Horning Lecture - Steven Shapin, Harvard University
"Eating Good in the Neighborhood: The Medical and Moral History of Dietary Localism"
Thursday, May 15, 2008 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
In late 2007 the Oxford University Press anointed "locavore" Word of the Year. The word was made up in 2005 by some San Franciscans who thought it a good idea to eat only foods produced within a 100
mile radius. Their view is that we should be locavores because it is good for the palate and good for the planet. They also tend to believe that we should reject modern globalization and return to
the local ways of the past. But have locavores gotten their history right? This lecture explores how medical and moral traditions from antiquity to recent times have thought about local and exotic
diets and reflects on changing conceptions of the self and the place of food in our lives.
Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life and
Wetenschap is cultuur (Science is Culture), both written with Simon Schaffer, and A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England and The
Scientific Revolution. Shapin’s newest book The Life of Science: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation will appear in September 2008. Shapin writes regularly for the London
Review of Books and recently for The New Yorker.His current research interests include historical and contemporary studies of dietetics, the nature of entrepreneurial science, and
modern relations between academia and industry.
