From Agriculture to Culture: Perspectives on your food from seed to plate

Catalog description

This course explores a diversity of contemporary topics of the food system, as well as current and emergent career opportunities. Emphasis is on the multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of work inherent to many careers throughout the food value chain. The food system has received greater public attention over the past 15-20 years as we face increasingly complex challenges of environmental resource quality and quantity; climate change impacts; health, hunger and malnutrition; and distributional equity and ethics of the food. Beyond growing public awareness and interest, the need exists for fuller knowledge about complexity and change across the food system. The course provides a framework where students see the food system as a comprehensive value chain encompassing producers, processors and distributors who jointly deliver food to consumers, and do so embedded in community, cultural, institutional and regulatory contexts that are variously supportive or constraining of the multiple goals for the food system. During the course, a combination of in-class presentations by food systems stakeholders, reading of relevant literature and reflection on students' own immersive experiences in the food system will expose students to issues and opportunities along the entire value chain.