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UC Davis
Department of Food Science & Technology Special Seminar
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
2:10 PM
Sensory Theater
Robert Mondavi Institute

Solomon Katz
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania

“The nutritional significance of the biocultural evolution of cuisine practices: implications for the future of the food system”

ABSTRACT: Over the last two decades there is substantial evidence that a coevolution occurred between the Neolithic rise of agriculture and the social routinization of cuisine practices. This coevolutionary process involving our cultures, genomes and microbiomes allowed a relatively small number of highly productive crops to replace the much broader pre-Neolithic diet with a series of exo-digestive food processing technologies that provided the necessary transformations to maintain the nutritional balance of our agricultural diets. This seminar tracks these evolutionary processes and their implications for the contemporary human diet as humanity adapts to rapidly changing demands on our food system over the remainder of this century and beyond.

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