Welcome back readers. Hopefully everyone managed to recuperate from the stresses of coursework during thanksgiving break. The 5 day weekend allowed us to nourish our souls with good food and company (and a chance to catch up on work if needed). Nourishment is an important aspect of our lives, we all need some form of it to lead a well-conditioned lifestyle. The term nourish is an interesting word that can be manipulated in various ways that hold different meanings. The Salon committee tackled the way nourish can mean for different circumstances, and brought ideas of nourishment that are worth spreading to the intimate platform of a TEDxOhioStateUniversity Salon event.
The Salon committee is a newly formed committee in our organization. The committee operates under an individual TED license. With six members and a committee director, Salon orchestrates free and personable TED events that generate discussions on a micro scale here on campus. They keep the Ohio State community engaged with TED and TEDxOhioStateUniversity with Salon events throughout the year. These events provide an outlet for students and faculty to be part of conversations on issues other than the ones discussed in our main event in the spring. Salon events tackle specific topics in an intimate atmosphere to allow the viewer to feel incorporated in the conversation. The committee handles everything from topic selection, event planning, and event execution. They have hand selected the speakers and coached the speakers to create the most efficient first salon event.
The first installment of TEDxOhioStateUniveristy’s inaugural series — Nourish; dealt with how food nourishes our souls, minds and communities. Nourish featured students and faculty from Ohio State’s College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Science and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity who each generated unique and thought-provoking conversations on how food plays a pivotal role in our lives and communities. The importance of tackling a specific topic such as Nourish in an intimate atmosphere it is not only able to educate, but also inspire the audience to think about ways to tackle nourishment in our own communities. Central Ohio is devastated by the disparity of food stability within communities. TEDxOhioStateUniversitySalon tackles the food instability prevalent in Columbus, while also discussing how conceptions of nourishment can affect the lives we lead.
The first speaker of the night was Glennon Sweeney. Sweeney is a senior research associate at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the community assessment and metropolitan charge unit. An aspect that her vast focuses on is food security in metropolitan neighborhoods. Her talk explored the racially systematic policies that divide our society, and such policies continue to sustain the food insecurity issues in certain parts of our Columbus neighborhoods. The poor in Columbus aren’t poor by choice, but by design of the policies that enforce them to remain in impoverished life. The talk illuminated the stark differences of locations such as Franklinton vs Dublin, and how policies and practices have shaped such segregation in the 20th and 21st century. The issue of systematic racial oppression is a heavy topic that must be discussed in order for change to occur.
Our second speaker flipped the narrative of nourishment from the issue of food sustainability for communities to viewing food as a community builder. Ayna Arora is a senior in Food Science at Ohio State University with a minor in Entrepreneurship. She built her craft by attending a pastry school school in Australia which exposed her to opportunities such as working under some of the best pastry chefs across the Asia Pacific region. Her talk revolved around how she is using food to build a community through her Sweet Talks project. Through the Sweet Talks Project, Ayna is able to address heavy topics such as body image in a fun and creative way — through deserts. She has created pastries that resemble menstrual cups to generate the conversation of women’s health and break the stigma around the conversations of women's health.
Our final speaker, Jessica Cooperstone is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Horticulture and Crop Science and Food Science and Technology at the Ohio State University. Her talk illuminates the lack of scientific consensus on the what is the “ideal diet”. Magazines and “Food Expert Websites” skew scientific information to sell a food item as either ideal or unhealthy. Cooperstone used her scientific lab research to break down the various lies around the claims that “experts” make which constitute an ideal diet.
All of these speakers collectively brought the ideas of nourishment to the TEDxOhioStateUniversitySalon platform. The salon committee effectively selected speakers who had diverse ideas of nourishment, and brought them together to create our first Salon event. The most intense round of applause for the Salon Committee! Stay tuned for our next blogpost which will illustrate a speaker perspective of the Nourish event. Keep checking our blog updates to see which speaker’s perspective you’ll read about next week!