Food Studies Scholar Amy Bentley to Discuss Baby Food's Evolution, Impact at UH

HOUSTON - Jan. 30, 2015 - PRLog -- Leading food studies scholar Amy Bentley will deliver the lecture “Baby Food and the American Industrial Diet” at 5:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 6 at the Science and Engineering Classroom (SEC) 105. The free event is part of the Food for Thought Lecture Series and open to the public.

“We are excited to bring Dr. Amy Bentley to campus because she is a leading food studies scholar and her work on the cultural history of baby food is pathbreaking,” said Todd Romero, associate professor of history and co-director of the Gulf Coast Food Project at UH.“She contextualizes changing attitudes about American motherhood within debates about nutrition, gender, and the way industrialization of our food system. Her talk should interest a wide campus audience and anyone who is interested in the changing ways that Americans have debated what’s best for a baby to eat.”

Bentley willexplore how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care. Her lecture is based on her book, “Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet.”

Bentley is an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical and cultural contexts of food, she serves as editor for “A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era.” She has published numerous articles on the social, historical and cultural contexts of food. Bentley also serves as editor of Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and is a boardmember for the journals Food and Foodways and the Graduate Journal of Food Studies.

WHAT:

Food for Thought Lecture Series featuring Ann Bentley:

“Baby Food and the American Industrial Diet”

Free and open to the public.

For more information, contact UH Prof. Todd Romero at tromero2@uh.edu

or 713-743-3112

WHEN:

5:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 6

WHERE:

Science and Engineering Classroom (SEC) 105

University of Houston

For directions, click http://www.uh.edu/maps/buildings/?short_name=SEC

Public parking is available in the Stadium Parking Garage off Cullen.

WHO:

The Food for Thought Lecture Series is presented by UH’s Center for Public History

Gulf Coast Food Project with the mission to promote the scholarly study of food in the

Texas Gulf Coast Region. The lecture is supported by the National Endowment for the

Humanities; UH’s Center for Public History Lecture Series, Women’s, Gender &

Sexuality Studies; Women’s Resource Center and the Honors College Medicine and

Society Program.