Overview
This event is part of the Center for Ethics and Human Values' 2025-26 COMPAS Program on the theme of Food.
Further details TBA.
Panelists
Charlotte Biltekoff (University of California, Davis; Food Science and Technology, American Studies)
Charlotte Biltekoff, PhD, is Professor of American Studies and Food Science & Technology and Darrel Corti Endowed Professor in Food, Wine and Culture at the University of California, Davis, where she builds bridges between scientific and cultural approaches to questions about food and health. Her expertise centers on understanding where ideas about “good” and “bad” food come from and the social and cultural role they play. Recent work explores the political stakes of how experts in the food system understand the role of the public and communicate about science, technology, and innovation. Her research is interdisciplinary, and she frequently collaborates and communicates across disciplinary differences.
Biltekoff’s latest book, Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge, is about how good food became “real” in the beginning of the 21st century and how the food industry has responded to increasingly negative public views of processed food with science-based education and information campaigns designed to “correct” what they see as public misperceptions. Chapters explore competing school curricula seeking to teach students very different versions of “where their food comes from,” the fraught politics of “natural” claims, and the possibilities and limits of “transparency.” Throughout, the book highlights the political importance of how the food industry imagines, or thinks about the public, and how that shapes communication as well as possibilities for meaningful debate and dialogue about what kind of food system we want.
Biltekoff is also author of Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (Duke University Press, 2013). She was a co-PI on the NSF-funded UC AFTeR Project, a multidisciplinary research project across 3 UC campuses examining the Bay Area Agri-Food Tech sector. She has published articles in a wide range of academic journals and enjoys doing podcasts and other interviews.
Julie Guthman (University of California, Santa Cruz; Social Sciences)
Julie Guthman is a professor of social sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds a PhD in geography and an MBA, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research investigates how neoliberal-inflected capitalism shapes the conditions of possibility for food system transformation. In conversation with her students in the Community Studies major at UC Santa Cruz, she has taken particular interest in the evolving character of the alternative food movement as it confronts race, class, and bodily difference. More recently, she has explored the intersection of knowledge practices and political economy in the construction of healthy food and bodies, especially in light of emergent science on non-nutritional pathways to metabolic illness. She retains an abiding interest in the history and geography of California agriculture. These themes converged in her recent research on the California strawberry industry, first inspired by a contentious fight over the soil fumigant methyl iodide, which is a replacement for ozone-depleting methyl bromide and has possible epigenetic effects. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2017 and 2018, Julie received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In that capacity, she has been working on a book project that traces how, while facing emergent soil pathogens, the California strawberry industry came to rely on highly toxic soil fumigants and how that reliance reverberated throughout the entire production system, making growing strawberries without fumigants deeply challenging.
Her publications include three books and over forty articles in peer-reviewed professional journals. Her first book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California (2014) was awarded the Donald Q. Innis Award from the Rural Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers and the Frederick H. Buttel Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the Rural Sociological Society. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (2011) earned the James E. Blaut Award for Innovative Publication from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers and the Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award. A third book, The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action, which was co-edited with Alison Alkon, was published by University of California Press in late 2017. Julie is a recipient of the Excellence in Research Award from the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society. She serves on the editorial board of seven peer-reviewed journals and is co-editor of a new book series with University of California Press, Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics.
Becky Mansfield (Ohio State; Geography)
Professor Becky Mansfield is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Geography. Her research lies in the areas of nature-society geography, political ecology, and science studies. Broadly interested in the recursive relationship between power and nature, Professor Mansfield studies diverse bodily and planetary socionatures. She is particularly interested in how traditional ideas about a separation between humans and nature seem to be giving way to new, non-dualist, fluid understandings of nature-society dynamics that undermine any notion of foundational separations. Yet a central focus of her work is how these non-dualist nature-society relationships do not erase but transform and unleash new power dynamics. This raises key questions about who (both human and non-human) will benefit and who will be harmed, and in what ways. Questions about race, gender, and reproduction are central to these new power dynamics and problems of injustice. Building on these interests, Professor Mansfield also brings feminist and anti-racist perspective to bear on academia.
Much of Professor Mansfield's recent work focuses on chemical geographies as exemplar and mechanism of human-nature entanglement. She recently completed projects on the biopolitics of epigenetics and on deregulatory science at the US Environmental Protection Agency. She is currently engaged in a collaborative project the global pesticide complex, addressing industry, regulation, and contested knowledges of toxicity and harm. Another ongoing collaborative project is on the role of ideas about nature in limiting racial diversity in environmental sciences.
Moderation: Naomi Scheinerman (Ohio State; Bioethics)
Naomi Scheinerman is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics in the Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy. Her background is in political and democratic theory, with experience in law, public policy, and philosophy. In addition to deliberative democracy, she works on exploitation and consent, including on such topics as prenatal genetic testing, gestational surrogacy, reproductive rights, paid participation for clinical trials, egg and organ donation, and newborn screening. Prior to joining the faculty at OSU, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Genetics and Genomics at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Medical Ethics and Healthcare Policy and the AI Joint Fellow-in-Residents at Harvard’s EJS Center for Ethics and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She also worked for two years as a research assistant at The Hastings Center.
Accommodations
To ask questions about accessibility or request accommodations, please contact CEHV Associate Director Aaron Yarmel (yarmel.2@osu.edu). At least two weeks' advance notice will help us to provide seamless access.