Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment

Round-table discussion marking the paperback launch of Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment, edited by Angela Creager (Princeton University, 2024-2025 Research Fellow at the Paris IAS) and Jean-Paul Gaudillière (Inserm & EHESS).

Online only.
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Presentation

Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions, and cultural notions of “pure” food.

This panel will use Risk on the Table, which was just published in paperback, as a starting point for a multidisciplinary discussion of the costs and consequences of the reliance on chemical technologies in contemporary food production.

Program

Introduction from the editors, Angela Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillère.

Jean-Paul Gaudilliere is historian of science and medicine, senior researcher at Inserm and professor at the EHESS. His research explores the relationship between knowledge, practices and politics. He has recently been working on the history of pharmaceuticals on the one hand, the history of international public health on the other hand.

Angela N. H. Creager is a fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, and the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, where she teaches history of biology and biomedicine. Her current project looks at the development of regulatory testing to identify cancer-causing chemicals, including in food.

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Hannah Landecker is jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, where she also co-directs the Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education.  A historian and sociologist of metabolism, Landecker’s chapter in Risk on the Table concerns arsenical drugs used as growth promoters in agriculture.

Saadi Lahlou, Paris Institute for Advanced Study (Paris IAS) and chair in Social Psychology, Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics. Alongside his academic career, Saadi has worked as a senior executive in industry and government. He has led several national social science research programmes on food and is currently Co-PI of the Food Socioscope.

Mathilde Cohen is the George Williamson Crawford Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut and currently a fellow at the Paris IEA. Her research focuses on courts, decision-making, and embodied phenomena such as eating and lactation at the intersection of legal scholarship and the social sciences.

Valentin Thomas, CNRS/Cermes3, is a sociologist of environmental health and social movements. His current research addresses pollution by persistent chemicals PFAS in Europe and the correlated production of knowledge/ignorance, contestation, and public policy. He previously worked on the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the French Yellow Vests movement.

Register with the form below. The connection link will be sent to you 48 hours before the event.