MOUNT VERNON — Western Iowa farmer Denise O’Brien will speak on “Women and the Politics of Food” at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College. Admission is free.
O’Brien, who raises fruit, vegetables and poultry on a farm she and husband Larry Harris own near Atlantic, is involved in food, conservation, agricultural trade and rural women’s issues.
She helped organize the Women’s Task Force of the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, directed the Rural Women’s Leadership Development Project of Prairie Fire Rural Action Inc. and served as president of the National Family Farm Coalition. She was appointed by the governor to the Iowa Food Policy Council, where she serves on the Institutional Food Purchasing Task Force. She is founder and coordinator of Women, Food and Agriculture. In 2000 she was inducted into Iowa’s Women’s Hall of Fame.
In 2001 she was appointed a Food and Society Policy Fellow, a national program that educates consumers, opinion leaders and policymakers on sustaining family farms and food systems in the United States that promote the environment, health and local ownership.
Internationally, O’Brien helped organize and participated in the Rural Women’s Workshop in Rome prior to the 1996 United Nations’ World Food Summit. She helped organize the Globalization of Agriculture workshop at the U.N.’s Fourth World Women’s Conference in Beijing and has addressed the U.N. General Assembly on behalf of the world’s farmers.
Her daughter, Caia Harris, is a senior at Cornell.
O’Brien is the final speaker this year in the annual lecture series Community, Agency, Action: Social Change in the New Century, sponsored by Cornell’s Office of Academic Affairs and the department of sociology and anthropology.