LILY RESLINK
Staff Writer
Adrienne Krone, associate professor of environmental science, sustainability and religious studies at Allegheny College, will deliver a lecture at 2 p.m. in the Hall of Philosophy. She will examine religious alternative food movements in the U.S. based on her scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork at sites where organizations are working to shift the food system in a different direction. She said she will cover the subject through a lens of contemporary issues.
“I think we’re really at an inflection point in the food system,” she said. “We need to continue feeding 8 billion people, and we really can’t keep doing it the way we’re doing it now.”
As part of the Interfaith Lecture Series, Krone will apply religious worldviews to corrections she sees as necessary to society’s food systems.
“When we think about big environmental problems, if we want to understand how we got to the place where we are, but also how to get out of it, what we’re thinking about is how to change people’s minds,” she said. “And religion is a huge part of how people’s worldviews are shaped.”
Krone published her ethnographic work in her 2025 book, Free-Range Religion: Alternative Food Movements and Religious Life in the United States.
“Religion, religious upbringings, education, practice does a lot to tell people where their place is in the world, what their responsibility is to other humans, to all of creation,” she said.
The field sites she documents in her book include a retreat based on biblical interpretations of vegan diets and Jewish farms that offer experiential learning.
Krone said she will offer takeaways on what she views as areas of need and calls to action related to society’s current reliance on large-scale agriculture.
She said it is not scarcity that impedes an effective food system, but rather, sharing.
“There is technically enough food for everybody on the planet. The problem is, it’s not distributed equitably,” Krone said.
Her lecture will draw on research about how accelerated production in the food system has proceeded at the expense of life on earth.
“What we’re seeing is environmental degradation. We’re seeing health issues. We’re seeing a lot of things that suggest that that system is not working. The soil cannot continue,” she said.
As a first step for anyone to take, she said she suggests people gather more information about the source of their food.
“There are many local food systems. They need people’s support, and if you go to your local farmer’s market, you know where your food came from.”
While larger justice issues create obstacles to local food shopping, Krone said, “For people who have the means, seeking out local food is a great place to start.”
Krone is part of the environmental science and sustainability program at Allegheny College, which recently celebrated its 50-year anniversary. Attending her lecture, Krone said, may offer Chautauquans a combined experience of her courses at Allegheny, such as “Religion and the Environment” and “Judaism, Justice and Food.” She said several of her courses focus on food systems and small-scale sustainable agriculture.
Krone said she grew up in a household that valued knowing where food came from, but as a graduate student working for a nonprofit in New York City, she could not afford to eat the way her family had eaten. She said this spurred deeper consideration of food injustice.
As she earned her degrees in religion studies, she said she began to reflect on religion and materiality, as well as how people’s religious values translate into their lifestyles. While she has seen scholarly work at the intersection of religion and food become more prevalent in the past 20 years, she said religious people, like minister and dietary reformer Sylvester Graham, have long been at the forefront of critiquing humanity’s eating habits.
She said ethical values and human motivations are essential considerations to understanding the food system’s origins and shaping its future.
She said this consideration lends itself to the following conclusion: “Humans are supposed to have a different relationship with the food system, agriculture, with animals than they do right now, and a lot of that comes out of religious values and religious teachings, even if people are not religious in the traditional sense.”
