The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy

For many, September is the season of returning to school.

This blog grew out of a second-year master's-level course each Fall on "Determinants of U.S. Food Policy," at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Students and alumni frequently share comments and suggest ideas for posts on this site. Though I don't always mention the connection, this blog also links to things former students are doing elsewhere online. Tufts is a great place for this type of engagement with real-world issues. Other faculty members blog as a form of public communication, and the university has a long-standing commitment to active citizenship.

This year, the first food policy class was today. It is a good time to send some links to interesting sources of news and food policy ideas at the Friedman School. For more information, I have just added a permanent image link in the sidebar to the School's web site.

The school covers a diverse area of work, from community interventions to improve diet and physical activity in the United States to humanitarian work in some of the most challenging settings around the world. For many readers, the most relevant academic areas are the Agriculture, Food, and Environment (AFE) program and the Food Policy and Applied Nutrition (FPAN) program. The FPAN program has a working paper series, including recent research on rethinking food security in humanitarian response (.pdf), a major study on diet diversity (.pdf), and hunger mapping in developing countries (.pdf) (image below). More research from the school can be found on the faculty pages.

A high-profile event at the school each Fall is the Friedman Symposium. This year, the event is scheduled for Sep. 24-26, and will feature former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman as the keynote speaker. Despite sponsorship from major food companies, the symposium registration is fairly expensive for most people (though a more reasonable $100 for students). Other important annual events include the graduate student research conference, which last Spring drew diverse contributors from 11 universities, and the annual Gershoff Symposium.