Instructors:
Lucy Jarosz (jarosz@u.washington.edu)
Ann Anagnost (anagnost@u.washington.edu)
Course Description:
This course explores how food production and consumption creates meanings, identities, relationships, and values that extend far beyond meeting our nutritional needs. It is organized thematically to include considerations of the industrialization of food, food and health, local and alternative food systems, hunger, and food democracy movements. The learning objectives for this course are to encourage a deeper understanding of these themes, to enhance your ability to synthesize and analyze issues and debates among the topics, and to reveal how the questions and concepts introduced each session are applicable to your lives.
Readings:
Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006) is the only assigned reading for this course. But we hope it will just be the beginning of your explorations. We have included many suggestions for further reading (and viewing) for those who would like to explore food issues further.
Course Schedule:
January 14: Making Industrial Food
January 28: What to Eat?
February 11: Food and the Environment
February 25: The Contemporary Food Crisis
March 11: Toward Food Democracy: Local and Alternative Food Systems
Making Industrial Agriculture
This is a discussion area for the January 28 lecture by Lucy on Industrialized Agriculture. Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question.
An issue I wanted to ask about at the lecture was on genetic diversity and health. Industrial agriculture encourages growers to choose a few strains that adapt well to large-scale production and are not necessarily the best tasting or the best for food preparation. We see this with tomatoes - only recently are heritage tomatoes making it to the supermarket because they are much more delicate than beefsteaks or romas.
ReplyDeleteI have a big concern about apples though. I learned in Michal Pollan's earlier book, The Botany of Desire, that all conventional apple varieties are grown from cloned cuttings of a few original trees. This was necessary because of a strange genetic trait in apples that makes them not breed true through seeds - if you took the seeds of any particular apple and grew them into trees, their apples and genetics could be completely different from the parent. This means that every generation of apple seeds that are planted are random to an extent. This not only means that there is no standardization of product, but also that anyone who tries to grow new varieties from seed risks growing a bunch of trees that are useless (some variations could taste terrible).
What this means though, is that conventional apples are some of our genetically weakest and most vulnerable crops. Their predators and pests have evolved, but they have not. I believe this is why conventional apples top the charts in pesticide levels - more interventions are needed to grow them because they are "outdated" genetically. Ultimately, I foresee a collapse of these conventional varieties of apples because they just won't keep up in the genetic arms race.
On the positive side, I have noticed a large variety of apples at farmer's markets and at coops - strains I've never heard of before. This suggests that independent farmers have more freedom to try hybridizing and experimenting with new varieties. So not only are independent farmers bringing us new types of yummy apples, but they are also helping to preserve the apple as a species by continuing the synergy between crop and cultivator described in Botany.