Last month, Ithaca’s first Farm to Plate Conference was launched as a collaboration between Groundswell Center for Local Food and Farming and Cornell University’s Development Sociology Department to celebrate and discuss challenges around “uniting for a just and sustainable food system.”

Faculty and staff from the Cornell MPH program contributed as both academics and practitioners. Audrey Baker, MPA, teamed up with Cornell Cooperative Extension’s school and community garden coordinator to facilitate a roundtable discussion about food- and farm- based education. Audrey is the Accreditation and Evaluation Specialist with the MPH program, and an instructor with the MPH Food Systems and Health concentration team. She is also a liaison between the MPH program and Ithaca’s food and farming community, where she has coordinated farm-to-school programs for almost nine years.

Two members of the MPH team also presented with a panel of other academics and practitioners on topics related to integrating food production systems. Dr. Katie Fiorella, lead instructor for the MPH Food Systems and Health Concentration and organizer for this panel discussed her work in fisheries in Kenya and how environmental change impacts food, livelihoods and nutritional security. Audrey Baker then discussed some of the environmental governance literature on local food system interventions and neoliberalism. Other presentations in the panel touched on the integration of global fishery and livestock operations, the silvo-pasturing of cattle in the northeast United States, and using agricultural waste products as substrates for mushroom cultivation.

For more information about the Farm to Plate conference, check out Groundswell’s Farm to Plate Conference Re-Cap.

This was written by Audrey Baker, MPA, Accreditation and Evaluation Specialist with the MPH program.