Saving Us One Snack at a Time

It’s ironic that lawmakers in Washington are negotiating both health care and food safety bills this week, while new evidence shows that treating diet-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease is costing the country more than $140 billion a year in health costs. While legislators try to give us health coverage with one hand, they are threatening our health in The Food Safety Enhancement Act (H.R. 2749). A number of nonprofits who defend the ability of small farms to stay in business have put out an all-points bulletin this week that the food safety bill, in its current form, would make it impossible for small-scale and local food systems to survive. Many consumers depend on these alternatives as their way to insure the health of their families. The new food safety regulations, in terms of fees, inspections and traceability requirements, would simply make small-scale direct marketing too expensive. Anyone who has seen Food, Inc. would know the result: the monopoly that large scale agribusiness has over our stomachs would get even stronger, giving consumers little choice but to buy from the big guys who are part of the problem.

In my book, Nature’s Perfect Food, I showed that the industrialization of our dairy production system and the imposition of certain food safety regulations in the 1920s went hand-in-hand. And it led to the kind of industrial dairy foods we have today – Velveeta and pizza cheese. But it didn’t have to be that way: regulations could have been different and could have created a more diverse dairy system while still protecting consumers. Many of the nonprofit supporters of small farm systems are taking a “no government” attitude towards the new food safety bill. Alternative food system activists tend to be suspicious of government in general, like libertarian the organic farmer Joel Salatin, featured in Michael Pollan’s Ominvore’s Dilemma, who talks about his wish for “government-free” relationships between him and the people who buy from him. Some food politics observers, like myself, are more like the “goo-goos” (good government advocates) of the 1900s: we believe government can get it right, if they work on it. Legislators, however, aren’t doing it right when it comes to HR 2749. They are trying to pass this bill “under a suspension of the rules” that is, without allowing negotiation over amendments such as the Farr-Kaptur Amendment, which provides some regulatory relief for smaller food producers.

Yet, in the Senate, legislators are intensively negotiating the health care bill, trying to balance interests and get the best bill possible. They may fail, giving us yet another indication that government is not longer capable of governing. But if Congress is trying so hard on health care, why not the same kind of in-depth conversation on food safety as well? Isn’t getting food safety regulation right as important as making sure our health care regulations actually give us better health at a reasonable cost? This is an important question, since, if we hand our entire food system to large-scale industrial processors, we may, in fact, cancel out whatever benefits health care coverage will give us. As Food, Inc, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and other food activists have shown, large scale industrial food businesses have an economic incentive to convince us that food created from various forms of corn actually comprise a balanced diet, a diet as balanced as the one the New York Times reported as on the table at the health care negotiations: chocolate-covered chips, beef jerky, and other salty snacks. Which is more risky for our nation’s health, the Senate Room Snack Diet or spinach salads?

The fact is that “interests,” in terms of food safety, have their undemocratic factors, the powerful lobbies, as much as we’ve seen in the health debate. The Organic Trade Association, a captured lobby group that claims to represent the whole industry but is mostly funded by large organic processors, has not come out in favor of the Farr-Kaptur Amendment. In fact, there is no mention of the amendment on their website at all. More grassroots groups are asking their members to call their representatives in favor of Farr-Kaptur. The amendment can provide the beginning of a larger conversation about getting government regulation right in terms of food safety.

Does “free information” make the university irrelevant?

I was sitting on my university loop bus, which is where I get to “test the temperature” of this current crop of students. A group of three sat across from me, looking very much like they fit into the category of first generation college students. They were accessing a cellphone app that gave them various pieces of trivia, on which they were all avidly focused.

“Did you know that a moth has no stomach?” the student holding the cellphone exclaimed

“No!” the others answered.

After reading several of these facts, one of the students exclaimed, “Why can’t school be like this, teaching us stuff we can really use?”

As a professor at this university, I was crestfallen. How can I compete with a cellphone app?

Getting off the bus, I met one of my own students. “I think the University as a system of knowledge is in trouble.” I said, and related the story of the cellphone trivia app to him.

“And you think that’s a problem?” he asked.

I don’t know. I teach classical sociology, citing Weber’s ideas about the legitimacy of authority. If students see a cellphone app as a more legitimate information authority than The University, doesn’t this traditional educational institution have a problem? I might not be so sensitive if it were not for the fact that the state is now proposing to cut my wage by 8 percent, making my full professor salary somewhat less than the pay of a large city trash collector. I might also be less sensitive if 40 percent of my students, in their evaluation of my Web 2.0 based class, had not seen me as largely irrelevant to their learning. When I taught Introduction to Sociology two decades ago, Professor was very close to the top of the list in terms of honorable status. I see – of course my research comes from the web -- that this position of honor is slipping. Certainly, we need our trash moved away from our living spaces. And no amount of Web 2.0 apps will move our trash for us. However, given Web 2.0, do we truly need professors?

I am a big fan of Web 2.0. I teach a course on collaborative sustainable design that uses Web 2.0 tools to allow students to collaborate for intersubjective learning. And I greatly cherish the new kinds of knowledge they get from working with each other rather than getting their heads filled with my lectures. My large lecture courses are interactive, but that’s different from this small lab class, in which cohorts of equals work together to accomplish a goal. It’s great to watch students learning from each other, and Web 2.0 tools like Google Docs and various collaborative wiki tools (such as Wikispaces and PBworks) are very useful in that process (or very frustrating, as my students have told me in my last set of evaluations for this course).

The university costs money. Web 2.0 is “free.” Does that free information compete with me and my role in society, making me less essential, less useful, less paid? Should I hang it up and let the web teach my students?

Interestingly, in their evaluation of this course, many of my students believed that a TA could meet most of their needs, and that my role was largely irrelevant. However, a majority of students also believed that I provided useful input to their projects. Useful, I am, but not essential.

I should say, however, that students’ evaluations were equally mixed about the benefits of Web 2.0 tools. They are frustrating, they (and I) all agreed, never quite meeting the ideals we expected of them. But, of course, professors never quite meet the expectations of students as well. As a person, and therefore not a program, I am probably better at managing student expectations than Web 2.0 tools, but I’m not always sure. There’s something about Google Docs that creates an infrastructure of promise, of hope, that I, as an individual, will never live up to. How do I manage the expectations when I’m in competition with Google Docs, when I’m in fact dependent upon Google Docs to get things done myself? Does Google Docs become, in 1980s lingo, the “locus of authority”?

The University, as an institution, is going to have to face these issues head on. How do we make these tools work for us rather than compete with us? How do we appreciate how “group projects” become so much better with these tools, while not letting the tools become the center of the educational process?

My students, the focus of my anxiety, have also been the most assuring. In their evaluation of my class, when I expected them to write about the technologies, the “active learning” classroom I managed to cob together out of nothing, what they really wanted to talk about was what they learned about from learning to deal with each other. They learned how to do something, even if it was failing to do something, with other people in an active, engaged, and often painful, way. And they appreciated that more than any course design I could provide, although, I like to think that the course design had something to do with it. I’m hoping that, maybe five years down the road, they stop being annoyed at the ways in which I failed to provide the best organized of courses and realize that what they got done with each other had something to do with me, too.