Rate My Professor Susanne Freidberg

Susanne Freidberg is Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College and a faculty member in the Ecology, Evolution, Ecosystems and Society Graduate Program. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Yale University, an M.A. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. As a geographer, her research spans political ecology, cultural economy, and science and technology studies. Much of her work centers on food supply chains in and between different parts of the world, exploring expert knowledge and social relations involved in getting food from farm to market. She investigates work, technology, and politics in defining and assuring qualities in food and agriculture, such as fresh, fair, and sustainable. Freidberg examines contemporary debates on measuring food's environmental footprint and efforts by large food companies to assess and improve the sustainability of farms supplying their raw materials. Through the Freidberg Lab, she and her team study the social, political, and ecological life of food supply chains from soil to shelf. Current research focuses on diverse visions of regenerative agriculture taking shape in the United States, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Freidberg has published two major books: French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford University Press, 2004), which examines cultures of commerce in fresh vegetable trades between Africa and Europe, and Fresh: A Perishable History (Harvard University Press, 2009), which traces the meanings of freshness and related technologies in American food. Her peer-reviewed articles include "'Unable to determine': Limits to metrical governance in agricultural supply chains" in Science, Technology and Human Values (2019), "Trading in the secretive commodity" in Economy and Society (2017), "Big Food, little data: The slow harvest of corporate food supply chain sustainability initiatives" in Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2017), "Footprint technopolitics" in Geoforum (2014), and "Calculating sustainability in supply chain capitalism" in Economy and Society (2013). Earlier works cover supermarkets and imperial knowledge, the ethical complex of corporate food power, and cleaning up in African horticulture. She has delivered public lectures such as "Contentious Harvest: The Greening of Big Food" at The Ohio State University (2016) and keynote addresses on life cycle assessment, moral economies of the cold chain, and political metrics of food's footprint at international conferences. Freidberg teaches courses including GEOG 6/INTS 16: Introduction to International Development, GEOG 15: Food and Power, and GEOG 16: Moral Economies of Development.