Vanishing Foods of the Americas: Coffee, Chocolate, and Quinoa

Date: 

Wednesday, November 18, 2020, 6:00pm to 7:00pm


This virtual event is part of the Food Security in the Americas Series. To watch the recording, click here.

Stuart McCook, Professor of History, University of Guelph
Coffee is Not Forever

Ana Rita García Lascuráin, Founder and Director, Museo del Chocolate
Chocolate: Biodiversity and Developing/Rebuilding Community 

Marygold Walsh-Dilley, Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of New Mexico
Quinoa's Uncertain Future

Moderated by: Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico; Co-Chair, Faculty Committee on Mexico, DRCLAS, Harvard University

Stuart McCook is Professor of History at the University of Guelph. His research explores the history of the environmental sciences in the tropics, and the environmental history of tropical crops, especially coffee. His most recent book is Coffee is not Forever: A Global History of the Coffee Leaf Rust (Ohio University Press, 2019), which explores the spread of a catastrophic coffee disease, and attempts to control it. It received the Agricultural History Society’s Wallace Prize for the best book on agricultural history outside the United States. His current project is a global environmental history of coffee.

 

Ana Rita García Lascuráin is the founder and Director of Fundación Mucho, the Chocolate Museum in Mexico City (2010). MUCHO is an educational center promoting knowledge, communication, research and creative production related to one of Mesoamerica’s most important contributions to world culture: chocolate. She is a member of the Conservation International Council of the Americas, and has collaborated since 2014 with CI’s team on cacao and biodiversity projects in Mexico. Ana Rita is a chocolate maker, working with Mexican native cacaos and other endemic foods. Trained as an architect, she is a founder of DGL (De Pirro & Garcia Lascurain Architects), an architecture and urban design firm established in 1993.  She holds a BA degree in Architecture and Urban Design from Universidad Iberoamericana, and a Master's degree in Real Estate Business from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

 

Marygold Walsh-Dilley is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico. Using political ecological, feminist, and decolonial approaches, her work focuses on agrarian change and climate change, primarily in the Andes region of South America. She has worked with and alongside quinoa producers for two decades. She holds a Master's degree in Applied Economics (Development Economics) and a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University.

Presented in collaboration with the Department of the History of Science

See also: Virtual, Mexico