Marina Mefleh will present her research, The Future of Plant-Based Foods through Fermentation, Consumer Acceptance, and Policy Frameworks. The research aims to explore the role of fermentation in improving plant-based food and it examines the challenges of scaling up, consumer acceptance, and regulatory compliance, highlighting the need for innovative solutions and clear policy guidelines to support the sustainable transition of food production.
Valentina Peveri will give a talk titled Hybridity in the Tropical Garden drawing on her unfinished ethnographic work on gardens and green spaces in Southern Ethiopia, once again reflecting on how the rhizomatic resilience of local communities' interconnected ecology has been honed through hybridization and mixture.
Marina Mefleh’s areas of research include the development of sustainable plant-based foods with good nutritional profiles using various alternative sources of protein. She has been working on the sustainability and biodiversity of ancient kinds of wheat and their suitability in bread production. She has published many articles in the areas of food fermentation, plant-based alternatives to dairy products, and grain quality of old kinds of wheat grown in the Mediterranean region under low nitrogen input. She serves as an advisor to the bakery and farming industries within the framework of current agri-food and trade policy context. She also worked as a nutritionist in a private clinic in Beirut.
Since 2004 Valentina Peveri has carried out fieldwork in Southern Ethiopia on the robust constitution of an indigenous plant and of the (women) farmers who cultivate it. Her goal as an anthropologist has been to explore the links between agriculture, natural resources, crop/livelihood choices, and food security, and especially to provide evidence of the role of gender in these relationships. In 2017, Prof. Peveri was awarded one of eight prestigious fellowships by the Wenner Gren Foundation for her research project entitled The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia. An Ethnographic Journey into Landscapes of Diversity and Hunger.