Wednesday, May 2, 7:15 pm

Wed, May 6, 7:15 pm, Goodman Community Center
"Finding the Roots of the American Food Industry Beneath the Cannery Floor" by Anna Zeide.
Before there were the food industry giants of today, there were small, independent canning companies, spread across the eastern half of the United States. From these humble beginnings grew the huge industry we know today, which has increasingly come under attack for what many commentators see as the negative effects the industry's products have on our country's health, economy, and environment. These effects are underpinned by the industry's manipulation of consumers through media, of government agencies through lobbyists, and of science through industry-funded research. But these features are not products of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather, these complex relationships find their roots over a hundred years earlier, in the late nineteenth century, when the modern food industry first began to take shape, on the cannery floor. This talk will offer stories about the birth and growth of commercial canning.

Anna Zeide is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Program for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. She active in many food and community initiatives at the University and throughout Madison. Anna writes about food ethics and politics on her blog, Dining and Opining, and on the environmental website, Grist.

Photo: Avenue Food Shop in Madison, circa 1931.

Photo courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, #19414.

June 6, 2012. 7:15pm. – "Juliette Gordon: Low and the History of the Girl Scout Cookie," with Shannon Henry Kleiber, author of On My Honor: Real Life Lessons From America's First Girl Scout.

Photo: Girl Scouts try to build a fire in order to do outdoor cookery. Camp Brandenburg, near Springfield, WI. 1945.

Photo courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, # 43546.

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NO MEETING in July due to the holiday falling on our regular meeting date.