Taking Notes

This summer, as I have for two other summers (last summer and two before that) I have been teaching an ethics of eating course. It is a course of my own design and making, prompted by a budding local food movement, looking for a topic that would encourage students to live their values, and a university freshman class reading assignment of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Two weeks into the third time around and things are looking interesting in the class as always.

There are always varied students in the class. Some are there to fulfill a requirement, some are there because the topic was interesting to them. Some are there because they think I'm funny in class. I have a hunter, a vegan, a kid whose grandfather raised hens for eggs, some environmentalists and some whose positions are not yet clear to me.

This is a philosophy class in applied ethics, cross-listed with environmental studies. Yesterday while teaching a desperate photographer from University Relations came in to get some new shots of classes being taught. In-the-classroom classes are few and far between in the summers. As I was teaching and he was snapping shots of the powerpoint slide and the board, I was wondering what someone would think if they saw these shots -- likely not that it was a philosophy class. The powerpoint slide told a tale about Monsanto's Round-up Ready Soy and had a picture of a soy plant damaged by Round-up, the white board had just a few things written on it in red ink--Bt corn and Bt soy.We were discussing a chapter from Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest where she deals with a series of what she calls myths about big agribusiness and GMOs.

Why is this philosophy? Well, because philosophy includes ethics. Talking about this allows students to put their values to work in their own lives. That's really the goal of this class. Students want to live their values and they have to do that by their choices and we make a lot of choices about our food, but do so wildly disconnected from information about it or the values we say we hold.

Perhaps the first thing to do when trying to eat ethically is to make clear what values we have and which ones relate to our food choices. Next is to arm ourselves with information and work on combining that information with our values. Priorities of values and information will change, so this is an ongoing thing. So those who want to live their values by eating with them will be armed with more than fork and spoon, but with pencil, pen, computer and library card as learning and taking notes are just as important.