his own catering company. At Sheridans he learnt the importance of nurturing and developing close relationships with artisan food producers, and the role of the specialty food distributor/ retailer in the education of consumers. During his time in Sheridans he was involved in all aspects of the Retail and Wholesale business, in particular the sourcing of cheeses, olive oil, chocolate and wine; quality control; and flavour profiling. In 2005 he represented Ireland in the International Caseus Cheese Skills Competition in Lyon, winning the cheese-selling round, and coming fifth overall. Dan has also lectured extensively on Irish cheese in Ireland, France and Italy and has written articles for the Irish Times; Food and Wine Magazine; and Business and Finance magazine. He has recently finished a major publication on Irish Farmhouse Cheeses for An Bord Bia, the State’s food promotion board, and hopes to write a book on Irish Farmhouse Cheese in the next 12 months.

February 11 (Friday)

Eating for Beginners
Melanie Rehak, New York (Dock 11 EDEN)
10:15 – 12:00

Cooking Workshops
Adina Scortescu, Bucharest
14:00 – 18:30

Buffet/Student Competition
19:30 – (Kuckhoffstraße 24)

February 10 (Thursday)

Why Food Criticism should be taken with a Grain of Salt
Frank Armstrong, Oxford, UK (Dock 11 EDEN)
10:15 – 11:00
Often the food critic has the power to make or break a restaurant. Yet taste is famously subjective. This lecture will explore the various sub-genres of food criticism relied on in the English-speaking world and assess their reliability.

Being a Food Critic
Paolo Tullio, Dublin (Dock 11 EDEN)
11:15 – 12:15
Being a food critic can be a tricky business. Questions for the conscience can be whether a good or bad restaurant review can make or break a restaurant. Many questions come to mind such as does the well-known face of a restaurant critic ensure better service and food; can one person’s tastes and preferences be of any use to someone else; and should a restaurant review tend to informative or entertaining? Broader questions shall be asked such as whether gastronomy is for the few or the many. Does better cuisine in restaurants help people eat better at home? Why has food become the zeitgeist of the last 20 years? Where will restaurant cooking go in the next decade? And, finally, why should we care?

The Nation-Plate: How Nationalities are defined by their Cuisines
Frank Armstrong, Oxford, UK (P24.Conference Room)
16:30 – 18:00
Why is French food esteemed around the globe and English disparaged? This seminar will explore the relationship between food culture and the ‘imagined community’ of nations. A national cuisine draws together disparate dishes and identifies them with that community. Once formulated this becomes a source of identity which binds people together.

Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste
Jim Cohn, Quest University, Canada (P98a. Lecture Hall)
19:30 – 21:00
In any discussion of food, it behooves us not to lose sight of one of its most basic human features: good food tastes good. To stimulate our own discussion of taste, we will look at excerpts from Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (1825)—an effervescent classic that is partly a gastronomic cookbook, partly a scientific treatise, and partly a personal memoir. His book is still in print, and it is still a favourite for its charming style and its diverting anecdotes about the many pleasures of the table. Despite its surface claim to be merely the personal reflections of a bon vivant, this book raises consequential questions about our relationship to food, which of course we know primarily through our palate: Is good taste natural? Or is appreciation of the finer things learned? Does it depend on our culture of food? What is the importance of the small pleasures and the outsized passions that characterize our sense of taste?

Foodways as Cultural Theory and Practice
Ryan Plumley (P24. Conference Room)
19:30 – 21:00
Through the mutual interaction of theory and practice, foodways enact processes of socialization that define who is a child or an adult, a man or a woman, one of “us” or one of “them”. Partly unconscious, partly learned, partly improvised, partly planned, partly theory, partly practice, foodways can tell us a lot about a culture. In this seminar, drawing on an engaging reading about French women’s culinary practices by Luce Girard and Michel de Certeau, we will discuss how foodways define culture and identity.

February 9 (Wednesday)

The University of Gastronomic Sciences
Andrea Pieroni, UNISG, Italy (Dock 11 EDEN)
10:15 – 11:00
The University of Gastronomic Sciences UNISG, is the first university worldwide entirely dedicated to the exploration of the inextricable links between food and culture(s). It was founded by the Slow Food movement, in collaboration with the Regions of Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna in 2004, and it obtains support from a number of private companies, institutions and local government agencies. At the moment UNISG hosts approx. 250 under-graduate and post-graduate international students and offers one BSc and three Master programs. In his talk, Andrea will present UNISG’s teaching & learning strategy/philosophy, as well as the currently ongoing research trajectories.

Irish Farmhouse Cheese
Dan Fennelly, Ireland (Dock 11 EDEN)
11:15 – 12:00
This talk will act as an introduction to Irish farmhouse cheese and look at the development of Irish farmhouse cheeses through the stories and experiences of producers. It will scrutinize the Irish Farmhouse Cheese concept and ask to what extent various contemporary production practices are appropriate to that concept. The talk will conclude by asking what the future holds for Irish farmhouse cheese-makers, particularly in light of the current economic climate in Ireland.

