NLCC 2025: Food Power Politics

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2025
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
ROLLING RIVER BISTRO
TICKETS – $28.29 – PURCHASE HERE

Join us for a thought-provoking lunch event featuring Dr. Bobby J. Smith II, author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. In this timely and powerful conversation, Dr. Smith will explore how food shaped Black freedom struggles in Mississippi—from dinner tables to protest lines.

As you hear the stories behind the book, you’ll also taste them. The lunch will feature dishes inspired by the very foods discussed in Food Power Politics, bringing the narrative to life through a curated, sensory experience.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to engage with the history, culture, and politics of food in the South—with the author himself as your guide.

About the book:

This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives.Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.

About the author:

Dr. Bobby J. Smith II is an award-winning author, social scientist, and Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and Fellow in the Policy Design Lab in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign with affiliations in the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science.

Trained as a sociologist, with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith’s research, teaching, and service creates a public interdisciplinary space to explore how Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to agriculture and food have shaped both their lives and the world. More broadly, Dr. Smith is an expert in food justice, food systems analysis, food equity, agricultural history, agricultural industry issues, and equitable policy design. While at the University of Illinois, Dr. Smith’s research has received international and national recognition. He was a named a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow, a 2021 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow, the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the USDA National Agricultural Library in 2023, a 2023-2024 Research Fellow in the Public Libraries Partnering on Food Justice Project with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a 2023-2024 Excellence in Research Award recipient in the Department of African American Studies, a 2024 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award recipient, and a 2024-2025 Helen Corley Petit Scholar from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, among other awards and honors.

Dr. Smith’s first book, Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023), won the 2024 First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and the 2024 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Book Award-Honorable Mention from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The book was named a 2024 James Beard Book Award Finalist and a 2023 Hooks National Book Award Finalist. As the inaugural book of the Black Food Justice Series at UNC Press, Food Power Politics reconfigures how we understand the American Civil Rights Movement and uses the movement in Mississippi as a litmus test to measure how Black people interface with the nation’s food system and identify blind spots that illuminate the persistence of food inequities.

Dr. Smith’s other writings appear in respected academic journals including Food, Culture, & Society, Agriculture and Human Values, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. He serves on the editorial boards of Agricultural History, the leading international journal of record among agricultural historians and the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, the world’s only peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal focused solely on food- and farming-related community development. 

Dr. Smith earned a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2018, a master’s degree in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University in 2013, and a bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) in Agriculture with a focus on Agricultural Economics from Prairie View A&M University in 2011. Deeply committed to public engagement, Dr. Smith was awarded the 2022-2023 Outstanding Service, Community Engagement, and Outreach Award in the Department of African American Studies.