Almost two dozen faculty, staff, and students traveled to Rome in December for Food at the Nexus of Territory, Tradition, and Climate Change, a two-day international symposium co-sponsored by Dartmouth and the American Academy in Rome.
The event brought together an array of policymakers, representatives of the agricultural and food industry, and scholars—humanists as well as scientists—from Dartmouth and around the world to explore how food systems intersect with issues of culture and sustainability.
Also attending the conference: a group of 10 undergraduates participating in a 10-day Sustainable Food Systems Immersion program in Italy.
Conference participants engaged in panel discussions on topics including sustainable agricultural practices, migration and food systems, and the impact of climate change on food system resilience. They also viewed documentary films and sampled regional foods.
Italy, and Rome in particular, is home to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme, the Slow Food movement, and the Rome Sustainable Food Project, founded by chefs Alice Waters and Mona Talbott and hosted at the American Academy. The city’s mix of international institutions and local initiatives provided a fitting context for conversations about sustainability, culture, and climate impacts across food systems.
Barbara Will, vice provost for academic and international affairs, said Rome offered an especially useful vantage point for connecting local practice with global supply chains.
“Rome is ground zero for food systems analysis and activism,” Will says. “It’s only by having an international conversation that we can start to understand how embedded we all are in this complex dynamic of local vs. global, sustainable vs ‘efficient.’ ”
The conference explored how “people around the world are invested in local food systems as more sustainable and healthful, but many people find it cheaper and more efficient to take part in global supply chains that are ultimately much more damaging for the environment. We talked about acting locally and thinking globally,” Will says.
Welcoming attendees on the first day of the event, Will cited the legacy of the 19th-century statesman and conservationist George Perkins Marsh, Class of 1820, who served more than two decades as the first U.S. minister to Italy.
“While we come from far away, it is completely fitting that, like Perkins Marsh, we Dartmouth people find ourselves here today in Rome,” Will told attendees. “I know I speak for all my colleagues here today in expressing gratitude for being part of this international conversation.”
Will described the symposium’s two primary goals: “First, to raise awareness of the effect of climate change on food production, distribution, and consumption in both global and local contexts. And second, to showcase scholars, researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders around food systems who offer hope and solutions to the climate crisis.”
“We wanted to lean into the transdisciplinary nature of issues around food and climate change,” says Meredith Kelly, faculty director of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative, which is supporting research, teaching, and collaboration and advancing Dartmouth’s commitment to environmental stewardship and long-term resilience.
“We heard from farmers, chefs, scholars and people working on migration. It was a conference focused on the impacts of climate on people on a daily basis, very close to home,” says Kelly, the Frederick Hall Professor in Mineralogy and Geology and chair of the Department of Earth Sciences. “It brought home the fact that climate is really everyone’s problem, not just a science or engineering problem.”
Kelly, who moderated a session on Migration and Movement: Sustainable Food Systems in a Changing World, says the conference was an opportunity to explore a new potential focus for the Climate Collaborative around food and sustainability.
On day two, Provost Santiago Schnell noted the diversity of disciplines and industries in attendance.
“What unites these perspectives is a recognition that food sits at a nexus: where territory meets tradition, where local practice confronts global systems, where the imperative to feed the world encounters the imperative to preserve the world that feeds us,” said Schnell, a professor of mathematics and biomedical data science.
Invoking the work of 7th-century scholar and bishop Isidore, whose life’s work was the compilation of an encyclopedia of human knowledge—an effort completed during a period of major social transition—Schnell said, “We stand at our own moment of transition. The climate is changing. Food systems that sustained previous generations are under stress. Migration reshapes both who grows food and who eats it. The question before us is not merely technical—how do we adapt?—but also cultural and even spiritual: What do we wish to preserve? What must we let go? What new relationships between people, food, and land must we cultivate?”
Joe Flueckiger, associate vice president for business and hospitality, whose role includes oversight of Dartmouth Dining Services, spoke on a panel on Farms to Tables: Institutions, Systems, and Policies.
“Food is both personal and universal,” Flueckiger says. “Linking climate action to everyday food choices helps make sustainability more understandable, while highlighting how institutional decisions, such as sourcing and operations, can have meaningful climate and community impact.”
Flueckiger says he and his colleagues are excited to put some of the ideas discussed at the conference into action on campus. For example, he sees ways for Dartmouth Dining to extend student learning opportunities as a living laboratory beyond the classroom, as well as opportunities to “be an agent of change in the Upper Valley, shoring up the agro-economy and demonstrating how an anchor institution like Dartmouth can align everyday operations with climate leadership and community impact.”
He also hopes to continue strengthening networks and partnerships with peer institutions in Hanover and abroad to share solutions and “adapt proven approaches that can be scaled on campus and beyond.”
Other Dartmouth participants included Matthew Ayres, professor of biological studies; Danielle Callegari, associate professor of French and Italian; Nicola Camerlenghi, associate professor and chair of art history; and Theresa Ong, assistant professor of environmental studies.
The student immersion program was sponsored by the Dartmouth Sustainability Office and the Climate Collaborative—a hands-on experience that is part of the Climate Collaborative’s effort to help students become climate-conscious citizens, says Kelly.
After the symposium, the students traveled to the countryside in Umbria and Tuscany, where they visited farms and saw traditional and modern agricultural practices first-hand. The itinerary included conversations with growers and producers about labor, land stewardship, and the economics of food production.
“My favorite part of this trip has been me rethinking everything that I eat,” says Mikaela Browning ’26, who is majoring in economics modified with computer science and minoring in Italian. “It’s made me less picky, just knowing how much labor and effort and love went into the food that is on our table.”
The winterim immersion trip, while intellectually rigorous, was not an official academic course with grades—a fact that made the experience especially meaningful to Vismaya Gopalan ’27, a double-major in chemistry and Hispanic studies and a minor in anthropology.
“This might be one of my favorite experiences because it’s not tied to a reward where you feel like you have to succeed, and yet I think I’ve learned as much as I would in a whole term just in the past few days,” Gopalan says. “This is purely for people who are interested in the topic and get a chance to explore it.”
