Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior (SNEB) International Conference 2024

Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior (SNEB) International Conference 2024 is organized by Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior (SNEB) and will be held from Jul 29 - Aug 01, 2024 at University of Tennessee Student Union, Knoxville, Tennessee, United States of America.

Description:
The Society of Nutrition Education and Behavior’s (SNEB) International Conference provides nutrition professionals the opportunity to explore the latest in nutrition education and behavior change research, practice and policy. In recent years, the financial loss SNEB incurred from our conferences has increased to unsustainable levels; so, a change to our conference model is unavoidable. I have been asked to envision and create a new model that retains everything we love about SNEB but is fiscally viable. To achieve this, we are holding the conference at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee. I am confident that the changes we are making will result in exciting and positive outcomes for our conference and society.

One of the things that has not changed is that our conference has a theme. The 2024 SNEB conference theme is, “Understanding Foodways: Learning, Growing and Sustaining.” Since announcing this theme, I have had many people ask, “What is a Foodway?” Foodways refers to why we eat what we eat and what that means. Foodways are shaped by culture, religion, tradition, geographic location, climates, time periods, politics and socio-demographic power differentials. 1-5 In 1942, the term foodways was coined by three graduate students who were studying the food behavior of people living in under resourced communities.6 In 1971, Jay Anderson defined foodways as: “the whole interrelated system of food conceptualization and evaluation, procurement, preservation, preparation, consumption and nutrition shared by all the members of a particular society.”7 Since then, other constructs have been included such as attitudes, beliefs, transferring of knowledge, activism, justice, folklore, symbolism and tradition as well as food production including gathering, presentation, distribution, marketing and food waste.

The theme also includes the words Learning, Growing and Sustaining. I hope all of us will experience these three things during our conference, but these are also things we work towards in our practice. In nutrition education, on the way to behavior change, learning is often one of the essential parts of the process. In our practice, we hope that people we work with will not only grow in their knowledge and skills but also grow healthy bodies and we of course want to sustain these positive outcomes. Learning, Growing and Sustaining also refers to our work towards learning how to grow a healthy global sustainable food system.