ISO Announces First Symposium

The International Students’ Organization (ISO) will be hosting Middlebury’s first ever Food and Globalization Week. Running Mar. 4-11, the event — dubbed “F&G Week” for short — will tie together global issues with the academic study of food.

ISO Vice President Mika Tan ’15 has been working on this project with the organization’s symposium committee since November of last year.

“We wanted to do a huge symposium as our first flagship spring event,” Tan said. In the fall, the organization holds the annual ISO Cultural Show.

However, since its early planning stages, the project has been scaled down from the large academic symposium it originally intended to be.

“We realized our main goal is to showcase the diversity of our student body on campus,” Tan said. “So we decided that [F&G Week] doesn’t have to stay academic. We can have fun things, too.”

Tan struggled to find a specific word to categorize F&G Week. “It’s not a symposium, and it’s not a conference.” Eventually, Tan settled on the following: a collection of separate but interrelated activities that celebrate food and culture.

Helen Wu ’16.5 is a board member on the planning committee for F&G and considered other themes such as art and music before ultimately settling on food.

“I think food has the power to gather people together,” said Wu. “Eating food is an occasion to share experiences. It’s an occasion to share history, culture, and geography.”

The activities planned for F&G Week will fall into one of two categories—culture or academics. The cultural category will include food tastings, cooking lessons, and film screenings. A themed Atwater dinner is also being prepared. The academic category of activities will include lectures and panel discussions on topics related to food and culture.

Dr. Teresa Mares, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont, will be the week’s featured speaker. Her work has focused on changes in Latino and Latina diets following migration. Panel speakers for F&G Week will include Middlebury’s own Lois B. Watson Professor of French Paula Schwartz, Gordon Schuster Professor of Anthropology Ellen Oxfeld, and Visiting Professor of Geography Kacy McKinney.

Many activities for the week will be held by other student organizations. Clubs currently planning to hold events include Hillel, Alianza, the Japanese Club and the Southern Society.

“I think a great part of planning this event has been the collaboration with everyone,” said Tan.

The Japanese Club will be holding a cooking workshop where students can learn to make dumplings.

“Our main goal is to help others discover Japanese culture,” said Dew Nawarat ’14, the club’s president.

The Southern Society will hold a Mardi Gras event showcasing Louisiana Cajun food. On the menu are beignets, gumbo, jambalaya and king cake.

“As most students at Middlebury have never been to Mardi Gras or Louisiana, we hope to bring a little bit of the South to New England,” Southern Society President Zack Strauss ’15 wrote in an email.

At the end of F&G Week, ISO hopes that all Middlebury students will gain a deeper appreciation for the diversity of their student body.

“The process is meant to be as fun as it is intellectually stimulating, and we really hope that students will begin to view the connections between themselves and the many cultures that populate their community,” said ISO President Joanne Wu ’15.