Hello everyone. Welcome to our session today on Stakeholder Capitalism, Building the Future. We have a fantastic panel with us. We're going to start this session with the expert on Stakeholder Capitalism, the web chairman and founder, Klaus Schwab. Klaus has a new book out today on this subject that we'll launch our panel and then we'll join in a broader discussion. Klaus, welcome. Thank you very much, Edward. It's really a very important moment, not just because I'm publishing a book, but we are witnessing a mindset change. I think we are moving from the priority of short-term shareholder profit maximization to a world which is characterized much more by stakeholder responsibility. The COVID crisis has shown us that companies which were committed to the stakeholder concept have performed much better because they have invested into the long-term vitality of the company. So what we have to do now and what is very important is to walk the talk. And walking the talk means not just to talk about stakeholder capitalism, but also to establish a framework of metrics which allow everybody to see that a company is performing according to the ESG criteria. So the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum has undertaken the task, together with the four big audit companies, to develop such a comprehensive system which allows not only a reporting process companies can be really measured, but which allows also to see progress companies are making, similar to the financial reporting system. I feel this mindset change is essential if we want to move from a world which is just based on material objectives like GDP and so on, to a world which is much more conscious of the well-being of people. And I think the COVID crisis has shown us that we have to pay more attention to the well-being and this means that I come back a change in the approach of business philosophy to move really to a large-scale stakeholder capitalism. So this is a book you were writing, you had started writing before the pandemic, it's really a book you've been writing for 50 years. But you were working on this book then as you write in the book, February of 2020 comes and you had what you call an ACBC moment realizing that everything was about to change, there was an after COVID world and a before COVID world that were going to be nothing alike. Can you talk about how the pandemic not just shifted your thinking on stakeholder capitalism but the landscape that it operates in? I think the notion of stakeholder capitalism is old one. I wrote about it 50 years ago and we should not forget that last year a major change happened when the US business roundtable which represents major companies in the United States actually issued a statement embracing the stakeholder concept. Now what has happened with the crisis, with the corona crisis is showing us that people expect more from governments and business not just material satisfaction but security for example in terms of health services. But what we also have learned is that all those services related to cleaning up the environment, providing the necessary diversity inside companies and society, this cannot only undertaken by governments or by business alone or by civil society alone, we really need public-private cooperation. So the crisis has shown us we need a mindset change and we need also to move from a society where business and governments have very separate tasks to a society where two together with civil society work hand in hand. How different do you think the book is the final form of the book versus where it would have was headed prior to that moment, that realization in February? I think as the big changes the people are much more open today compared to a year ago where we felt or being in a society which is well-doing and so on. Now they have noticed the fragility of global society. So we went from crisis to extreme crisis in a way, health crisis, economic crisis, inequality crisis, trust crisis, democracy crisis and that has spurred this openness. So everybody went into panic mode. We all did around this time last year. Obviously some companies fared extremely well in the pandemic but of course far more. Quickly small businesses have suffered terribly. How has that impacted not the philosophy of stakeholder capitalism but the ability of companies across the spectrum to execute it? You ask me? Yes. Yes, question to you and then we'll open to the group. No, what we are seeing frankly is companies now really engage and I see it in terms of our different initiatives. The forum has about 100 initiatives related to climate issues related to creating jobs and so on. What we are seeing is at least multinational big companies engage much more compared to a year ago. I think they have listened to the people who have great expectations today. Expectations which means that they have to exercise stakeholder responsibility. I guess I was really asking about the smaller companies that have suffered much more and for whom survival minute by minute is such a focus right now. Is it playing out at all beyond big companies? I mean for this to really grow obviously it's got to go beyond the largest companies and include the way everybody thinks about capitalism and their employees and their community. No, it's my big concern because smaller medium-sized companies have been much more hit by the crisis compared to large companies or most large companies. So I'm very pleased and I think it's a task of society to take care because they are an essential part of our economic tissue. So we have to make sure that it's not the default that they can survive the crisis because we need at the end of the crisis we need still a prospering middle class in the as far as companies are concerned. Thank you. Let's now open it up to our terrific panel. We have to introduce them and I don't think I introduced myself at the beginning. I'm Edward Felzenthal. I'm the editor-in-chief and CEO of Time and I'm joined today by Professor Klaus whom you just heard from also by Mariana Mazucato a professor at University College London where there's snow on the ground I gather. She's also the author of a new book coming out this week right? Yeah. Mission Economy A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. We have with us Dan Schulman the president and CEO of PayPal where he's been since 2014. We have four-time Grammy Award winner the amazing Angelique Kidjo musician, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Great to have you here with us from Paris and we have Alexander Dekru the prime minister of Belgium, prime minister Dekru. You as well. I want to start with you in part because I know you have to just to let the audience know you've got can't imagine what's on your to-do list every day but I know you have to leave a few minutes. Let's let's you took over as prime minister in October country with one of the highest death tolls per capita death rates in the world certainly in Europe facing a massive economic recession the worst in probably a hundred years. I guess I'll say in that context how are you and and give us a sense you know it's it's been a few months. Where do you assess the recovery both the health recovery and the economic recovery given what you what you faced coming into office? Well first of all thank you for the invitation and a discussion which I think is a very very timely one. One thing I would like to start off with is that over the last years all of us in the public on the public side and the private side we've been talking so much about trust and this is a moment to not talk about trust but to show that we can be trustworthy and it's an incredibly difficult time to do so because we're confronted to something which is new to most of us which is new to the public. I think the western European public is confronted to a level of vulnerability that we thought was not there. I mean we would live a safe life and never be confronted to anything like that and so in these very unstable times showing that we can create trust with all the things that happened which which you could not know in advance and seeing actually week by week that we're confronted to something to something new is I would say in politics it's a new sport in politics. I have to say I feel much more as a coach of the population than I have ever been. This is about keeping people motivated. This is about explaining the things we know but also explaining the things we don't know. It's very often also telling that we have made a decision and we thought it was the right decision because of these reasons but it is clear now that actually it maybe was not the right the right decision and really trying to explain to everyone we are a population of 11 million that we are a team of 11 million and that as a team we can beat this. We actually did a communication campaign around that as well and really convincing every person that everyone in their own individual action has an impact on this crisis has an impact on its own health and especially an impact on the health of everyone and maybe to conclude with that I think that element that people now are convinced of in the in the medical in the health sphere if we could keep that and keep that mindset in the recovery being also an economic recovery my own actions have an impact on myself but have an impact on on the society I think that would be a great thing if if we could take that out of this crisis I think it will be one of the determining elements to to to economically get out of this crisis. Let's let's talk about trust for a moment. It'll be a running theme throughout the discussion. We've talked about just now the the teamwork part of trust the the collaboration that's required to establish trust the deliverables that are required to establish trust. What about something I think about in my role all the time and I'm sure you do and all of us do the connection between truth and trust and this crisis we're facing I didn't even mention as I ticked them off earlier around misinformation. How do you think about and combating combating misinformation as you try to build this this team? We are confronted with that every day now we have we are in an atmosphere where there are experts that they're basically growing out of the ground experts in everything especially a lot of obviously virologists and vaccinologists and so on they have a very broad audience in the in the belgium press I would say that there's even there's almost more space for for experts in the in a medical in a medical domain than there is place for for politicians and maybe that's not wrong. I think we find a way where the expert voices and the political voices work together often we get sometimes a bit on each other's domain and that does create some tension from time to time but very often and I've often said it look if you if you want to be convinced that being vaccinated is a good thing I'm not going to convince you listen to a vaccinologist listen to an expert I am going to get vaccinated I'm convinced but if you have doubts then listen to the experts and and and science should be able to to convince you I think that this is a great moment to make a link between expert scientists give them give them an audience and politicians policy makers and and so on now does this mean that there are no wild conspiracy theories going around no obviously not but if you look at the the share of people who are willing to get vaccinated is actually quite high in belgium it's somewhere between 75 and 80 which is which is incredibly incredibly high the trust discussion is now also more and more towards the cooperation between governments and the vaccine producing companies there are very high hopes a lot of people the light at the end of the tunnel they see is the vaccine the fact that there are now delays in the production and and and is something extremely hard for the copulate population to to cope with because it seems that that light at the end of the tunnel it's it's basically going through their hands that's a hard one and I think more transparency from the corporate side on what is going on and explaining that producing a vaccine is a bit more complicated than baking bread is is is a message that that should get across more often and the science around the variants which we're still struggling to understand I I