Watch: German Professor 
Hans-Jakob Werlen Talks Slow Food

by Alisa Giardinelli
4/02/2010

Professor of German Hans-Jakob Werlen is featured in the April 2 premiere of WHYY's Friday Arts, a monthly arts, culture and entertainment television magazine program. Werlen, the founder and head of Slow Food Philadelphia, discusses the origins and politics of the Slow Food movement, as well as one of his new interdisciplinary courses, Food Revolutions.

"Working with Slow Food on various food-related issues, such as sustainability and food quality in schools, provides synergistic links with classes I teach in the Tri-College Food Studies Program," Werlen says. "In my class Food Revolutions: History, Politics, Culture, co-taught with Bryn Mawr professor Kate Thomas, students learn about the history of technical and market innovations, political exigencies, and shifts in consumer culture that lie behind our current unsustainable system of industrialized food production.  The 'activist component' of the class encourages students to become engaged in a new type of 'food fight' - the promotion of sustainable, biodiverse, and local agriculture that restores the frayed social fabric of rural communities and serves human needs instead of corporate interests."