Priya Fielding-Singh (Sociology, Stanford University) will visit Cornell in November as part of the course Controversies about Inequality to present her talk, "Understanding Nutritional Inequality in America: The Limits and Promise of Food Access"

Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. In this talk, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh draws on her years of field research to bring us into the kitchens of dozens of families to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. At the heart of Fielding-Singh's talk will be covering her powerful and timely book, How the Other Half Eats: the Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America. The book unpacks nutritional inequality in America through an examination of class, race and health, intimately following four families across the income spectrum in an exploration of the meaning of food itself. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ diets through fixing food deserts. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can access: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself. Once you've taken a seat with Fielding-Singh at dinner tables across America, you'll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again.

Priya Fielding-Singh is a sociologist and ethnographer. She is currently a Senior Manager of Research and Education at the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation. Her research and writing examine issues of social, economic and racial justice, with a focus on food and nutrition equity alongside maternal and child health. Her first book, How the Other Half Eats: the Untold Story of Food andInequality,draws on years of field research she conducted on families' diets in the San Francisco Bay Area to illuminate the complex drivers of diet disparities. Priya received her PhD in Sociology from Stanford University and completed her postdoctoral fellowship as a National Institutes of Health Scholar in Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at the Stanford University School of Medicine.