Keep Food Legal's Baylen Linnekin Moderates All-Star Panel on Food & Social Media

On Saturday, Apr. 13 Keep Food Legal executive director Baylen Linnekin will moderate a panel at the American University Social Media Club's Social Learning Summit.

Billed as "DC's only student-run social media conference," the two-day conference features "industry-focused panel discussions & keynotes designed to explore the unique impact of social media."

Panelists and keynote speakers include leaders from such notable companies as Buzzfeed, Twitter, Tumblr, Mashable, Uber, and IBM.

The panel Linnekin will moderate, You Are What You Tweet, will take the form of a lively Q&A. It features an all-star cast of panelists.

What: You Are What You Tweet (food and social media)

Who: Danny Harris, founder, Feastly; Che Ruddell-Tabisola, owner, BBQ Bus, former President, DC Food Truck Association; Alejandra Owens, food blogger, Frijolita; Brett Schulman, CEO, Cava Mezze Grill; Baylen Linnekin, Keep Food Legal (moderator)

Where: School of International Service, Room #120 | American University Main Campus

When: Saturday, Apr. 13, 2:30pm–3:15pm

The panel is organized by Melanie Löff-Bird, who serves as vice president of AU's Social Media Club and was a student in Foodways 2.0--the AU undergraduate class Linnekin taught last semester.

For those of you in Washington, DC who would like to attend the two-day conference (which begins on Friday), including the food and social media panel, please buy tickets here. Those of you who cannot attend may follow all the action using the Twitter hashtags #SLS13 or #SLSNOMS.

Keep Food Legal Heads to Chicago to Speak at IJ Mobile Food Vending Symposium

We are excited to report that Keep Food Legal executive director Baylen Linnekin has accepted an invitation to speak at the University of Chicago School of Law next weekend as part of an Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship symposium on street food, mobile food vending, and food trucks. The IJ Clinic, a joint project of the Institute for Justice and The University of Chicago Law School, is hosting the one-day symposium as part of its campaign to ensure that regulations permit a vibrant street food scene in Chicago, where rules currently place needless burdens on mobile vendors at a time when demand for street food has exploded in the city.

Linnekin will sit on a regulatory-reform panel at the Saturday, Apr. 14 conference, My Streets, My Eats: Chicago Mobile Food Symposium & Meet Up. He will discuss mobile-food vending regulations and highlight his forthcoming law-journal article on mobile-food advocacy, which he co-authored with Jeff Dermer of Dermer Behrendt and Matt Geller of SoCalMFVA.

Nationally known IJ Clinic symposium panelists include Gregg Kettles, currently with the Los Angeles mayor's office, who wrote one of the earliest law-review articles on regulating street vending; food journalist Heather Shouse of Timeout Chicago, author of the book Food Trucks; and Sean Basinski, of New York City's excellent Street Vendor Project. To learn more and to register for the free symposium--which will feature food served by various Windy City trucks--go here.

In related news, Linnekin will teach an undergraduate-level course on food entrepreneurship and social media at American University in Washington, DC in fall 2012. Course registration for students in the Washington, DC area is now open.

Keep Food Legal's Baylen Linnekin Reveals "Foodways 2.0" at American Studies Conference

On Satuday, Mar. 10 Keep Food Legal executive director Baylen Linnekin will present his research on the great impact of social media on America's food scene as a panelist at the 2012 meeting of the Chesapeake American Studies Association (CHASA). Linnekin's talk is based on an undergraduate food studies course that he developed and will be teaching in fall 2012 in the American Studies Program at American University in Washington, DC, which is incidentally the site of this year's CHASA meeting.

Linnekin argues that the promises delivered by Web 2.0--perhaps best illustrated by the increasing ubiquity of social media tools like Twitter that allow users to sift, shape, and share news and ideas in ways meaningful to themselves and others--has helped usher in an entirely new era of foodways, which he calls Foodways 2.0. As Linnekin states in his CHASA topic proposal:

Foodways 2.0: Social Media, #FoodTrucks, Pop-Ups, & Underground Foods

Since 2008, social-media tools like Twitter have revolutionized many ways Americans buy and sell food. Social media has made possible mobile-food vending in areas (like parts of Washington, DC) where it was previously difficult or illegal. Social media also facilitates other legal food transactions (i.e., by helping draw customers to pop-up restaurants), makes possible illicit food transactions (i.e., by directing customers to underground restaurants, markets, and street-food vendors), and enhances the consumer’s eating experience (i.e., by fostering food-photography sharing tools like Foodspotting). In effect, social media has led to the creation of an entirely new type of foodways in America, a phenomenon I call “Foodways 2.0.” My research focuses on the most visible and popular example of Foodways 2.0—mobile food trucks—and explores the relationship between social media and pop-up restaurants, underground restaurants, underground markets, and other underground sellers.

For more information and to register for the CHASA conference, please go here. You can download a conference program here (PDF). For information about other upcoming events on Keep Food Legal's calendar--including panel presentations at University of Chicago Law School, New York University, and Harvard University Law School--please visit our Events page.