Food Words: Popular Food Literacy Conversation Corner

This conversation corner was inspired by a conversation about popular food literacy and frameworks for food systems education. Asking event participants to share concepts and questions they think are important to conversations about food literacy and food systems, this installation gives people a chance to prepare for and contribute to discussions related to food and society, especially with people who might use different words or mean different things by their Food Words.

FoodWords is part of a larger program to explore food and agriculture issues, focused on a translational glossary and “finding guides” to help create “guard rails” for the perilous paths conversations can take when people from different perspectives try to talk about how they would like to improve food, or navigate various collections of food and agriculture knowledge resources. This multi-perspective glossary of key words that people use to describe food and agriculture will help us create an online forum for sharing stories about food and agriculture, focusing on efforts to make food and agriculture good or better. Minnesota is an extraordinary hotbed of activity related to food, and this project seeks to build on the momentum of efforts to support and improve food by making stories about engagement with food more usable to public and scholarly audiences. This project starts with existing clusters of stories. It provides means to create curriculum modules for investigating food topics based on those stories and to curate an archive into a usable—and publicly expandable—collection.

*Location: east side first floor study lounge