have so many questions across the panel but I before we move on I I would love to when I'm sure the audience would love to to just get your you just gave a sense of it the the blurry light at the end of the tunnel but but we're we're we're you're two and a half months in how do you how do you see where Belgium is right now are you at a moment of optimism pessimism somewhere somewhere in the middle with all the challenges well we we've had an extremely difficult second wave we have been able in eight weeks eight weeks time to move from the worst country in Europe to today one of the best countries there there's not that many countries that are in a better situation than us but still a very worrying situation and we will do everything to keep that rather advantageous situation that we that we have my view is that vaccination will of course come up to speed and the months of February and March are going to be very difficult because the active population at large is not yet in the scope of vaccination but once that starts and that will be March March April I would think that rapidly we will start open again public life and restaurants and bars and and and so on and that will have a huge impact on the way we look at the future today it's hard I mean end of January February these are the dark months in general and people are extremely fed up with this so I would hope that the coming weeks are the hardest ones and that when the sun is coming that the light of the vaccines will be will be shining into people's minds as well thank you I hope so um Mariano Mariano Mazzucato you've been everywhere during this pandemic advising the Pope working with the World Health Organization also writing for Time Magazine and I want to talk about your book but but I but you wrote a really provocative piece for us here in our our issue the great reset which we did in partnership with the forum in which you went through a really fascinating thought exercise imagining we're in 2023 end of 2023 the same people a different society that that we we succeeded that the the light was there at the end of the tunnel that we made that we made progress on all these issues where we need a reset where the crisis is um prompting reset what does that look like um in three years if if we get it right and and how how did we do it um from that perspective great and thanks for both asking me to write that piece and to join this panel again so really at the center of both my new book on um emission economy but also that piece is the idea that you know Klaus's wonderful concept of stakeholder capitalism can't just be about corporate governance and how the corporate world interacts with you know different stakeholders that actually has to go to the center of how we design our capitalist system because there's different ways to do that and we unfortunately have really a wrong design uh both in terms again of the whole issue of shareholder maximization versus this kind of more purpose driven stakeholder uh value concept but really you know the nitty gritty of how business interacts with government and with the broader kind of you know civil society organizations and I think what COVID has done which is fantastic is it's really highlighted how we can do things differently but we need to start normalizing it it can't just be during a crisis just you know quick example what we've seen this time around which we didn't see in the financial crisis and I hope we see post COVID hence you know the importance of the piece going to 2023 is for example that the bailouts that have been provided to different industries globally for example the ones that have been really hard hit like airlines because they're not flying as much have been in some countries and I come back to this issue of heterogeneity not every country has done this the same um those bailouts to airlines but also to autos in some countries have been conditional on the companies receiving the public benefit to commit to reducing their carbon emissions this happened in France where Macron was very clear he said we're not here just to bail you out we want to help you transform because otherwise we shouldn't use the word build back better or in Austria and Denmark they also made the bailouts conditional on companies not using tax havens you know it's not rocket science let's do that in the US even the US care act had a bit of a seed for something that didn't actually then happen but there was discussion about it that companies receiving bailouts can't just use that money to say buy back their shares in the last 10 years four trillion dollars have been used by companies just to buy back shares to boost stock prices stock options executive pay so how do we bring that notion of a social contract to the center of this notion of purpose and a more purposeful system personally I think unless it's conditional it's not going to happen but the word condition kind of sounds negative it sounds like someone has a stick over your head we need to change that too this really needs to be a better win-win about building back better and those companies interested in long-term growth really need to radically change how they're working with governments and I'm a bit less optimistic by the way of what we're seeing you know it's great we have a vaccine for example or almost in terms of a complete rollout but the way it's being governed is still problematic in a truly symbiotic and mutualistic ecosystem in different areas including health and specifically around the vaccine would make sure for example to govern the intellectual property rights in a way that really foster what Dr. Tedros and and who talks about collective intelligence so using a patent pool Pfizer has not signed up to that we should make sure that the prices of the vaccines actually take into account the public contribution you know there's been lots of different governments that have contributed not only to this vaccine but also to the different drugs like remdesivir and historically almost all blockbuster drugs trace a lot of their research back to the public sector and yet the prices of those drugs or vaccines don't reflect that so we really need to get our hands much dirtier than we have in the past in terms of what it means to create a mutualistic ecosystem right the the the skeptics of stakeholder capitalism argue that capitalists and capitalism by their nature are a really predator prey not symbiotic and and tell us about how would your your your book the moonshot guide to changing capitalism how how do you out how do we change that how do we make sure that it really is mutualistic as you say and not predator prey sure so what I do in the book is to sort of start with you know the moon landing when 50 years ago great ambitious you know bold inspirational mission to get to the moon and back again in one generation there was that great speech where Kennedy was like you know this is also going to be hugely expensive we might screw up along the way but it's worth it and so on you know what would it look like to bring that kind of ambition to the sustainable development goals to have real leadership but it's not about like a top down state driven system right it's about really setting the direction for change being really ambitious about it and then redesigning I come I always come back to this notion of design redesigning everything we have on the ground from procurement policy grants and loans and these are all interfaces of course with the private sector which receive procurement contracts grants and loans to really foster collaborations to work together towards solving the goals and what's interesting about the SDGs the sustainable development goals there's 17 of them they're really broad and inspirational their challenges which were negotiated they didn't come down just you know randomly they were negotiated globally but they're very broad so transforming them into moonshots so the clean oceans one saying 90% of the plastic out of the ocean no one country is going to do that alone and no actor state or private will do it alone it requires a new form of collaboration but the real tragedy and this is you know what I talk about in the book there's a whole chapter dedicated to this is we now no longer have the capacity and the dynamic capabilities that we need within governments because they bought into this notion that they're there just to fix market failures and I advocate for market co-creation co-shaping agenda which then would require both the private sector and the public sector to be investing within their own knowledge creating organizations as opposed to what we've seen definitely in the UK this immense outsourcing of the public brain to say consulting companies and one of the reasons the vaccine rollout is working quite well in the UK compared to the testing rollout which didn't work well is the vaccine rollout is actually happening through the public health system through GPs and you know that requires also strengthening that public health system whereas the testing occurred purely through an outsourcing mechanism which in and of itself is not a problem unless it's accompanied by what we've seen which is an underfunding of the brain itself if you want of government which absolutely requires when crises occur but also again in the everyday governing you know what it means to build back better. Thank you Angelique, Kijo I wanted to ask you to really jumping off what Mariana just said about take for example plastic out of the ocean it's going to no one country can do it you're a global citizen in all of your work an advocate great advocate for collaboration across borders one of the things that strikes me is how hard given how hard it is at the moment in particular to get collaboration within borders Prime Minister DeCruz spoke about that and we're all feeling it how do we find a path back to the kind of international collaboration that these challenges require? I think thank you for asking the question and I listen to everybody and it is really interesting what I'm hearing to talk about collaboration they have to be respect of one another and when we talk about global economy we're talking about stakeholder capitalism it doesn't shareholder capitalism doesn't work in Africa we don't have that in Africa my continent is never on the global agenda when it comes to capitalism when it comes to anything that only profit the western country and the rich countries and the leaders of Africa are shareholders of all those big companies we've been talking about they do not care about their own population to create job or to create anything of course to get the money they start learning from all this forum that we do to patch up the outside of their home to get money from the rich countries and nothing goes back to the people and if we're talking about stakeholder we need people in Africa to be educated to have jobs to participate in an economy how can we build an economy in 53 different countries that take into account the most vulnerable people the women they create more jobs than anyone but they don't have access to fines you have all those banks in Africa they only lend money to the middle the mid business the medium business size and the biggest one the one below that can get out of poverty they don't have access to money Mariana is talking about sustainable development goal but none of those 17 goals we can achieve if we don't tackle first poverty when people are hungry and there all the energy they in they out is to think about putting food on the table for their children nothing we're talking about here work and when I hear digital a solution that does not work too because digital is also discriminated the one that have the money to go to digital will go to digital the poorest that we have to to help they don't understand they can't do the business with cell phone I mean we have been helping Africa instead of empowering Africa's economy Africa is the richest continent on the planet yet the rich country have managed to take the resources out anytime this COVID pandemic gonna finish we're gonna end up with a lot of debts the rich country that are out making money to get the economy back up will be good but us we won't be good we'll fall back and back and what does it create to the rich countries immigration the oceans are more and more