Mbuli Charles Boliko

Director of FAO Liaison Office in Japan

(Message from FAO Liaison office in Japan) “The FAO Liaison Office in Japan” was established in 1997 and is based in Yokohama. It undertakes a series of activities aimed at facilitating information exchange, fostering mutual understanding and promoting collaboration between FAO and the people of Japan on issues pertaining to food and nutrition security around the world. As such, the office constantly interacts with key ministries, national and international agencies, NGOs, schools, universities and research centers, private companies and the public at large. For many years, the Government of Japan has been one of the top contributors to the regular budget of FAO, thereby greatly supporting international efforts to increase food production and raise levels of nutrition in developing countries, especially in rural areas, and to strengthen the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises. This is a fundamental endeavor to eradicate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition from the surface of the earth, where an unacceptable 795 million people still cannot eat enough to live a decent life and properly contribute to development.

Liu Guangwei

Chinese Master Chef, founder of Eatology, president of the World Eatology Forum, dean of the Beijing Eatology Research Institute.

Liu Guangwei, Chinese Master Chef, founder of Eatology, president of the World Eatology Forum, dean of the Beijing Eatology Research Institute. In 2013, the Introduction to Eatology was published, and the basic framework of the human eatology science system was proposed. In 2017, he founded the World Eatology Forum which was successively held in Beijing, China in 2018 and Osaka, Japan in 2019. In 2018, he published Eatology, proposed the 3-32 system of the eatology discipline, and the ten eating-related problems of the 21st century. In 2019, he published the Eatology Terminology, Eatology (English version), and Eatology (Japanese version).

Arnold Toynbee

Historian, Philosopher of History

Arnold Joseph Toynbee, was a British historian, philosopher of history, author of numerous books and research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College in the University of London. Toynbee in the 1918–1950 period was a leading specialist on international affairs. He is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–1961). With his prodigious output of papers, articles, speeches and presentations, and numerous books translated into many languages, Toynbee was a widely read and discussed scholar in the 1940s and 1950s. However, by the 1960s his magnum opus had fallen out of favor among mainstream historians and his vast readership had faded.

Conrad Kottak

Anthropologist

Conrad Kottak is an American anthropologist. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and he did extensive research in Brazil and Madagascar, visiting societies there and writing books about them. He then wrote several textbooks, including Window on Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Anthropology; Madagascar: Society and History, and Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity and Cultural Anthropology, which are often used by colleges and high schools in the United States. He is currently a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he has been teaching since 1968. He believes that various American legends and stories, such as Star Trek, Star Wars and the Thanksgiving story are growing into a type of mythology which someday might be comparable to Greek, Roman, or other stories which today are considered to be myths. Kottak has received several honors for his work. Among these awards is an excellence in teaching award by the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts of the University of Michigan in 1992, and the American Anthropological Association (AAA)/Mayfield Award for Excellence in the Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology in 1999. He was elected to the membership of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.

Henry Kissinger

Former U.S. Secretary of State and Expert on International Issues

Jared Diamond

Geographer, Anthropologist, Historian, and Author

Jared Diamond is an American geographer, anthropologist, historian, and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005); and The World Until Yesterday (2012). Originally trained in physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA. After graduation from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands. Later, in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became a professor of geography at UCLA, his current position. He also teaches at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. He won the National Medal of Science in 1999 and Westfield State University granted him an honorary doctorate in 2009.

Jean Drèze

Economist and Activist

Jean Drèze is a Belgian-born Indian economist and activist. He has worked on several developmental issues facing India like hunger, famine, gender inequality. His co-authors include Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen, with whom he has written on famine, Nicholas Stern, with whom he has written on policy reform when market prices are distorted, and Nobel laureate in economics Angus Deaton. He is currently an honorary Professor at the Delhi School of Economics, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University. He was a member of the National Advisory Council of India in both first and second term, but only for a year each time. He excused himself after the first year both times.

Jeremy Rifkin

Economic and Social Theorist, Writer, Public Speaker, Political Advisor, and Activist

Jeremy Rifkin is the author of 20 books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), The Third Industrial Revolution(2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), and The European Dream (2004). Rifkin is the principal architect of the Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. The Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission. The Huffington Post reported from Beijing in October 2015 that "Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has not only read Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Third Industrial Revolution, but taken it to heart", he and his colleagues having incorporated ideas from this book into the core of the country's thirteenth Five-Year Plan. According to EurActiv, "Jeremy Rifkin is an American economist and author whose best-selling Third Industrial Revolution arguably provided the blueprint for Germany's transition to a low-carbon economy, and China's strategic acceptance of climate policy."

