Kim Foster is the James Beard Award-winning Author of the forthcoming The Meth Lunches: The Care and Feeding of a Drug Addict, St. Martin’s Press. In this lecture, Kim Foster will examine the ways food can signify and complicate dysfunction in Las Vegas, for both individuals and communities – those with empty tables, and those with full plates. What does food mean to people in addiction? Or psychosis? Or in jail? Or for people who don’t have kitchens? What should it mean to the rest of us? Food can be a way to control. And punish. And abuse. And a means to force people to conform. And, there is no food at all. Food is often a litmus test. What we are eating and how we are eating tells us something integral about how we are doing, and what our lives are like.