polluted we can't fight climate change without people being educated about what they have to do the whole global economy depends on the well-being of Africa if that continent don't shake we don't change the way we do business with African leaders not giving them pass for everything then when we invest we won't return when we give money to government we don't want return so we keep on feeding into the poverty the lack of education the lack I mean we kill the creativity of young Africans and we all see here with Goodwill talking about all the things you're hearing we work in Europe we work in America because you have a system in place but in Africa it won't work so we can't be talking about global economy without paying attention to what is going on in the on the continent of Africa Europe we never get away with the immigration that is coming to take what is taking away from them we can't fight immigration if we do not have the young African to find work in the country when you hear an immigrant say death is better than the poverty I'm living in how can we come to this form for people to be so desperate and while we sit and talk we talk number economy for me is always number I don't see people it does when we're talking about economy I don't see a face of a human being algorithm has become a weapon to create more poverty algorithm become the atomic bomb that is created by the new technology that is out there is not taking care of people we're talking about trust we're talking about fake news what is what is really feeding those people on internet the fact that they feel they feel disenfranchised they don't trust the system anymore they don't trust any government they don't trust anything because every time they try first the system in place that stopped them from trying so stakeholder capitalism are all I'm all for it but we have as Marianna said to go back to the nitty gritty at the bottom of it and build this our society strong enough to understand that this COVID is showing us that we are interconnected we are here we want to know that we leave one person behind we all gonna fail though all those dice all these puzzles that we are if we don't really tackle corruption institutional corruption in Africa that is really killing every day as we speak in people are dying from that corruption and we see you're talking about stakeholder capitalism that doesn't mean anything to us in Africa is something that disturbed me a lot so the price so the priorities are wrong in your in your completely completely wrong and and as I mean we're talking about stakeholder capitalism today with a particular focus on business but of course trillions of dollars and euros are are being as spent a stimulus to to pull countries out of this crisis and I'm reading into your perspective here that those plans are too inward looking that they're they're really focused on the US stimulus on the US and the EU stimulus on the EU and so on and leaving out we're not going to solve it unless we unless we extend that beyond borders is that that is that your that's exactly what I'm saying and we need to really strengthen the the banking system in Africa the financial system in Africa the the the thing that is really painful for me as I say is that we don't have any currency that can make it to the Wall Street our currency per the country where I come from my currency is index on the euro so how can you have any economy when you don't have your own money how can you have an economy when the rule of post colonialism is still imposed upon the countries I mean our leaders are facilitator for that there are the client of the rich country to continue taking the the resources out of Africa without creating anything in return for the for us to create our own economy I mean for people to be able to invest in African businesses the businesses that are there that are thriving in Africa are owned by the rich countries by France England America all those people that make do business in Africa that make money out of Africa are not the African business very few African businessmen are make money or a millionaire there are some of them but at the scope of Europe in America no the broad issue you raise is one Dan Shulman I'd love to talk to you about which is and Klaus and I spoke about a little bit at the beginning you you took a no layoff pledge when the pandemic hit we did we were able to as well at at time many many companies have have you know been a lot of success of wealth creation you know during this this period you've been able to increase wages and lower benefit costs for for your employees but what Angelica's getting at is is and I'd love to sense of is you know really I think in a way how much can this how much can stakeholder capitalism how much can business do given the depth of this a global crisis you know well thanks for first of all for having me Edward and it's really an honor to be with all of my fellow panelists and listen to all of their remarks I think that business has a very important role to play in this and I don't want to minimize that and I don't want to minimize the responsibility that CEOs and companies have to our broader communities I think everyone's brought this up but the pandemic really I think just brought into stark relief uh issues uh and trends that have been with us for quite some time they may just not have been as visible you've got several billion people throughout the world who live outside the financial system in the United States you have basically two-thirds of adults 185 million adults that struggle to make ends meet every single month um and if we think about kind of our politics our society the social unrest we've seen the political unrest we've seen that I mean that rings true to me like how can we expect somebody to embrace uh democracy when they don't think that the system is working for them when they think that others are doing well but they're not doing well and I think we as businesses do have an obligation to step up to work with the public sector to work within all the communities that we serve and I think we have different roles to play I think this idea that profit and purpose are at odds with each other inside business is ridiculous in fact I would argue that the two go hand in hand I mean where do the best employees want to work they want to work for companies that are making a difference in the world they want to work for companies that are taking care of them you mentioned that um you know we lowered health costs uh benefits raised wages well you know one of the things I found when we did a survey inside PayPal um and we're PayPal we pay at or above the market in every single country that we operate in but I found out that almost 50 percent of my employees were struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month in fact we created this metric we called it net disposable income it's how much money does somebody have after they've paid all of their taxes and essential living expenses what I found out for about half our company is that NDI was four percent and um to me that was just no wonder they were struggling and we worked with academics and we worked with the governments and we felt like the minimum NDI necessary for somebody to be able to save for somebody to be able to dream again about um you know having their kids have a better lives than they do is 20 percent and so we slashed health care benefits by 60 percent we raised salaries we gave everybody in the company equity and today we've taken that NDI from four percent to 16 percent and this year I hope we get to 20 percent I think those kinds of things we can do inside our company and I think every CEO has an obligation to first of all take care of your employees we can't depend on governments or shift that burden just to governments to go do that we can do that ourselves and then we need to step up and address issues in our society whether it be uh racial injustice social injustice you know we made a five hundred and thirty five million dollar commitment to reduce the racial wealth gap uh in the U.S. I think those are the kinds of things that we as leaders of industry need to do we don't stand in isolation we stand in solidarity with the communities that we have and hoping that helps us I have uh want to follow up on on a couple of key points you made but um I know Prime Minister DeCruis has to leave momentarily and I would love to um um pose to him and and in a sense to the two of you um you know what what's the where's the line um or how do you think about uh what government should be doing in the areas that Dan just described um uh government policy um regulation um versus a kind of loose partnership I mean again this also gets to what to the theme of Mariana's book you know what what where what is the role of government in what um in the aims that Dan just described um Prime Minister DeCruis maybe if I can echo one element that Dan mentioned is that you know if if you have corporates who have bad behavior towards their clients to our society as an employee you can be quite sure that if things go wrong they will also show bad behavior towards you and and that I think is is is more than ever a way that people look at it and a way that that people employees vote with their um with their uh with their feet so I I agree 100% with what Dan said and purpose and profit is not opposite if we talk about sustainability there is no activity that is sustainable if it is not profitable at one point and so profitability is not a bad thing quite the opposite but there are certain domains which obviously in in the way especially on the european side we look at it are are in a non-for-profit environment that is the case for healthcare and and it has proven that it is a successful uh formula but in the challenges that we see now we can achieve incredible things if everyone brings their best at the table see what we have done in in in vaccines I mean if if the public sector brings to the table what they're best in being uh funding uh early stage research and so on providing stability of financing and if the private sector brings what they're best at at the table that is being innovative speed um bringing things to market see what we can do we've developed vaccines in less than a year's time but in general it would take eight years and for me that's that really is the lesson instead of pointing fingers at each other let's see what we are best at and if everyone brings at the table what they're best at I mean what we have we've proven over the last months what humanity is capable of I think it's mind-boggling and we should continue doing it and have that mindset instead of being pointing at each other let's let's see what you're best at and bring that at the table if we do that incredible can I just add a a framing issue on what was just mentioned is that okay Edward I don't know if we're allowed to bump in here so in terms of this issue that Dan was raising because I completely agree with him I just want to give it a bit of a different twist of course it's possible to make profits without purpose what we want to do is bring profits and purpose together but take any sector if you take retail you know Costco and Walmart you know we're making more or less the same profit margin one through kind of you know innovation one basically through exploiting the labor force this is to be honest to respect Walmart it was before they actually started to change in that situation what you then need for government to do is to say we're not here to level the playing field this like word that or sentence that basically just means almost status quo you need to tilt the playing field towards making it more profitable for those companies that are able to achieve a certain type of profit margin through innovation through investment in the workforce and so on instead of exploiting them but that does mean really again getting your hands dirty with you know tax you know whether it's capital gains tax to foster long-termism and not short-termism or with companies of this sort to make sure they really are treating their workforce well in order to get a public loan and so on but this notion about leveling the playing field I think that's one of the things we should get out and bring in the notion of tilting not meaning choosing one company one sector