Skip to main content

Keynote speakers

Hans Hoogeveen

Dr. Hans Hoogeveen serves as the elected Independent Chairperson of the Council at FAO. He previously served as Ambassador / Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the UN Organizations for Food and Agriculture. Before that he was the Director General for Agriculture and Nature Management at the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs. As such, Dr. Hoogeveen was the most senior civil servant to lead the agriculture, agribusiness, food safety, food security, veterinary and plant health, international affairs, including the European Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, international food security, the FAO and other UN affairs, trade liberalisation (WTO), market access and nature/biodiversity managements agendas.
 
Additionally, he is one of the founding fathers of the Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture and the Global Action Network for Oceans and Blue Growth. He also served, amongst others, as President of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Facilitator of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC). Additionally, Dr. Hoogeveen is Professor of Practice in Natural Resource Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston and lead lecturer in European Policy at the Netherlands School for Public Government.


Josh Milburn

Josh Milburn is a philosopher interested in the place of animals in moral, legal, and political thought. His first book, Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals, was published in 2022 by McGill-Queen's University Press; his second, Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on his third book, provisionally titled Animals, State, and Utopia: Robert Nozick's Animal Ethics, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. He is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Department of International Relations, Politics, and History at Loughborough University in the UK, where he has worked since 2022. He is also the host of the podcast Knowing Animals, which features regular conversations with academics working in animal studies from a range of academic perspectives.


Cor van der Weele

Cor was trained as a biologist and a philosopher and is now emeritus professor of humanistic philosophy at Wageningen University. Coming from an arable farm in Zeeland, she was easily convinced in the 1970’s, by Frances Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a small planet, that pulses should and would come to replace meat. When the opposite continued to occur, cultured meat appeared as a new source of hope. Reflecting on societal responses to this new idea, she became interested in processes of change and in the role of ambivalence in such processes. In recent years she has been thinking back and forth between beans and cultured meat.


Arne Hendriks

Arne is an artistic researcher, historian and exhibition maker with an interest in food as medium for positive change; landscapes as manifestations of desire; and the disruptive power of shrinking towards abundance. His longterm research project The Incredible Shrinking Man (2010 - ongoing) has brought him wide acclaim as well as invitations by such diverse organisations as Rabobank, Wageningen University & Research, and the Hubrecht Institute for long term cooperation and collective research into the potential of shrinking. Central to all his work is the attempt to develop cultures that manifest a desire for less. In 2020 Hendriks worked as an artist in residence at WUR on the topic of protein transition. He is currently artistic researcher at De Kleine Aarde in Boxtel (food), Mediamatic (experimental urban ecology) and Gemeente Bergen (landscape).


Fava Bean as a main player
A search for integrating mind and matter

An artist (Arne Hendriks), a philosopher (Cor van der Weele) and a protagonist (Fava Bean) have been joining forces to create a counterfactual condiment (miso, a savoury fermented Japanese bean paste) and meanwhile talk about pasts and futures of food. Dualisms and hierarchies were recurring themes. Our culture’s cognitive history has given us very unequal valuations of mind and matter, with Plato as a central source. Despite a partial reassessment by Aristotle and despite growing unhappiness about Plato’s heritage in our own time, thorough change turns out to be hard, not least for philosophers, who tend to prioritize concepts, ideas, visions. Yet food is matter first. In our talk, we present our search to find ways for integrating mind and matter concerning food, agriculture and ourselves. We will talk about fava beans, grown at Cor’s family farm in Zeeland. They inspired us to experiment with fermentation, with alternate storytelling, with time, and to dream about pilot farms that integrate new and old technologies. Fava beans thus have a central role, but how to think of this role, if integrating mind and matter is the aim? Beans have always been a good idea, but did we forget how to make them a good material reality in our diet? We continue to learn by doing and will discuss the ‘Buro Miso’ project, in which the gift of a small pot of miso helps us build new networks and practices. To paraphrase James Carville: It's the beans, stupid.

Jasper Udink ten Cate

Jasper is a well known artist and designer from the Netherlands and founder of the multidisciplinary studio Creative Chef. All of his work is connected with food and is shown around the world at exhibitions and museums like the Metropolitan New York and Beijing Design. Jasper’s leadership style is that he likes to take action. He grows food in his garden with a hyperlocal mindset. He educates and shares his stories at schools and steps in as a food-consultant when a company is open for a change in their food behavior. He creates inclusive artworks for blind people and uses food to ‘visualize’ the story he wants to tell. With a history as a chef, co founder of a chocolate factory, musician, cooking school and author Jasper now uses these skills to create immersive experiences that have the capacity to benefit collective stories that will help humanity to build a better future.