Film Screening “Babette’s Feast”
Introduction by Bartholomew Ryan (Kino Krokodil)
16:00 –
This magical film, directed by Danish filmmaker Gabriel Axel, is based on the short story by Karen Blixen. Babette is a 19th century Parisian political refugee seeking shelter in a very rural, Jutland coastal town in Denmark. Philippa and Martina, the elderly daughters of the town’s long-dead minister, take Babette in. As revealed in flashback, Philippa and Martina were once beautiful young women, who’d forsaken their chances at romance and fame, and have taken resigned refuge in religion. But Babette is more than meets the eye. Through the delights of cuisine can a world be transformed?

The cous-cous was more similar to my grandmother’s Libyan version of the dish than anything I’ve had since she passed away, despite my aunts’ countless attempts to try conjure it up again and despite the lack of lamb in Pfeiffer’s version of the dish. I guess the most important elements were the spices and the texture which immediately sent me back eight or so years to when my grandmother would meticulously prepare the grand dish through hours of constant work which no one in my family has managed to imitate. The familiarity and recognition I felt with the first mouthful were such positive and present emotions that I’m sure that they played a big part in my judgment of the dish. In fact I wonder whether anyone enjoyed it to the extent that I did.

The sorbet, on the other hand, brought images of my grandfather rushing through my mind. Here I was eating a mixture of homemade marmalade and homemade Maltese ice cream, which my grandfather used to make in abundance thanks to the excess of oranges falling from the trees in his garden and his sweet tooth. Actually, as a child, I never liked marmalade or Maltese ice cream (which tastes nothing like gelato or soft ice cream, its more a hard block of milk, sugar and other ingredients which taste like the sorbet we had on Monday) and yet I really did eat the sorbet, maybe because it actually had nothing to do with either of my grandfather’s creations, or perhaps because in recognition of lost flavours and people I’d do anything to try gain them again.

So, perhaps oddly, lunch is what really got me thinking on the first day of this year’s SWWE. Food emerged as a tool to resuscitate memories and as a way of initiating the telling of stories, it became clear that it could be distinctly connected to past experiences and, in connecting with the senses, is capable of drawing up memories in much the same way music or images often do.

Entry by LUISA TOLU
Academy Year 2009-2010
Currently studying Commerce at University of Malta

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.

February 7 (Monday)

Localising the Food Economy
Roger Scruton (Dock 11 EDEN)
10:15 – 12:00

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals
Catherine Toal (P98a.U.16)
16:30 – 18:00
The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, a journalistic investigation into the meat-production industry, shares with other vegan and vegetarian activist works and statements the suggestion that complicity with this industry is comparable to collaboration in the worst kinds of political and social oppression. We consider the evidence for and the rhetoric of this argument, and the relationship between vegan and vegetarian commitment and wider claims of individual political and social responsibility.

Sense and Sensuality: Food in Film
Matthias Hurst (P98a. Lecture Hall)
16:30 – 18:00
We can neither smell nor taste films; only visual and auditory senses are stimulated in cinema. However, food and the acts of eating and drinking as sensual and meaningful experiences are favorite cinematic topics. As in real life, food as a cultural phenomenon does not only serve as a pure function and means of ingestion and nutrition; the preparation and consumption of food express much more than just the practice of sustaining the body. There’s a whole spectrum of meaning and both social and emotional connotations that unfold in cinematic scenes of cooking, eating and drinking. Issues such as cultural or individual identity and self-representation, ideas of abundance, consumerism and excess, and sensations such as love, passion and sexual tension are represented in the depiction of food. Food in film becomes a symbol for sensuality in general, but this symbolic form of sensuality does not always give us pleasure. The seminar will explore different films, their specific representations of food, and the related messages of sense and sensuality.

Philosophical Arguments on Vegetarianism
Bruno Macaes (P24.U.00)
19:30 – 21:00
This seminar will focus on the classical philosophical defense of vegetarianism, including a detailed and fair account of the arguments against it advanced by the main philosophical schools of the ancient world. We will start by asking why the topic was discussed in classical philosophy with such intellectual power as contemporary reflections on vegetarianism cannot hope to rival.

Cora Diamond’s Eating Meat and Eating People
David Hayes (P98a.1.00)
19:30 – 21:00
The philosopher Cora Diamond’s article “Eating Meat and Eating People” (1978) is a non-consequentialist ethical defense of vegetarianism. Diamond argues that the prevailing philosophical defense of vegetarianism, which is grounded in claims about rights, is both “comically uncompelling” and ultimately self-undermining. One should look instead, she argues, to a non-biological notion of what it means to be a “fellow creature,” a notion particularly available for contemplation through poetry and literature. This seminar follows up this suggestion, and partly tests it, through a consideration of Issac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish folktale “Zlateh the Goat.”