Building on three sold-out years, the vibrant Oxford-style public policy debate series, Intelligence Squared U.S., arrives at the Skirball Center for ten provocative and informative live debates on hot-topic issues of the day.
Organic Food is Marketing Hype
Panelists for the motion:
Dennis Avery, Blake Hurst and John Krebs
Panelists against the motion:
Jeffrey Steingarten, Urvashi Rangan and Charles Benbrook
Dennis Avery is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. From 1980-1988, he served as an agricultural analyst for the U.S. Department of State, where he was responsible for assessing the foreign-policy implications of food and farming developments worldwide. Blake Hurst and his wife Julie raise corn and soybeans with seven family members on a farm in northwest Missouri. They've farmed for over thirty years. Hurst is also a freelance writer, and has had articles published in numerous periodicals, including the Wall Street Journal, Wilson Quarterly, and the American. John Krebs is the principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and is the former chairman of the Food Standards Agency in the UK. He was appointed to the House of Lords as an independent crossbencher in 2007. Jeffrey Steingarten trained to become a food writer at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Harvard Lampoon. For the past eight years he has been the internationally feared and acclaimed food critic of Vogue. Urvashi Rangan is the project director for Consumer Reports GreenerChoices.org and Consumers Union’s senior scientist for Policy Initiatives. Charles Benbrook serves as the chief scientist of The Organic Center. He has worked in Washington, D.C. on agricultural policy, science and regulatory issues from 1979 through 1997. Benbrook served as the agricultural staff expert on the Council for Environmental Quality; the executive director of the Subcommittee on Department Operations, Research, and Foreign Agriculture, U.S. House of Representatives; and the executive director, Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences.
For more information please visit: www.iq2us.org
John Donvan, correspondent for ABC News Nightline, moderates the IQ2US series. The debates can be watched on the Bloomberg Television ® network, are aired by NPR® on more than 185 stations and podcasts are available from iTunes. Newsweek is the IQ2US media sponsor for the 2009/2010 season.
