Hear from anthropologist, instructor and award winning science writer Dr. Andrew Flach.

Dr, Flach is a renowned professor at Purdue University and will join the One Health Institute, Guelph Institute of Development Studies and the Canada India Research Centre for Learning and Engagement in an engaging talk that asks big questions around the challenges and complexities of feeding the world.

Although farms are living spaces that anchor diverse economies, the challenge of feeding the world is dominated by narrow questions of yield, efficiency, and cost-benefit analysis.

Combining streams from world ecology, critical agrarian studies, and diverse economies thinkers, Flach will discuss anthropological case studies from India, Bosnia, and the U.S. Midwest to ask how small-scale agriculture supports living communities in place: feeding the world as if people mattered.

Central to this approach is viewing efficiency not as a function of yields, profits, or commodities produced but of reproducing the conditions for local health and wellbeing. The talk will center small-scale agriculture as an engine of social reproduction, the continual creation of communities of practice. This analysis both helps to re-value the rippling benefits of local farm systems and illuminate the profound damage of commercial plantations that emphasize commodity production.