- "Food Labeling Chaos" (Keynote). Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director of Sustainability and Professor of Public Policy at George Washington University. Merrigan was Deputy Secretary of Agriculture in the Obama administration. She led a fascinating workshop on sustainability in dietary guidance in 2014, leading to a 2015 commentary in Science (whose co-authors included my Tufts colleague Tim Griffin and myself), which was part of the discussion and debate around sustainability issues in the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
- "Deal or No Deal, What Do You See in a Label?" John Bernard, Professor, Department of Applied Economics & Statistics, University of Delaware. John is an old friend from graduate school at Cornell. His recent research addresses fascinating topics in food labeling, including (a) one article in Food Policy anticipating what will type of mess will happen if cloned meat and dairy products enter the marketplace without labeling rules, and (b) another article in Food Quality & Preference with amusing results about how much more highly consumers rate the taste of equivalent food products when they are labeled organic compared to when they are not labeled.
- "State of the Evidence: Organic vs. Non-Organic." Qi Sun, Associate Professor of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
- "Creating a Sustainable Food System: What Matters and What Counts?" Amanda Beal, President and Chief Executive Officer, Maine Farmland Trust. Beal is a Tufts Friedman School alum and a great source of insight about local farming and fisheries in Maine.
A registration link and more information about this annual symposium, in honor of former dean Stanley Gershoff, are here.
