Charlotte Biltekoff is Associate Professor of American Studies and Food Science and Technology at the University of California Davis, where she builds bridges between scientific and cultural approaches to questions about food and health. Broadly, her work focuses on the relationships between food and culture (i.e. beliefs and values) and food and the social order (i.e. relationships between people). More specifically, her expertise centers on understanding where ideas about “good” and “bad” food come from, the social and cultural roles they play, and their political stakes. She is the author of Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (Duke University Press, 2013), an exploration of the social and cultural dimensions of dietary advice and the changing meaning of “eating right” over the last century. She is currently working on a book about the role that contests over scientific authority and expertise play in contemporary food politics, particularly in relation to the food industry’s response to growing critiques of “processed food.” She is also a PI on the AFTeR Project, a multidisciplinary research project across 3 UC campuses examining the Bay Area Agri-Food Tech sector. Funded by NSF, the project produces an understanding of the interests, principles, rhetoric, social relationships, and institutional forces that are guiding the sector as a whole. Biltekoff has published work in academic journals that span a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary terrain and has made cross-disciplinary collaboration a core facet of her research, teaching, and service efforts. At UC Davis she teaches classes on food and culture, as well as innovation in the food system.

Website: http://www.charlottebiltekoff.com/