Food Literacy for All: Saru Jayaraman

Concurrent food, energy, water, and climate crises, and a global rise in obesity amidst widespread hunger and undernutrition, have re-focused public attention on the deficiencies and complexities of the global food system. Yet, a diversity of ‘alternative’ food systems demonstrates that food systems can be nutrition sensitive, socially just, and conserve natural resources. Transforming food systems will require coordinated effort across scales, drawing upon diverse disciplinary and practical perspectives, and understanding how value systems shape food and agriculture. Linking theory and practice is also essential, involving the full range of actors moving food from farm to fork.

Saru Jayaraman is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded ROC, which now has more than 18,000 worker members, 200 employer partners, and several thousand consumer members in a dozen states nationwide. The story of Saru and her co-founder's work founding ROC has been chronicled in the book The Accidental American. Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her most recent book is Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Community Attendees: Registration for each session will open one week prior (here). Space is limited.

This course is presented by the UM Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, with support from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), LSA Instructional Support Services (LSA-ISS), the International Institute, the Institute for the Humanities, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), Graham Sustainability Institute, and the Center for Engaged Academic Learning (CEAL), and the Nutritional Sciences Department.