PhD, UCLA
MS, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
BA, Macalester College
Dr. Block’s research focuses on food regulation, historical geography of food, GIS, community geography, and Chicago. He has led many food access studies, including the Northeastern Illinois Community Food Security Assessment, a large-scale food access study of the six-county Chicago metro area. He is author or co-author of several articles on the regulation and gendering of milk in the early twentieth century, foodways of the urban poor, and the book Chicago: A Food Biography. Much of his work focuses on community-university partnerships for food justice. He is a past president of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, is currently on the board of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, and is a fellow of the Association of American Geographers, where he was the founding chair of the Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group. He currently is a board member of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, where he is coordinating an effort to evaluation to effects of the Good Food Purchasing Program in Chicago and Cook County. He currently is embarking on a study comparing the regulation of street food vendors in Chicago and France.