Kevin Kelly

Executive Editor

Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. Kelly was born in Pennsylvania on August 14, 1952, and graduated from Westfield High School, Westfield, New Jersey, in 1970. Through his father, an executive for Time who used systems analysis in his work, Kelly developed an early interest in cybernetics. He attended the University of Rhode Island for one year, studying geology. Kelly began contributing freelance articles to CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, while living in Athens, Georgia. Around this time he was also editing his own start-up magazine called Walking Journal, and working in an epidemiology laboratory to support himself. Kelly's writing has appeared in many other national and international Publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harper's Magazine, Science, Veneer Magazine, GQ, and Esquire. His photographs have appeared in Life and other American national magazines.[citation needed] Kelly's book-length Publications, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (1994), presents a view on the mechanisms of complex organization. The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organisations, intelligent computers, and to the human brain.

Margaret Visser

Writer and Broadcaster

Margaret Visser is a writer and broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Paris, and South West France. Her subject matter is the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life. Born in South Africa, she attended school in Zambia, Zimbabwe, France (the Sorbonne) and the University of Toronto Canada where she earned a PhD in Classics. Visser taught Greek and Latin at York University north of Toronto for 18 years. For several years Visser regularly appeared on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular radio program Morningside in conversations with Peter Gzowski. Her writing has won many awards, including the Glenfiddich Award for Food Book of the Year in Britain in 1989, the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Literary Food Writing Award, and the Jane Grigson Award. Visser delivered the 2002 CBC Massey Lectures. Her topic was "Beyond Fate."

Marion Nestle

Professor of Sociology at New York University, Visiting professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University

Marion Nestle is an American academic. She is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She is also a professor of Sociology at NYU and a visiting professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. From 1976 to 1986, Nestle was associate dean for human biology and taught nutrition at the UCSF School of Medicine. From 1986 to 1988, she was senior nutrition policy advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services and editor of the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. In 1988, she was appointed Chair of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, she held the position until 2003. In 1996, she founded the Food Studies program at New York University with food consultant Clark Wolf. She hoped that the new program of study would raise the public’s awareness of food and its role in culture, society, and personal nutrition. It not only succeeded but inspired other universities to launch their own programs. Her research examines scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice, obesity, and food safety, emphasizing the role of food marketing. Through her role at NYU and her book, Food Politics (2002), she has become a national influencer of food policy, nutrition, and food education.

Michael Heasman

Researcher, Teacher, Writer and Consultant

Michael has been a researcher, teacher, writer and consultant in the area of food policy for more than 25 years. His most recent book is the fully revised 2nd edition of Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds, and Markets (2015) written with Professor Tim Lang. He has worked at a number of universities as a teacher and researcher including the University of Bradford, Harper Adams University, Aalborg University, Metropol (Copenhagen), University of Alberta, the Centre for Food Policy (now at City University, London), University of Reading, and the School of Oriental and African Studies. He completed his PhD at the Food Policy Research Unit, University of Bradford. Michael has also worked as a freelance consultant for government, business and civil society organisations in a number of European countries, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and is co-author of two further books Consumption in the Age of Affluence: the World of Food (1996) and The Functional Foods Revolution: Healthy People, Healthy Profits? (2001).

Shek Mao straight road

Anthropologist

Daily Story: Food Evolution from Acorn to Sushi

Paul Freedman

Professor of History at Yale University

Paul H. Freedman is the Chester D Tripp Professor of History at Yale University. He specializes in medieval social history, the history of Spain, the study of medieval peasantry, and medieval cuisine. Freedman was awarded a BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MLS from the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in History at Berkeley in 1978 and then taught for 18 years at Vanderbilt University before joining the Yale faculty in 1997. His 1999 book Images of the Medieval Peasant won the Medieval Academy's prestigious Haskins Medal.

Raj Patel

A British Indian American Academic, Journalist, Activist and Writer

Raj Patel is a British Indian American academic, journalist, activist and writer who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States for extended periods. He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing." Patel is an educator and academic. He has written articles and books. He is possibly best known for his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. In 2009, he published The Value of Nothing which was on The New York Times best-seller list during February 2010. In 2017, he published, with co-author Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press). He has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin. Patel is listed as a Research Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin.

Sidney Mintz

Anthropologist

Sidney Mintz Mintz was born in Dover, New Jersey. He studied at Brooklyn College, earning his B.A in psychology in 1943. After enlisting in the US Army Air Corps for the remainder of World War II, he enrolled in the doctoral program in anthropology at Columbia University and completed a dissertation on sugar-cane plantation workers in Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict. was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career. Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential Publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.

