Part of the Taste and Interdisciplinary Food Studies Network at Westminster seminar series
Calls for more sustainable food systems often focus on what we should produce, what we should consume, and which foods should disappear from our plates. Yet eating is never simply a matter of environmental efficiency. Food carries culture, memory, identity, status, history, pleasure, and belonging. This seminar asks what happens when sustainability challenges those meanings. Why are some animals considered food in one society and unacceptable in another? Who has the power to define a sustainable diet? What happens when proposed solutions ask communities to abandon familiar foods, change traditional practices, or accept ingredients they consider culturally inappropriate? Drawing on work across international development, sustainable food systems, gender, and food cultures in different parts of the world, this seminar explores the tension between sustainability goals and human behaviour. It considers how gender, class, culture, inequality, and access shape both the possibilities and limits of sustainable consumption. Rather than treating consumers as the final step in a supply chain, this conversation places people, culture, and power at the centre of food-system transformation. Ultimately, it asks: if creating a more sustainable food system requires us to eat differently, who gets to decide what change should taste like?
Location
Room Regent Street 352, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW.
Nearest station: Oxford Circus
About the speaker
Mercedes Diane Griffin Forbes
Mercedes Diane Griffin Forbes, MA, MPH, is a sustainable food systems consultant, global educator, author, and cultural storyteller whose work examines the intersections of food, gender, sustainability, culture, and human-centred development. With more than two decades of experience in international development, she has worked across Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, Europe, and the United States, including extensive work with farmers, food enterprises, women entrepreneurs, and community-based organisations. She holds an MPH in Global Health from George Washington University and an MA in Sustainable Development from the School for International Training. Mercedes is the founder of Forbes Food & Ag and Editor of DG Speaks, where she explores food, travel, culture, sustainability, and the ways individual and collective choices shape the systems around us.
