CROP 2012 Lecture Series

[Vanessa Smith]

Hello,

Please join us and help spread the word for the first speaker of the Chicago Rarities Orchard Project 2012 Lecture Series:

Jennifer Jordan, associate professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Tuesday, April 24
Haas Park Field house, 2404 N Washtenaw, Chicago
6 p.m.
Free admission

Please visit the "What's Happening" sidebar of the CROP website for more information about the full series - www.chicagorarities.org

Lecture description:
Across Europe, the US, and elsewhere, people are paying increasing attention to “heirlooms,” seeking to preserve endangered edible plants and animals, but also the kinds of meanings attached to these foods. Food is deeply intertwined with memory, and fruit is no exception. This talk will focus on apples in particular, and the ways that apples and other fruit capture shared understandings of the past, and the ways that a diverse array of farmers, chefs, activists, and gardeners have been working to preserve disappearing apples—the profound array of flavors, colors, textures, and shapes, and well as family memories and local histories, and biodiversity. Apples themselves, as well as the trees and the landscapes they create, are deeply connected to shared understandings of the past and future, and to collective memory and identity. Farmers, gardeners, pomologists, and other passionate savers of seeds and trees create fecund pockets of biodiversity across the country, often off the grid, decentralized ways of holding on to the past but also looking toward the future.

Bio:
Jennifer Jordan is an associate professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, 2006) as well as numerous articles about cities, memory, and food. She is currently finishing a book about the heirloom food phenomenon.

Many thanks,
Vanessa Smith
CROP Board Member