Philosophy of Food Fall 2020 Class Notes and Reading Schedule

1: SEP 2: Course Introduction

• Welcome - personal introduction and welcome.

About the Course (technical information and course management)

• Course Websites: Wiki & Courses.alfino.org (linked from alfino.org), Sharepoint site (link at main course wiki page).
• Use of pseudonyms - Saints and animals
• Use of peer review and peer evaluation
• Student choice in work and grading scheme - Default grade scheme shows ranges for grade weights. You will be able to choose optional assignments and assign them weight in your grading scheme. (See courses.alfino.org)
• Transparency in grade information. Never give out your Saint name. Customer service will never ask you for your Saint name. A friendly grade curve gives you good information about your performance while reducing grade stress.

About the Course (course content and research questions)

• What's so exciting about studying food deeply at this time? Start a list....
• Philosophy of Food Course Research Questions
• Disciplines represented in the course: gastronomy, food history, bio-history, evolutionary psych, economics, politics, nutrition, microbiology, soil agronomy, food ethics.
• Major Course Topics (see reading list): Microbiome, Macronutrition, Dietary Guidelines, Western Industrial Diet, Gastronomy, Food philosophy, Food Histories, Plant Intelligence, Food and Animal Ethics, Environment and Agriculture, Food and Power, Food and Religion, Organic Diets.

Succeeding in the Course and Assignments

• Prep Cycle - Monitor time commitments and results early on.
• Keep Course Research Questions in Mind -
• The best student writing shows the cumulative effect of deep reading, active critical thinking, and reflection.

• Required Assignments and Default Grade Weights for your Grading Scheme

• Final Paper 10-30%
• Final Essay 10-20%
• Points 50-70%

• Points Assignments

• 1. Student Food biographies (5) Assigned 9/1, due 9/9
• 2. USDGS and Me (10) Assigned 9/16, due 9/18
• 3. Carbohydrate Worksheet (10) Assigned 10/5
• 4. Culinary Cosmos Pantry Photos (5) Assigned and due 10/7
• 5. Assessing Agriculture 600 words (20) Peer reviewed: Assigned 10/21, writing due 10/23, reviews due 10/28, backevals due TBD
• 6. Fats Worksheet (10) Assigned and due 10/28
• 7. Ethics of Eating (20) 800 words Peer reviewed: Assigned 11/4, writing due 11/8, reviews due 11/15, backevals due TBD
• 8. Proteins Worksheet (10) Assigned and due 11/9

Food Biographies - (Points, ungraded, short writing, reflection)

• Please write a paragraph in answer to the following questions by September 9, 2020, 11:59pm.

• Topic: What kind of eater are you? How would you describe your relationship to food?

• Here are some prompts for you to consider as you prepare your food biographies:

• How would you describe your diet? What categories of foods will you eat or not? On principle or preference?
• Do you like foods related to your ethnicity? Do you cook?
• How important or prominent is food in your memory as a child or your current life or both?
• Do you engage in food related social media activity?
• Are you a good cook? Do you dance when you cook?
• Did your parents or guardians cook from scratch for you? Did they cook? Did you learn to cook?
• How knowledgeable are you about nutrition? Is your experience of food connected to concerns about nutrition and dietary disease or not so much?

• • Follow this link to a google form when you are ready to post.

To Do List from 1st Day

• Make sure you can find the three course websites and that you understand what information and tools each provides.
• Fill out the first day food survey (on main course wiki page)
• Fill out "Roster Information" form (on main course wiki page)
• Browse the top 8 links on the main course wiki page
• Look out for readings attached to an email. You will need these for our next class
• Email me if you would like to attend class in person next time.
• Keep an eye out for Food News!

