Professor Kevin Morgan recently attended the Pennsylvania Institute for Urban Research’s path-breaking “Feeding Cities” conference.
The Pennsylvania Gazette wrote of the conference:
A food-policy wonk needn’t look far these days to find disaster or the threat of one. So it was no surprise that the Penn Institute for Urban Research’s path-breaking “Feeding Cities” conference, held in Houston Hall in March, raised red flags by the dozen. But it wasn’t until near the end of the second day that someone came up with a zinger equal to the task of showing how truly bizarre the global food system has become.
During a panel discussion on peri-urban farmland preservation, Kevin Morgan, a professor of governance and development at Cardiff University in the UK, allowed himself a brief digression on the horsemeat scandal that shook Europe this past winter.
“By the way,” he quipped, “we think it’s the most extraordinary example in human history where food adulteration actually improved the nutritional quality of the food.”