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
Food and the Environment
Please feel free to pose a question or add a comment.
As a follow-up to my comment after the lecture, here are the items I mentioned:
ReplyDelete- Starlink Corn: was not authorized for human consumption, but made it into the food supply and was eaten by school children in lunches. If you search for this, you will find many documents online.
- Flavr Savr Tomato (Calgene): A genetically modified tomato that was tested for safety by Calgene; because it is considered a food, it was GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) and held to food safety standards instead of chemical additive safety standards (which are stricter). Documents from the FDA found here: http://biointegrity.org/list.html
- Golden Rice and Vandana Shiva: Dr. Shiva is a renowned advocate of the Precautionary Principle and an activist for global human rights and social justice. Her essay, "The Golden Rice Hoax", argues why this approach to relieving Vitamin A deficiency is the wrong way to go.
- Another issue that emerges from the GMO/corporate controversy draws from information found in sources like Guns, Germs, and Steel - the crops that GM companies choose to develop tend to be Western crops (wheat, soy, corn) that grow in temperate climates. But the native crops grown in poorer countries are 1) harder to grow on an industrial scale, 2) provide fewer calories for the work put into it, 3) are considered less profitable to develop. Examples: sorghum, cassava, some rice. So in addition to being exposed to the potential risks of GM crops, developing nations who have GM crops thrust upon them often lose their native crops and foods and are forced to eat Western crops instead.
Article today on Peanut Corp.'s owner "pleading the fifth" on knowingly distributing salmonella-tainted peanut butter:
ReplyDeletehttp://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/399749_salmonella12.html
I also recommend watching the documentary, "The Corporation", because it does a great job explaining what a corporation is, what its motivations are, and what the impacts are of leaving moral decisionmaking to them instead of holding people responsible for actions.