2: SEP 9. Unit 1: Food Health and Nutrition

Assigned Work

• Sonnenbergs, C 1, "What is the Microbiota and Why Should I Care?" (26)
• Sonnenbergs, C 5, "Trillions of Mouths to Feed" (111-136) (25)
• Food biographies due by midnight before this class.
• View this movie on the Microbiome:

• Microbiota: The Amazing Gut. 2019. Sylvie Gilman. "Hidden deep in our intestines, 100,000 billion bacteria are keeping us healthy by producing a range of molecules. Although their names may be perplexing: Fecali bacterium, Roseburia, Akkermansia mucinifila, Eubacterium halli, as well as being invisible to the naked eye, they could revolutionize the future of medicine. That is, if our modern lifestyle doesn't wipe them out first." On Amazon Prime. [1]

In-class content

• Discussion of First Day Food Survey
• Initial review of food biographies

Some Food concepts and issues from the First Day Food Survey

• Q3: "Plant based diet". Consensus diet among mainstream nutritionists. Most recent dietary disease disappears when people change to a plant based diet. We will discussion research on meat and dairy later.

• Q5: Eating out. 50% of you once a week 25% several x a week. Low vs. norms. Also low on Q9 on fast food Norming data. "According to the survey, 56 percent say they dine at a restaurant, get take out or have a meal delivered 2 to 3 times a week. Fully 10 percent said they eat out 4 to 6 times a week, and 6 percent said they eat out everyday.

• Q6: Very interesting. More cooking training than I expected. But cooking is trending up, not just from the virus. Cooking trends

• Q11: Meat consumption. About half of you reported: "Pretty much every day" US per capita 96 kg / 211 pounds. About 4 pounds a week. [2]

• Q13 & 14 : Don't have time to cook -- evenly split. Half think it takes 1-2 hours / half think it takes 3-4. Opinions? How much time does it take not to cook? Practical cooking. Examples.

• Q15: Healthy skepticism about the health of prepared foods.

• Q17: 3/4 of you disagree or strongly disagree that cooking is a lot like other chores.

• Q19: Most of you say you do not try to avoid feeling hungry. Good! (Ask for amplification.)

• Prepared foods -- Industrial prepared vs. Scratch cooking (which is also technically "prepared") (why focus on industrial?). Take out from a healthy restaurant is healthy. Industrial prepared foods have several important traits: designed to travel, often sterile, reduction of food parts that spoil like whole grains, palatability (goes down easy), chemically engineered for stability, often contains concealed salts and added sugars.

• Organic - meaning: typically a claim about the absence of herbicides and pesticides (and possibly fungicides - mention wine). What is doesn't address: varietal choice (why bigger isn't always better), soil conditions (example of mexican cherry tomatoes), which enhance both flavor and nutrition.

• Why does varietal choice matter? Heritage or heirloom variety vs. industrial varieties. Often industrial fruits and vegetables are larger and have a larger percentage of water to nutrients. Start the "price/value" discussion.

Sonnenbergs, C 1, "What is the Microbiota and Why Should I Care?"

• How the world looks to a microbiologist! "Without microbes humans wouldn't exist, but if we all disappeared, few of them would notice." 10
• Introduction to the Tube and digestion
• Microbiota Case against the Western Diet

• Inflammatory Bowel Disease. People on Western Diet wo/IBD may still not have healthy M
• Sets the history of human diet in context. Agriculture already a big change, but then industrial ag / industrial foods
• Adaptability of M remarkable. Makes us omnivores. “Microbiota plasticity”
• Baseline M - cant' be health Western Diet eaters. studies of groups like Hadza -- far more diverse.
• 19 - Evolved Symbiotic relationship between us and bacteria --

• Microbiota — Microbiome (the collective genotypes of the residents intestines). Example of Japanese seaweed consuming bacteria.
• types of symbiotic relationship - parasitic, commensal (one party benefits, little or no effect on the other), mutualism. Microbiota and us have a symbiotic, mutualist relationship. Think of them as an extension of our genome. !
• The heart warming story of Tremblaya princeps and Moranella endobia. (21) -- why we should be happy mutualists. Delegation and division of labor might create resiliance. But our fates are linked!

• 22-30 - Cultural History and History of Science on Bacteria -- or, how germs got such a bad name.

• Pasteur -- germ theory of diseases.
• The Great Stink 1858 London, Miasma theory disproved, Cholera bacterium, not isolated until near end of century. Dr. Robert Koch. Because of this history we tend to think of bacteria as threats.
• 60-70's: Abbigail Salyers: early pioneer, 2008: Human Microbiome Project. Note how recent this field is. One of the pioneers was still working in 2005.
• Note research questions on p. 28.
• Contemporary research: gnotobiotic mice. early fecal transplant studies of.[Dr. Jeffrey Gordon].