Thomas Eriksen

Anthropologist

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Norwegian anthropologist. He is currently a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, as well as the 2015-2016 president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Born in Oslo, Eriksen has done fieldwork in Trinidad and Mauritius, and later in Norway and Australia. He is currently doing research on scale and globalisation in the Seychelles. His fields of research include identity, nationalism, globalisation and identity politics. Eriksen finished his dr. polit. degree in 1991, and was made a professor in 1995, at the age of 33. From 1993 to 2001 he was editor of the bimonthly cultural journal Samtiden. In 2011, Eriksen was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Under the heading "OVERHEATING", he directed research on three major crises of globalisation—economy/finance, environment/climate and identity/culture. This project is both comparative and interdisciplinary. Starting in late 2012, it was completed in 2017.

Tim Lang

Professor of Food Policy

Tim Lang has been Professor of Food Policy at City University’s Centre for Food Policy since 2002. He was a hill farmer in the 1970s and for the last 38 years has engaged in public and academic research and debate about food policy. He’s been an advisor to many bodies, from the European Commissioner for the Environment to the Mayor of London. He was Commissioner on the UK Government’s Sustainable Development Commission from 2006 to 2011. He is co-author of Ecological Public Health (Routledge, 2012), Food Policy (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Food Wars (Earthscan, 2004)

Tom Nealon

Writer of Food History

Tom Standage

Journalist and Author

Tom Standage is a journalist and author from England. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked as a science and technology writer for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, as the deputy editor at The Economist, has been published in Wired, and The New York Times. A consistent approach of his is the use of historical analogy in science, technology and business writing. He has published a collection of articles and surveys from The Economist and six books, including The Victorian Internet. This book explores the historical development of the telegraph and the social ramifications associated with this development. Tom Standage also proposes that if Victorians from the 19th century were to be around today, they would be far from impressed with present Internet capabilities. This is because the development of the telegraph essentially mirrored the development of the Internet. Both technologies can be seen to have largely increased the speed and transmission of information and both were widely criticised by some, due to their perceived negative consequences. Tom's most recent work is Writing on the Wall (2013).

William H. McNeill

Historian

Yuval Noah Harari

Historian, Professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). His writings examine free will, consciousness, and intelligence. Harari first specialized in medieval history and military history in his studies from 1993 to 1998 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his PhD degree at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2002, under the supervision of Steven J. Gunn. From 2003 to 2005 he pursued postdoctoral studies in history as a Yad Hanadiv Fellow. He has published numerous books and articles, including Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100–1550; The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000; The Concept of 'Decisive Battles' in World History; and Armchairs, Coffee and Authority: Eye-witnesses and Flesh-witnesses Speak about War, 1100–2000. He now specializes in world history and macro-historical processes. His book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was published in Hebrew in 2011 and then in English in 2014; it has since been translated into some 45 additional languages. The book surveys the entire length of human history, from the evolution of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age up to the political and technological revolutions of the 21st century. The Hebrew edition became a bestseller in Israel, and generated much interest among the general public, turning Harari into a celebrity. YouTube video clips of Harari's Hebrew lectures on the history of the world have been viewed by tens of thousands of Israelis.

Shimoto Minji

Medical expert

Professor, Doctor of Biological Resources Science, Faculty of University of Japan. Vice President of Japan Food System Society, Member of Globalization and Food Value Chain Promotion Association of Japan Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Chairman of Review Committee of Globalization of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce of Japan Ministry of Economy and Industry (2013-2015), Visiting Fellow of Cornell University (1993-1994). International trade and investment in the food system in Asia and the Pacific

Massimo Bottura

Activist,cook

Massimo Bottura (born 30 September 1962) is an Italian restaurateur and the chef patron of Osteria Francescana, a three-Michelin-star restaurant based in Modena,[1] Italy which has been listed in the top 5 at The World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards since 2010 and received top ratings from ESPRESSO, Gambero Rosso and the Touring Club guides.[2] After first winning the 50 Best Restaurants in 2016 Bottura announced the refettorio that he had established in Milan the year before would continue and went on to form the cultural foundation Food for Soul.[3] Bottura spends a lot of time in New York City for spreading the Italian culinary world and tradition. Osteria Francescana was ranked The World's 2nd Best Restaurant at the S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards 2015. In June 2016 Osteria Francescana was ranked No. 1 in The World's 50 Best Restaurants, and No. 2 in 2017. The restaurant was again ranked No. 1 in The World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2018.Massimo Bottura, the founder of the non-profit organization Food for Soul, devotes his time and energy to raise social awareness of food wastage and hunger,calls for social responsibility among culinary communities worldwide to take action.