The Fruit

INTO THEIR LUNCH BAGS TO TEACH RELEVANCE AND GLOBALIZATION WITH FOOD

"BUT I DON'T LIKE NATURE at all. Bugs scare me," proclaimed a student who was deciding whether or not to take my U.S. Environmental History course. Another said, "I'm so not outdoorsy," and a third said, "I am more interested in economics and science." For a student who lives in a city of over a million people in the Sonoran Desert that is hot and prickly much of the year, the first student's sentiment didn't surprise me, nor did the notion that one must be a hiker or a tree hugger in order to dig environmental history. The student who believed that environmental history is separate from the study of economics and science, however, astonished me. That sentiment reminded me of how little our students know about the importance of the earth and its processes in the larger scheme of things. Explaining and drumming up interest in the topic is one of the greatest challenges for teachers of environmental history.

This chapter introduces a variety of ideas for how to make the case to students that studying environmental history is relevant to them. We should think about relevance in another way as well: the relevance the discipline has for revolutionary teaching. Bell hooks has argued that the transformative potential of education is its power to encourage democratic decision making in the future. In order to achieve that noble end, one must teach the skills students need to engage deeply in democratic processes. Perhaps not surprisingly, progressive pedagogy tells us that skills should be at the center of what we teach, even more so than content, if we are to affect a future for our students in which they do not simply receive information and recite it but are empowered to critically think about information, communicate those thoughts, and solve problems on a daily basis. This, then, is the second place where the relevance of environmental history must be understood: by us, the teachers. Environmental history's relevance in students' daily lives gives it the potential to facilitate the essential acquisition of skills such as communication, creative problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration. The study of environmental history requires multidisciplinary understandings and perspectives, and therefore it applies to every facet of real life. It is this last truth that must be engagingly communicated to students.

One way to make environmental history readily relevant to our students is through a discussion of food. Our students live in a world that prizes the fast. Google provides answers in a nanosecond. Amazon can complete an order in less than two hours from purchase to delivery. Music and mobile apps download onto devices on demand. In addition our students live in a global world — at least in terms of their technological exposure. They know, even if they don't always take advantage of it, that fast food is there waiting at McDonald's at all hours and that a wide variety of cuisine peppers their culinary landscape. But when our students order the Big Mac, they don't see cows, corn, water, or the long global history of husbandry that is present in the "all-beef" patty. Students, especially urban students (who we can assume are upward of 75 percent of those in our classrooms), often do not understand the slow, painstaking, and often transnational processes that go into growing and harvesting that food. Introducing students, first, to the agro reality of their food is an important step in asking them to trace the history of their lunch so they can more easily grasp that environmental history transcends a seemingly simple study of trees and bugs.

The context of food is, obviously, agriculture, and the study of agriculture can be as riveting as watching corn grow. Assigning common general readings or film viewings or both is an excellent way to begin a foray into food history. The benefit of connecting academic study to the real world is that it opens up significantly more engaging sources for students, especially through journalistic and documentary texts. In the case of food, no author is better for this task than Michael Pollan. The erudition and accessibility of his writing make him a great choice for students at all levels. He talks about agriculture (literally the cultivation of fields) and plant evolution in a way that titillates rather than bores and that immediately connects the eon-long practice of human cultivation of plants to the present day. He also subtly but consistently shows how food has global, environmental consequences.

Consider this, from his introduction to The Botanyof Desire:

The DNA of that tulip there, the ivory one with the petals attenuated like sabers, contains detailed instructions on how best to catch the eye not of a bee but of an Ottoman Turk; it has something to tell us about that age's idea of beauty. Likewise, every Russet Burbank potato holds within it a treatise about our industrial food chain — and our taste for long, perfectly golden french fries. ... We have spent the last few thousand years remaking these species through artificial selection, transforming a tiny, toxic root node into a fat, nourishing potato and a short, unprepossessing wildflower into a tall, ravishing tulip. What is much less obvious, at least to us, is that these plants have, at the same time, been going about the business of remaking us.

Pollan is not just an approachable writer but a prolific one; in addition to his published book-length works, he has an impressive online presence. He has several advocacy columns published online, and PBS has produced an excellent documentary, called The Botanyof Desire, on his work. An instructor could use all of these sources in what I call a "sources in the round" discussion. In this assignment students access different kinds of sources (in small groups) and come to class prepared to highlight the content of the sources (What was learned?) and to discuss the efficacy of the source to communicate the information (How did we learn it?). Is a documentary film more effective than a book chapter? What gets left out of each? Is there enough information in Pollan's columns in the New York Times to fully inform the reader? Thus one can assign a documentary, an excerpt from one of his book chapters, and a sampling of his food advocacy blogs early in the semester and begin a robust...