but getting a system that really rewards the kind of companies that we're talking about is being more purposeful so you're talking about government policy at some level and the framing of it there's a framing of it blouse if I could ask you to chime in and I know you and dan have worked on this together mariana frames it around government policy what about internally within the corporation you briefly mentioned this at the beginning the metrics where do you see the place of metrics measuring commitment to stakeholders within corporations public disclosure around those metrics now first first I want to express my my appreciation for dan you are really a role model for stakeholder capitalism but let me come back to something which is fundamental I think we have two different levels here we have what has to happen inside a society where also government plays a key role in terms of taxes avoidance of taxation and so on and then we have in specific insights of society we have the role of the enterprise and let's not forget the enterprise the corporation is the world's creator and many of the issues which were mentioned like poverty and so on can be solved if we have enough at fair wealth creation it's companies with which drive innovation it's companies who in a competitive way drives a forced industrial revolution drive social benefits and so on now the problem which we have is when we talk about capital we think of financial capital but actually what you need for wealth creation is not just financial capital it's human capital it's social capital it's natural capital so we need to to embrace a much larger definition of capital and all those capitals create in a shared way wealth and indirectly or directly for country prosperity so we we coming back to to the essence of your question we still measure only how a company uses the financial capital whether it's really efficient in terms of allocation of financial capital but we should measure also how a company in which way a company uses natural capital people planet in a most responsible way so that's the essence of stakeholder capitalism and here of course the metrics are important because otherwise we stay with I mean every company has now a purpose that we have to measure how the company moves really forward in fulfilling this border purpose going beyond just serving shareholders and and how do you you take that that purpose those metrics those commitments far enough to you know back to the concerns Angelique was raising particularly in Africa but in you know many places around the world where you know the amazing things that Dan is doing at PayPal and many other you know companies that have joined in this movement are doing but they're so far to go how does that reset how does the reset that's supported by stakeholder capitalism get to the poorest of the of the poor no give me I give you just an example related to what Angelique said corruption if you are really forced in your reporting to indicate every dollar you paid to for non directly let's say corporate related issues and you have afterwards on a government levels and necessary penalty system and let's say you you really hold companies accountable if they deviate from good behavior I mean it's a dream but we can make this dream and companies like Dan provides a good example we can go into this direction of making stakeholder capitalism the core of our economic system a moonshot as I think Mariana would would put I don't think we can have stakeholder capitalism if we continue Klaus to say that wealth creation is just in business I think the whole point of stakeholder capitalism is to actually admit that wealth is collectively created you know everything that makes our iphone smart and not stupid happened not just through government you know taxation in the background it was actually government investment in the internet gps touchscreen series and then you know privates the private sector did magnificent things with them but we have to stop talking about wealth creation is just business sorry Mariana if you take stakeholders governments is an important crucial stakeholder in this context but not just for taxation sorry that was my point it's also investment what I agree with you it shared wealth creation so it's a benefit should also be shared yes but we cannot share the benefits properly if we don't also admit that we created it created it collectively and I think the really cutting edge discussions globally are where this distinction between wealth creation and wealth distribution that dichotomy is no longer there and we think about the direction of government investment and how it collaborates with business in new ways in the ways that Antoudique was talking about so in non-corrupt ways and ways that are catalytic to really inspire bottom-up innovation that that's truly how we talk about wealth creation itself when government hold the wealth of the country and it doesn't distribute the world wealth that's it there's nothing you can do because if you the leader of a country is the one that own the main resources and that is profiting from it with his family how are you gonna you can't I mean it's it's just I wish we have a solution class I just wish we have a solution that will work on African continent because the youth today in Africa they are so entrepreneur they have so many ideas no money to develop they I mean it's crazy every time I go there my head is a bubble they bubble with ideas and they have all those beautiful ideas that for example then can finance and create more wealth and more job but they can't they don't have access to the money and if they have that and they have it so if the company that start working then the government gonna come and say you can't do this and they take away how do you protect young entrepreneur a new entrepreneur in Africa to do business to create job to create wealth without the government being on the back through tax or stealing their company away from them that's the problem and what I'm saying I see it I heard about it it's not like I'm just making it up it's the reality of the 2021 till today so the COVID-19 is just hammering the young kids that have project and on the right to go to get off and their stock because they can't reach out to to finance in Europe or anywhere else and it is I want this stakeholder business capitalism to work I want it to work because the people in Africa are the one that are creating the wealth that is being hijacked by the leader of their countries Dan I I mean I asked this of a prime minister to crew and really and we've all been talking about it throughout where do you see this this line if that's the right word between government the role of government as a stakeholder and the corporation well I there has to be a partnership between government between the private sector between academia non-profits we all need to work together I don't think any of us can advocate responsibility you know one of the things that I think and I believe in at least is that you can be overwhelmed by the extent of the problems that exist in our world you know we're facing as I think you mentioned or somebody did multiple problems at one time that have all been magnified by the pandemic but I believe that leadership matters I believe that each and every one of us can make even if it's a small difference we can make a difference like I know that I can make a difference with the resources that PayPal has and there are places that I am doing my best to go and do that I think we can encourage government we can encourage by investing in NGOs by working with academia hand in hand to come up with solutions that we wouldn't come up with individually I think you know the collective power of that whole can be very very powerful it is not easy to go do and sometimes you just need to say look I'm going to go do this inside my company I am going to you know give loans as Angelique was saying to small businesses that otherwise wouldn't get them and there is discrimination in the way that loans are put out and this is one of the reasons why you know we dedicated money to just give grants to black-owned businesses here in the U.S. that were hit particularly hard by covid 41 percent double the number of non-black businesses owned businesses went out of business during the pandemic and so helping them to get loans helping them to survive through this pandemic we felt was essential to have a country that comes out of this that can at least start to come together and prosper and I I think this idea of stakeholder capitalism is so important because look anyone can maximize profits next quarter that's not the that's not a harder thing to go do it's really if you want to move from being a good company to a great company if you want to build a long enduring company that can make a difference this is about building for the long term I mean I think if we if we have a purpose if we inspire employees to do the right thing we treat them well we treat our customers and regulars with respect as people were saying then over the long run we do maximize profit we do maximize returns for shareholders but we can't just think about one constituent versus others we work in a complicated world and we need to have we need to have solutions that are multivariate in response I want to ask Dan said something that really is true we need all the all the pieces to work together because there's no way it's gonna work without it because you can't wash your left hand without your right hand and everything in our world is like that and what I'm doing as you said each one of us we can we can do something I started an organization where I give seed funding to adolescent girls and young women in my country I started three years ago last time I was there it was late 2019 and the result of it is just mind blowing even myself could not believe how fast those younger young those adolescent and young women gonna transform their family their community the COVID-19 hit their villages those young women from the get go they say we're gonna produce soap liquid and solid soap and my question was why are you doing such a small business and they said to me we buy the soap far away when we come back that soap we have to divide the use of the soap in three washing the dishes washing the clothes or washing ourselves our self-confidence start from our own hygiene so we need people to have access to soap COVID-19 arrived there were the first one to provide the soap the water fountain going to the radio and telling people in their different languages how to prevent COVID-19 to come to their village just a little seed I mean I mean beginning seeds goes a long way that's why I'm that's what I know this stakeholder capitalism can work because if you give to people the ability to work to create something for themselves to dream the kids do better the family do better the whole society and the world get better and we live in the world at peace and not in the world in pieces inspiration to all of us and a lot of work to do I'd love to let that class have the final the final word and and just your thoughts on you know great discussion today thank you all for being part of it class does this leave you where are you on the you announced a great reset there was skepticism there was skepticism there was optimism skepticism a new word where are you where are you on the are you if we if we get this group together in two years how much progress have we made if I look back the last 50 years since I created the world economic form humankind has made such a progress and it's a little things and if everybody gives more sun takes in I think son we as a humankind will fulfill our obligations which we have towards the next generation so I I have seen despite all the question marks we raised I have seen many positive signals the last let's say statement of kid you I think we stakeholder capitalist gives us direction now we have to walk fast to implement it thank you thank you and thank all of you thank you hope to see you in person soon


Curcumin is a powerful antioxidant with the ability to extend the lifespan of centerobditis elegans worms. This is due to its ability to reduce oxidative stress and down-regulate the MAPK signaling pathway. This article was authored by Jinning Su, Pinyun Du, Xiao Yulu, and others.


