Revolutionary Flavor

Are you ready for the revolution? Participants in the University of Vermont’s 2012 Food Systems Summit [1] are. The first annual week of events brings together luminaries and emerging leaders in regional food systems for educational programs and talks.

Cynthia Belliveau [2], UVM’s dean of continuing education and a professor of nutrition and food sciences, credits “visionary” interim president John Bramley with the idea for the event. “He looked at me and said, ‘We need our own summit, a yearly occurrence to discuss these very gnarly issues with a group of people from around the globe and help us start to create intellectual research agendas for these topics,’” recalls Belliveau.

The summit’s largest event is a public conference on Thursday, June 28, from 1 to 6:30 p.m., titled “The Necessary (r)Evolution for Sustainable Food Systems Conference.” [3] Speakers will gather for 10- to 15-minute TEDx-style talks with titles such as “Businesses for a Hungry Planet.”

The conference is sold out, with a waiting list. The talks will be live-streaming, however, with several places in Vermont to join a viewing party. So far, hosts include Burlington restaurant ¡Duino! (Duende) [4], the Vermont Fresh Network [5], Chelsea Green Publishing [6] in White River Junction and the New England Culinary Institute [7] in Montpelier. The event will also be live-tweeted with the hashtag #UVMsummit.

Off campus, UVM is cosponsoring a NetSquared event, “Locavore 2.0: Food + Tech Entrepreneurs.” [8] On June 27 at 6 p.m., at Maglianero Café [9] in Burlington, speakers will discuss their farm- and food-focused start-ups. They’ll include Jeff Gangemi of FarmPlate and Kevin Lehman of Three Revolutions, a crowd-funding platform dedicated to food and agriculture.

As the kickoff to an annual event, Belliveau says she expects this summit to effect real change: “We’re calling it the revolution, so we’re not kidding around.”