Vassar held a "Conference on the Politics of Hunger," featuring nutritionist and hunger researcher Jean Mayer from the Harvard School of Public Health and author Emma Rothschild.  An advisor on world hunger to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, Dr. Mayer organized the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health and helped found the National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States.

Ms. Rothschild’s research and writing on the subject included “The Politics of Food” (1974) and “Running Out of Food” (1974) in The New York Review of Books, “Food Politics” (1976) in Foreign Affairs and “Short Term, Long Term” (1975), an account of the UN World Food Conference held outside Rome in November 1974 in The New Yorker.