And so I just want to say a little bit about Karen. So Karen works as an elementary literacy coach in the Westsburg field public schools. Since her participation in the Westsburg mass writing project summer leadership institute in 2010, she has been an active teacher consultant in both side work and the professional development program. She served for three years as the Westsburg mass writing project co-director for teacher programs 2015 to 2017 and is an outstanding teacher leader in the Westsburg field public schools. During her term as co-director, she did an exemplary job of building and involving the team of teacher consultants who actively participated in planning and leading the annual best practices conference that's been symposium, as well as summer teachers as writer's programs. As a result of Karen's leadership, when her term was over, another active member of the team, Emily Lent, anyway, was ready to take on the responsibility. And I think that's one of the great things we see here is just the way in which, with a cohort, with a group of people who really have this kind of passing on of this kind of knowledge and I think it really is quite powerful. In addition, Karen was an active member of the Westsburg mass writing project executive board throughout her term, contributing to inquiry and decision making on a variety of issues. Karen helped to pioneer a new delivery model that combines traditional workshops with demonstration lessons and on-site coaching of teachers. She helped lead extensive Westsburg mass writing project programs using this model in at least three districts, Agnon, Mohoff Regional, and Southpaculate, on topics ranging from the six traits of writing to project-based learning. Recently, she has assisted in implementing state-funded partnerships to implement the new history and social science standards in the Hampshire region and Westsburg field of districts. Karen's contribution to the Westsburg mass writing project and various programs cannot be overstated. She embodies the spirit of Pat Hunter. She exemplifies our belief in teachers teaching. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It is such an incredible honor to be on this list of such accomplished people. Just thank you so much. But to be honest, it does make sense that there's a lot of people on the board together because I have never felt alone with the Westsburg mass writing project. I love the fact that at Westsburg mass writing project, we work together as teachers, as writers, as learners, and because of that, it may be better. For example, whenever Jane sends an email asking to do some type of PB that might sound a little daunting because I've never done it before, it's hard to say no to Jane if you know how to yell that. And I would say yes, because at Westsburg mass writing project, we work together to do things together, and I just always felt supported. And that's what helped me learn so much with the Westsburg mass writing project, especially Jane and Bruce, and Emily, and Karen, and Heather, and Alicia, and Kessa, if the list just goes on and on. So thank you very much. Mr. I appreciate it.


Good evening and welcome to this evening's lecture. Great to see so many people here tonight. The event is organized tonight by the SOAS Food Studies Center and is part of the Center's Distinguished Lecture Series. The SOAS Food Studies Center fosters teaching and research on food and agriculture here at SOAS and also serves as a vehicle for connecting SOAS academics and students with those sharing food-related interests beyond SOAS. We are interested in the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of food and the dynamic interactions of these dimensions, whether in the past, present, or future, from production through to consumption, not only in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but also in the rest of the world. More than 40 members of SOAS staff belong to the center, as do more than 20 SOAS research students, and more than 100 students on taught courses at the school and alumni of these courses. We also have nearly 1,000 associate members, including students and academics from other universities, policymakers, activists, journalists, and makers and vendors of food. The center convenes the weekly SOAS food forum, distinguished lectures, such as this evening's, and other events. Should anyone wish to join the center as an associate member, which is free of charge, and to be placed on our email list, please send an email to soasfoodstudies at soas.ac.uk. Our distinguished lectures are co-sponsored by Gastronomica, the Journal of Critical Food Studies. I'd like to thank the journal's editor, Melissa Caldwell, who is here with us this evening, as well as the University of California Press, which publishes the journal for their continuing support for this lecture series. Tonight's lecture will be published in the journal and will also be available on the SOAS Food Studies Center web page. I'd also like to thank the Centers and Programs office here at SOAS, especially Nanachuku, Jane Savery, and Yasmin Jayasimi for all of their work behind the scenes organizing this event. Now I'd like to introduce our speaker. David E. Sutton is professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He holds a BA in general studies in the humanities, an MA in anthropology, and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He took his PhD in 1995, and the work is published as Memories Cast in Stone with Berg in 1998. During a postdoc in Oxford, where after spending time in Greece, where food had figured so prominently in daily life, he found himself in a place where the table settings were of as much importance as the food itself, he started to think about making food more central to his research. Since the 90s, he has conducted research in Greece, much of this on the island of Kalimnos in the Eastern Aegean. His early work explored historical consciousness and the relevance of the past in daily life, ranging from naming practices to the ritual throwing of dynamite at Easter. He subsequently focused on everyday cooking practices in Kalimnos. In this work, he has examined how Kalimnians reproduce and innovate recipes, use tools as extensions of the body, and create their kitchen spaces. More recently, he has studied the so-called Greek financial crisis as seen through the lens of changing food practices, the theme he will address in this evening's lecture. Professor Sutton has been a leading figure in the study not only of food and cooking, but also in relation to this, materiality, tools and technology, and memory and the senses. His work has contributed significantly to the study of gender and, more recently, to the study of political protest. He has also been a pioneer in the use of video in ethnographic research. He is author of Remembrance of Rapasts, An Anthropology of Food and Memory, published by Berg in 2001, Hollywood Blockbusters, The Anthropology of Popular Movies, also published by Berg in 2009, and Secrets from the Greek Kitchen, Cooking Skill and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island, published by the University of California Press in 2014. He is co-editor with David Barris of The Restaurant's Book, Ethnographies of Where We Eat, published by Bloomsbury in 2007. These, as well as a great many journal articles, book chapters, and other writings. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Professor David Sutton, who will be speaking tonight on the theme let them eat stuffed peppers, an argument of images on the role of food in understanding neoliberal austerity in Greece. David. Thanks, Harry, for that really lovely introduction. And I'm really honored to be here tonight to talk to you all and to present what I've been working on and to get your feedback on it. So let me start with a little bit about my title because it's a long one. The argument of images is a phrase I take from my mentor, James Fernandez, who used it to talk about the synesthetic aspects of ritual in particular, which inspired me in some of my synesthetic ethnography. The role of food in understanding neoliberal austerity in Greece. Well, as I'm sure most of you know, Greece has been in a economic crisis. Some call it a financial crisis. Some just call it a crisis since 2009. And unlike other European Union countries, it's been subject to a series of programs, austerity programs known as Memoranda, that have been imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. And there were three of them, three Memoranda, three programs. And then this summer there was a fourth proposed and Greece had a referendum on it. And the Greek people overwhelmingly rejected the program, 62% to 38%. And on Calumnos, where I work, it was much higher. I think it was like 75%. But the government, the left-wing government known as Syriza, went ahead and signed the new memorandum about a week later. As for let them eat stuffed peppers, well, I'm going to show you a very short video. And this was in September. It was after on the eve of the reelection of the Syriza government. And they were interviewing the Deputy Minister of Social Solidarity. And they were asking her how she planned, how the ministry planned to help the Greek people who have been suffering under these austerity programs. And they have indeed been suffering. Once again, maybe you've heard. But just for example, they've had a youth unemployment rate of 50% to 60% for many years now. And so this is what she responded. We think that there are opportunities to make money and to support the projects that the Greek people are trying to do. The generation, the generations, the people, the people, the people, the people of the Greek people. The next generation. OK, so just a couple of things about that. This statement provoked a lot of reaction. I won't tell you what it was right now. But just to clarify a few things, she's suggesting that her ministry, just like the Greek people, will be able to economize and stretch things by doing things like making what I've translated as stuff peppers. But in fact, the word yamista is more general. It means stuffed vegetables. It can be tomatoes. It can be aubergines. And basically what you do is you fill the vegetable with a combination of rice, meat if you have it, ground beef, and various herbs and spices. And you bake it in the oven, or sometimes in an outdoor oven. And it's very nice. It's very delicious. It is, in some ways, as she's suggesting, kind of a Greek version of that idea of nail broth or stone soup, if you're familiar with it. The idea of making something from nothing. So I'm going to come back to that. During the period as the crisis was unfolding, I had been working on my research on everyday cooking on the island of Kalimnos. And while I felt that my research did have wider implications, I wasn't thinking about politics with a capital P. But I began to hear resonances between food discourses and larger issues, which got my attention at the time. So for me, this actually harkened back to my initial PhD research on Kalimnos, where I was looking at how local practices could inform the understanding of much larger issues, such as, for example, how local Greek naming practices, I