Claire Rider - American Food Culture
Claire is currently the Head of Strategy and Operations for The Farmlink Project, a food justice nonprofit.
She was a double major in American Studies and Anthropology and she received the Kroeber Prize in the Anthropology Department for her honors thesis.
Area of Concentration Courses
Global 10B: Food, Drink, Culture, Politics
English 166: Art of Writing: Grant Writing, Food Writing, Food Justice
ESPM 155AC: Sociology and Political Ecology of Agro-Food Systems
Envecon 185: The Production and Business of Beer, Wine, and Spirits
Nusctx 166: Nutrition in the Community
UGBA 192T: Edible Education 101
Thesis
Community Gardens in Berkeley and Albany, CA; The Sociopolitical Benefits that Maintain Community Spaces in Affluent Neighborhoods
There are alternative options — existing at the margins of the American food system — for food production and consumption outside of the dominant food supply chain. Community gardens have proliferated in recent years as one such alternative. Over the course of a year, Claire conducted in-person and virtual ethnography on UC Gill Tract Community Farm and Peralta Community Garden, two community gardens less than a mile apart in Alameda County, to analyze participant demographics, participant attitudes and engagement pathways, garden formal and informal rules, and map spatial organization. Claire’s honors thesis asks what motivates people to seek out these alternative participation pathways in the American food system, and investigates how these programs are founded and maintained amidst industrialized food systems.