believe, illuminated the controversy over the naming of Yugoslav Macedonia. So what's the broader perspective I'm taking here? No reason. Sorry about that. So I felt as I was getting into this, of course, I got into anthropology so that I wouldn't have to understand economics. But I realized at a certain point that I couldn't actually go on with that. And so as I'm motivated by what was going on, I really started trying to get my mind around certain things that were happening. And to get my mind around the concept of neoliberalism. Of course, neoliberalism, big concept, a lot of different perspectives. But the ones that I was drawn to were largely inspired by the work of Carl Polanyi, and he was a mid-century economic anthropologist. And he wrote a book, The Great Transformation, which was looking at the transformations of society around the eve of World War I. And particularly, he was interested in what he called the disinventing of the economy from society, the idea that with free markets, you have a separation of economy from society, perhaps for the first time in history, that was imposed by what was called liberal economics. And so a lot of people have found this concept useful. Can you hear me when I'm out here too? OK, I'll go back and forth. So a lot of people, anthropologists and others, have found this idea useful to understand now neoliberalism, which is in some ways doing some of the same things. He had another really good concept called the double movement. And the double movement was his phrase for the idea that in response to the disinventing of the economy from society, or claims to disinvent the economy from society, society protected itself. Society responded to this through protection of itself. And he noted in his work that this protection could take both right wing and left wing forms. And anyone following the election in the United States can see that he is very prophetic. But coming from my research on cooking, and as Harry described, I was looking at tool use and things like that, one thing that struck me is that very few people who were talking about Karl Polanyi ever mentioned his brother, Michael Polanyi. Michael Polanyi was a mid-century philosopher. And he was best known for talking about the concept of tacit knowledge, or the idea, as he put it, that we know more than we can say. And he explored this concept of tacit knowledge. He said that all knowledge has tacit dimensions, even the knowledge, even the most explicit objective knowledge produced by scientists has tacit dimensions. So it got me thinking, tacit knowledge? It was very much similar. I was kind of using a number of different concepts, not systematically, but tacit knowledge, embodied knowledge, situated knowledge, local knowledge. All of these were terms that recognized how knowledge is based in context. And of course I was interested in cooking knowledge and what exactly was transmitted when we talk about cooking knowledge being transmitted. So when I'm talking about neoliberalism now, I'm talking about the belief that markets and privatization provide greater efficiency and superior solutions to economic questions, along with the belief that you can apply market logic to ever-increasing areas of life. And this often involves processes which could be labeled abstraction after James Carrier, like commodity fetishism, like the kind of abstraction of knowledge from social contexts that we see in university assessment schemes and audit cultures. And as Marilyn Sirstern notes, the pressure to make intellectual work visible, measurable, and transferable favors disembed knowledge that attacks the very qualities of complexity and sensitivity that anthropologists are taught to value. So disembed it, just the same term that Polanyi was using, the other Polanyi, car Polanyi, embedded and disembed it. In terms of food, I see a similar tendency that I would call neoliberal in the notion that cooking knowledge and even taste itself can be standardized and abstracted from social settings. As we see in all kinds of projects, contemporary projects, from Cook's Illustrated Magazine and America's Test Kitchen, if you're familiar with those, to many avatars of molecular gastronomy, not all, but many, to the notion circulated last year that the Watson supercomputer is going to provide us with all kinds of previously untried, but delicious ingredient combinations, such as mushrooms with strawberries. Who knew? Let me contrast this briefly to what we know as anthropologists of food. For example, in Anita von Pozer's recent ethnography of food ways of the bosom of Papua New Guinea, she notes of their staple sego pudding, regardless of whether it appeared to her to have the right consistency or preparation, bosom insisted that a sociable person cannot fail to produce tasty sego pudding. Or in my own work on Calumnos, where I showed that techniques, such as what I call cutting in the hand, which is something that I analyze at length in my book, could not be abstracted from a total social material setting in which they make sense as part of the flow of a particular cultural life. So this is my context for beginning to make sense of the role of food and discourse, as discourse and practice in people's experience of the Greek crisis. Now, I first kind of became aware that this might be an interesting issue, when I was listening to various ministers talking about the causes of the crisis. So I remember it was kind of in a documentary and they had back to back, they had, I don't know if it would have been, was it George Osborn back then in 2011? They had the British Chancellor and he basically was saying, you know, we all benefited, so we all have to share the burden. And that was pretty much his expression, it was very unmetaphorical. The Irish minister said, well, you know, we all parted. But the Greek minister, the list-based deputy prime minister, said, mazithafagrame, which I'm translating, it literally means we all, we ate it together, but the gift is the money, we all eat the money. And this is, I mean, the verse, the priest used the word eating to mean a lot of things. And this gives you a sense of kind of the range of the word eating, it wasn't a kind of loud metaphor for him, it's a common expression. But people reacted to it pretty strongly. And I tried to capture their reactions in this, I think it's kind of summed up by this comment. And in this picture you see a group of people known as the Troika, which were the European institutions which were imposing the austerity program. And they're cutting up a cake, a New Year's cake, because in Greece, on New Year's you cut up a cake and whoever gets the piece with the coin in it is lucky for the next year. So they're cutting up a cake, this was on the eve of 2012, it says 2012 Greek, but they're giving out the pieces and it says one piece for the European lenders, one piece for the Greek banks, one piece for Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs actually was pretty instrumental in the Greek crisis in a number of different ways. In fact, I believe that the European director of Goldman Sachs is actually now the head of the European Commission. One piece for Angela Merkel and one piece for Reichenbach, who was the kind of overseer of the Troika. And in the background some very kind of disheveled and skinny Greek people are saying, and now they're gonna tell us that we all ate it together. So this was an initial context, a kind of context of claims of collective responsibility and responses about let's parse out that responsibility a little bit more. Another thing that I noticed early on, oh, actually, I'm sorry, I'm jumping ahead. So this was last year and this is a kind of picking up on this same theme, but in a slightly different way. In this case, a Greek man named Mr. Mitzos, a kind of typical Greek, is talking to Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, and he's saying, but why do you want my vine leaf? And she's saying, nomadakya, a stuffed grape leaf, I'm gonna make a menace grape leaf with green, Mr. Mitzos, and in the pot where she's cooking it, it says, lowering of wages and pensions and raising of taxes, which has been a big part of the austerity program. And in fact, I think this cartoon, actually brings up an important concept, which is when you talk to Greeks about the crisis, one of the words that they use a lot is dignity, or axioprapia. And the sense of dignity that they're talking about, well, this cartoon is kind of playing on the idea of personal dignity, right? But axioprapia kind of means dignity in a slightly broader sense, or maybe a lot broader sense. It really suggests the possibility to reproduce habits of life that make you a Greek person. So it kind of resonates with the idea of moral economy from E.P. Thompson. It kind of also suggests the idea that there's a problem with making profits on people's suffering. And in fact, the people I knew on Callum knows, for example, one guy I'm very close friends with, he was the computer administrator for the mayor's office, he is. And he saw his wages cut 48% in one day. In 2012, and over the period of the last six years, his taxes have brought up over 500%. So another food related practice that I was interested in early on, this was really popular back in 2011. And I analyzed it along with my former student and colleague with any of us or Nellies. And we wrote about it a little bit, so I'll just talk about it very briefly. It's called yogurting, and it means throwing yogurt at politicians or people in authority. And one of the things that struck us about it is that it seemed to be accepted for a long time.  And so of course we asked, why yogurt? Did there just happen to be a lot of yogurt handy? And one of the things we suggested is that yogurt is in fact one of the foods that has an identifiable Greekness to it. In fact, I saw this Greek fans at FIFA 2014 wearing Greek yogurt cups. But I also had the very odd experience last summer traveling through a lot of international airports. And I heard the same, almost the same discussion twice. It was some non-Greek people talking about the Greek crisis because this was right on the eve of the referendum and there was a suggestion that if the Greeks voted against the austerity package, they might be thrown out of Europe. So people had some consciousness of it. And I heard two different conversations where somebody said, oh yeah, the Greeks are doing pretty bad, they just hear about it. And they said, yeah, well, you know, what do they produce? They only produce yogurts. They have a yogurt economy. So this is food scholars. We know that food has that double-edgedness that can be an identifier and also a slur, right? But what we were arguing was that really what people were expressing by throwing yogurt was that the neoliberal austerity package was somehow against Greekness. That it was somehow antithetical to Greekness and that they were going to actually cover the politicians in this substance that represented Greekness to remind them of their Greekness. And I'm going to try and convince you of that in some of the other slides that I'm gonna show. Now these next two slides I wanted to show you together because in some ways they look similar. In one case you have people reaching for a bag of tomatoes. And in the other case you have people reaching for some bags of potatoes. But the context of these two pictures are very different. In this picture, this was during some of the protests in 2011, this was in Thessaloniki, Greece's second city. And farmers from Northern Greece drove their potatoes into Thessaloniki and handed them out to protesters as an act of, they said, solidarity. And this was in fact the beginnings of what later became known as the potato movement or the anti-middleman movement which was the first time in quite a while of trying to really connect producers and consumers more directly in Greece. And it has had some success. It's had different fates, but there are a number of anthropologists who are doing studies of it now or learning about it. Their studies are coming out as we speak. This other picture, people expressed a lot of consternation about this picture because it presented an image of Greeks as desperate. And they said, is this really our Greece? And others said, yes it is our Greece. Let's recognize that. But to me the striking thing is that it reminded me of a quote from Eduardo Galliano when he says I don't believe in charity, I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, it moves from top to bottom. Solidarity is horizontal, it respects the other. I have much to learn from other people. And in fact, a lot of the discussion in Greece about efforts to relieve people's needs and people's hunger is phrased in terms of an opposition between charity and solidarity. And there are big charity organizations in Greece including the Greek Orthodox Church and some very wealthy foundations. And a lot of people, particularly people on the left but more generally say, we're not doing charity, we're doing solidarity. And of course, there can be some fuzziness there. It's not always so kind of dry. But I think it's an important distinction that we wanna think about. So we'll see this in a couple of these slides coming up. So this is one of the most successful movements to come out of the crisis. It's called the social kitchen movement. This one is I think the most well-known, Oalos Athropos, the other human. And it started in Athens and it's been expanded all over Greece and they're pretty good about at least once a week getting together and cooking a meal in some public location with the idea that anyone who can should contribute what they can and anyone who can't should just come and they'll cook the meal and they'll sit down and eat it together. And in fact, the founder of this had some phrase. He said, if I just give you food, maybe you just throw it back at my head. But if we sit down together as humans, we can have a dialogue. And I think it's really important as anthropologists to contextualize this within Greek social practices because on Calumnos, people are feeding each other all the time.  And then the other neighbor sometime will bring something over to them. Nobody's keeping track, but it's a constant process and you're doing it for all kinds of reasons, not just out of people's needs, although they do do it in some cases for people who are in need. But more generally, often you're doing it to remember a dead relative when your parent dies, you cook extra for other people to think of them. So there are all kinds of reasons for this, but it's very much embedded in social practice to share food like this. Now this next slide, I don't wanna suggest that food is all about solidarity or that it doesn't include its exclusions. Certainly it does. And this is a food distribution by the notorious Greek neo-Nazi party, Golden Dog. And they have been providing some social services to desperate people in parts of Greece, along with enacting violence on migrants and others. But their food distribution, as you can see here, is a more serious matter. And it's very much pitched in hyper-nationalist terms. This is food buying for Greeks and nobody else. So I just wanted to make that point that the food can have those other uses. Now this is the logo for the suspended coffee movement in Greece. You may have heard of suspended coffee. It started, I believe, in Naples. It's spread throughout the world. And it means buying a coffee for someone who will have it later on, who maybe couldn't afford it. I mean, there are different versions of it, and I think the differences are important.  And then when somebody comes along and says, are there any suspended coffees, the coffee shop will tell them yes they're on. And as with the social kitchen movement, the idea behind suspended coffee is not so much charity, but neighborhood cohesion by allowing people to participate in daily rituals of life as one of the founders of the movement in Greece says, there's so many people that just sit in their apartment and don't go out because they can't. We want them to go out of the house, socialize and meet their neighbors. In one neighborhood, we even had a group of women baking cakes, which they gave to the cafes to serve with. So it really is a neighborhood initiative. Sorry. And it also has to be put in the context once again of Greek culture in which coffee shop sociability has deep, deep roots. And lots of anthropologists of Greece have written about this. It used to be a male social space, but for the last 30 years, it's definitely become a co-op social space, but it is a primary space for socializing. It's not for going to the coffee shop with your iPad or doing your work or something like that, it's a socializing space. And in fact, especially during the crisis, people have talked about how important it is to be able to still go out to the coffee shop to feel that they are not isolated, that they are still humans, that they are still able to engage in social relationships. And this, in fact, as the anthropologist Daniel Knight has written about, provokes some negative reactions on the part of some Northern Europeans, particularly in the German press, I guess, or maybe the German finance minister, Schoimler, who say, look at those Greeks sitting in coffee shops, if they're sitting in coffee shops buying coffees, clearly they're not suffering enough. But there's a phrase here that's really relevant. It takes us back to what I was talking about about the notion of dignity. It's a phrase. Istochia pedici, and a literal translation of it would be, poverty requires good living. But good living is more expansive term here. They're really, once again, refers to the idea that you can imagine stretching things so that you are able to reproduce your identities and social relations, that you are not going to turn into an isolated individual, which the Greeks imagine that many people in Northern Europe live like that. And I heard a lot of people talking about this on Calumnus, people in coffee shops kind of performed their coffee shop practice. And they said, here we are in the coffee shop. It's the crisis. We may as well be gathering together, having a coffee. And in fact, somebody said that instead of poverty requires good living. The phrase now is ikrisi thalikaliparasi, the crisis requires good living. And this could involve different things from going to the coffee shop. It could involve staying home with your friends and inviting them over for a pizza instead of going out to the taverna. But finding ways to stretch things so that you can still say that you're human beings and have social relations. I'm gonna talk really briefly about this. I think this is an interesting art project that two Greek artists who I think have studied anthropology as well put on. They gathered bitter oranges, which are, for the most part, used for decorative purposes in Greek cities. They gathered them from three different neighborhoods in Athens and in Thessaloniki. This is Syntagma Square. And they made what's called gliko to kutalliu, a spoon sweet out of them. Different one from each neighborhood. And they served them at a food conference in Greece. They served them at the Oxford Food Symposium. They served them at Gathering in Germany. And they wanted to provoke some dialogue with the people they were serving them to. And not surprisingly, they got very different reactions and the people in Germany and England were very interested in the different flavors and how the different flavors came from different locations. The people in Greece thought this was a really interesting strategy. They thought, we need to be doing more of this. We need to, maybe you could market it. Maybe you could make some money off of this. Or maybe this is something we should be doing to help people so that they can be enjoying this resource. And obviously it's not filling nutritional needs. It's just orange peel and sugar water. But it's actually part of coffee practices. That is, you'll serve spoon sweets, especially a little bit in coffee shops, not so much, but mostly when you have people over for coffee. So it's part of this same kind of reproducing sociability. So these are all pictures of what they did. And the one thing that I kind of asked them about and I don't know what they think about it. They haven't kind of totally responded. But I thought it was interesting that this is a bittersweet taste and kind of the symbolism of bittersweetness as a food that's representing the crisis and whether they felt that there was anything kind of connected to the taste of bittersweetness as a way of thinking about history or the past or the present. This takes us up to last summer when the referendum was going on. And once again, a yes vote on the referendum was to accept the new austerity package, a no vote was to reject it. And so this restaurant offered a yes burger, which as you can see was chickpea patties on a dry bun and the no burger, grease style with creamy feta and sun-dried tomatoes. And so, I mean, once again, it's interesting the symbolism of food because there were other protests that I haven't included in this presentation which played on the idea of foreign food in Greece. But this one, they're talking about two fairly Greek things, but chickpeas have an association with poverty or even sometimes some people associate them with World War II. And obviously, creamy feta and sun-dried tomatoes sound a lot nicer. And so I was interested in kind of things going on around the time of the referendum because one of the big issues was that people felt that if they voted against the austerity packages, they might be thrown out of the Eurozone or even thrown out of the European Union. That was kind of what some of the people who said we should vote yes because otherwise this is gonna happen, right? And so there was a kind of question about the Euro itself, that flood and how it felt about the Euro. And this is something that's been, I think, evolved in interesting ways over the, what is it, 12 or 13 years since the Euro was introduced. Because people on calendar still tell me like that the Euro doesn't reflect value in ways that they understand. And I haven't really studied this in depth. My former student actually was there during the time of the transition when the dropment and the Euro were both circulating together. And he'd had people telling him things like, you know, I can see buying clothes with the Euro or other things like that, but how am I going to buy tomatoes with the Euro? Tomatoes are Greek. I can only understand the value of tomatoes in dropments. So, you know, so this got me interested in kind of the relationship of food and money in this discourse. And some of the ways that food and money are like counting symbols to each other. Sometimes they overlap. We all make the money. And sometimes they're an emphasis to each other, right? And so I'm going to explore that a little bit more in these slides. This was a picture that circulated on the internet. This was part of the yes campaign saying, you know, we should stay in Europe. This was a picture from the rally just before the referendum. There were big rallies, both for yes and no. And this was the yes rally. You could say a number of things about this picture, including the fact that the sign the little girl is holding that has misspelled Europe in it. But the interesting thing to me was the Euro, the 10 Euro note plaster on the guy's head. Now I could read this in two very different ways.  But this also seems to me to symbolize the idea of identification that we are the money now. So it's standing for some this other idea here I think. And then one of my colleagues sent me this and apparently this is a graffiti that you can find in many places. It says ATM Society. So it has the idea, are we an ATM Society now? But it also is, it has another kind of twist to it, which is that it can be a pun. It can mean ati mekinomia or honorless society. So the ATM Society is an honorless society. And ATMs were actually the focus of a lot of concern last summer because for very complicated reasons Greece had to put capital controls and people could only get out 60 euros at a time. So there were a lot of lines at ATMs and sometimes the media showed to scare people again. They showed people fighting at ATMs. Like once again, if you vote no, we're gonna be fighting for our money. But on Calumnos, in fact, my friends told me that ATMs were actually very sociable places that people gathered together and they were joking and they were saying, yeah, do we really need to take out money today? Maybe not. So once again, this kind of opposition between money and food sociability. Now I wanna talk briefly about what I'm sure is on a lot of your minds, which is the refugee crisis. And this photo got a lot of play in Greece. In fact, it was singled out by the Greek Prime Minister and he said, this is the image that we want to present of Europe, not a Europe of borders and fences. But this Europe. And the woman who's feeding the refugee woman's baby, she is actually one of the people who's been nominated for the Nobel Prize on behalf of all of the volunteers in Greece. And you see lots of things like this. I mean, if you've followed it at all, ordinary Greek people by and large have been tremendously generous. And here you have this Greek baker who's sharing his own product and the word philotimo or honor, love of honor is on top there. And from all that I've read and followed and talked to colleagues about it, there's really been a tremendous effort on part of ordinary people, not only part of the government or the kind of UN or big NGOs, they've been dropping the ball. But ordinary people in solidarity networks have been making a tremendous effort. And it's really important. Once again, context is everything. It's like, why are they making this effort? One narrative says it's because Greeks are generous, Philxonia, hospitality. And this narrative is kind of nationalist. It says, yes, we are the generous ones. Turks aren't generous, nor do Europeans aren't generous. We're generous. And the other thing about Philxonia, though, is as anthropologists have analyzed, it's definitely hierarchical. It's like, once again, it's like that cherry. It's like, I'm in the position of power. But in fact, many people, when you ask them about it and there's actually somebody, I think at LSC who's talked about this, her name is Miria Yorgiu. But other anthropologists, like Renee Hirshan and historians like Nick DiMari, have written about this in the past. It's not about hierarchy, it's about identity. Yorgiu says, when she asked people, why are they doing it, they said, it could be me. It could be me. And this is something that to just quote Nina Glick-Schiller, who's been working on what she calls cosmopolitan solidarity, cosmopolitan sociability, sorry. In Germany and in the north of England, she writes that the welcome that some Europeans gave the refugees in the fall of 2015 was not an expression of tolerance to strangers, but an acknowledgement that we are all facing the consequences of a global warring and the depredations and displacements of capital accumulation. In that sense, we are all refugees. Well, and in an additional sense, many of those older Greeks who are donating so much, they were refugees either during World War II or their parents or grandparents were refugees during the Asia Minor catastrophe. So they are speaking from personal knowledge. How am I doing on time? Okay. So really quick on this one then. So it's not always rosy though. This is a protest, I found this about a week ago, a protest to the Chamber of Commerce of Gios because apparently some merchants are not happy about solidarity actions because they don't want the refugees to be getting free food, they want the refugees to be buying their food. And so this is the social kitchen on Gios, part of the social kitchen movement. They go to the Chamber of Commerce and protest and they say, basically, stop harassing us. But they do it by bringing cups of lentils which they distribute to each member of the Chamber of Commerce. So they actually are using food to shame these people who are once again putting profit and calculation before sociability and solidarity. And very briefly about how are people in Calamno surviving. Well, those who can are sending their children as they have in the past as economic migrants to some of the few places that still take economic migrants like Australia. And one family that I knew, the mother's pictured here, sorry, her son has been in Australia for something over a year. In the course of a year he sent them roughly 12,000 euro. So quite a substantial amount that he's basically dedicating himself to keeping his parents and his sister afloat. And the mother here is cleaning oregano, which used to be one of the many things you might do to provision yourself. But now things like this are being used to make a little bit of money. So she's gonna bag it up and sell it to tourists as she might do with wild capers or other things. Sometimes they collect snails, which used to be just a delicacy that you would eat and maybe share with friends while they collected extra snails and sold them to neighbors. And it called on a lot of local knowledge, a lot of knowledge that could be forgotten, like how do you keep the snails? How do you cook the snails? Only the grandmother remembered that or knew that. These aren't recipes written down. So this is one of the ways that people are surviving through local knowledge. I'll give you one more brief example. I've got plenty.  And the sponge divers would take it on the sponge boats because it would last for them. But nobody had made it, but people were making it. At least a few people were making it. I said, why are you making Kavarmas? They said, well, you never know. Who knows? We might not have electricity in the future. We might not have refrigerators. We may as well still know how to make those things that can keep us going. So this is very much kind of related to some of the things that that minister was saying about stretching things and using Tassan knowledge or local knowledge. So to come back to that minister's statement, and here's another quick video of a protest outside of that minister's office. Oops. Okay, so they're saying, basically show us the money so that we can eat stuffed specials. Because these are municipal workers who haven't been paid in months. And basically they're saying, we don't even have enough money to make the ME stuff. So why were people so upset with this minister? Basically, it's not that what she was saying was wrong. It was that this is not something you bring out in the open. And she certainly didn't have the right to say it because once again, she, like other ministers, but not like the Greek people, she wasn't suffering. She didn't, she wasn't having to make any stuff. So to say that the Greek people should be doing this was very upsetting to people. So to kind of bring, start to bring things to a close, here's a quote from Annalise Riles. She says, the compulsion toward reciprocity and exchange relations, the compulsion to create and continually rejuvenate relations based on debt and mutual obligation is in fact the basis of all ethics and sociality, the source of our humanity, and what we can return to at points at which grand ideologies such as neoliberalism fail us. And so this is what I've been talking about. The way that, the way that neoliberalism is not Greek is that it doesn't recognize that sociability is the basis of society. And that sociability calls on all kinds of local knowledge and tacit knowledge for its reproduction. All right. So while food can be used, certainly it can be used for neoliberal or exclusionary purposes and money can be culturally redeemed. In broad terms, money stands for a spirit of calculation and anti-social profiteering, which is something I've developed in some of my other work on Calimnian shopping. And food stands for sociability and the embeddedness of knowledge. And I would propose that there is something of comparative value in this ethnography and that we will find similar meanings anywhere in which a robust food culture, a cuisine in Sidney Mince's use of the term still exists and thrives and is faced with the threat of neoliberal ideologies and practices. But that's for all of you to tell me. And lastly, the more I study food, the more convinced I become that food studies needs to be at the very center of anthropology. And, you know, my mother was an anthropologist and she was, I think in many ways ahead of her times, she was studying social movements back in the 1950s. She was studying transnational migration in the 1980s. But she wondered why I was writing a whole book about food back in 2001. And when I finished that book and told her what my next project was, she said, you're gonna write another book about food? But I think my point is that food is not only a window onto other domains of life, is not only deeply woven into practices of kinship, exchange, and ritual, those domains that we have traditionally considered central to our anthropological project. But food itself is one such domain, absolutely critical to people's daily reproduction of what matters to them about their lives. And as food scholars, I think it's time that we own up to this. So I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite comic strips. This was on New Year's this year. And it's not talking about Greece, but somehow appropriate, I think. And thank you. Thanks to Harry, Jacob, Nenichuku, Leo Vornellis, Nenipanaya, Samatis Amarai, Rianakis, and Navsika Papacharo-Lambos.