• Some functions of the Microbiota:

• Harvesting calories from MACs
• immune system support
• resistance to harmful bacteria
• regulation of metabolism
• production of seratonin
• production of SCFAs, which affect weight control
• involved in production of anti-carcinogenic compounds.
• prevention of IBS and other disorders of the gut.

Sonnenbergs, C 5, "Trillions of Mouths to Feed"

• Microbiota extinction -- not just from change in foods, less fermented foods, more sterile food and sterile environments.
• To improve gut diversity, eat ferments and fiber. whole grains and rice. pets, gardens...pets help with our microbiota. (Elsewhere, food provokes an immune response. That's a good thing.)

• introduces acronym: MAC -- these are really complex carbs.

• Microbiota mechanisms:

• Nice metaphor of intestines to waste management. Note diffs bt. Small intestine and large in function.
• Life is hard for our M germs: no oxygen down there and transit time is fast. So they make short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that can metabolize in the blood stream where there is oxygen.
• Why feed the gut? Isn't that just more calories? (116) - No. people with high scfa diets lose weight, decrease inflammation, Western diet diseases. Back to the connection between satiety and nutritional health. (N - S - P)

• Sig. claim: 117: "Providing more..."

• History of research -- field doctors: Thomas Cleave, 70s "The Saccharine Disease" "Bran Man"; Denis Burkitt studies comparing Western and Africans on fiber, stool quality, and health. Note on "transit time". Overconsumption of refined carbs. (S&S mention here that public health attention didn't stay on refined Carbs. fear of fat, elsewhere "lipidphobia" took more attention.)

• Carb chemistry/metabolism basics -- 120: also in our nutrition textbook chapters. Note unique types of saccharides in particular foods: read 121 and 126; Oligosaccharides ferment in gut. insulin resistance. Big point here. At the level of MACs, plant chemical diversity is reflected in diversity of M. and it's products.

• 122: glycemic index and glycemic load. show how to look up food values. note that glycemic index isn't really an issue with most whole fruits and vegetables.

• Measuring MACs - the authors acronym for Macrobiotically Available Carbohydrates. - no standard measure of dietary fiber (note discrepancies from above.) 124. So author’s prefer MACs as a term since it focuses on what the M can eat from your carbs.
• Undernurished gut bacteria can start eating the mucus lining of the gut. (This was also in a segment of one of the gut movies.). Feed them or they'll eat you!

• RDAs: 29/38 grams. Actual 15 grams/day. 126: Notes that not all complex carbs are available to the M.

• research discovering enzyme in nori, a seaweed based sushi wrapper: found in Japanese guts. Helps digest fish. Note: Terrior. Local adaptation of the M.
• 128: Dutch research on rich and poor M. richness of M correlates with anti-inflammatory effects, thinness, low insulin resitane, metabolic potential for procarginogenic compounds. French study interesting because it suggests that dietary change and quickly alter M diversity (richness).
• Gordon's famous 2013 FMT mouse research: need M and M-supporting diet. Note caveat 129. Can't just benefit from the microbes alone. Fecal transplant with poor diet killed off beneficial bacteria.

Refining MACs out of the diet.

• What's wrong with refined cereal seeds (130) (like Montgomery's account). Wheat bread vs. Wheat berries. The form of the food matters to the fiber count. Highly milled whole wheat flour will behave differently in your gut that rough milled.
• What about the Inuit?
• What about excess gas? Interesting consolations.
• 135: Note their dietary advice. A high MAC, non-industrial omnivorous diet.

Some implications of Microbiome research

• The form of the food you eat partly determines the kinds of nutrition you can get from it.
• Nutritional information about the food is incomplete for assessing potential nutrition from the food.
• Which part of you eats the food affects what kind of nutrition (and other benefits) you receive from it.

3: SEP 14

Assigned Reading

• Sonnenbergs, C 7, "Eat Sh*t and Live" (163-185) 22
• Isolated Fiber in industrial food

More on Fiber

• Isolated Fiber in industrial food
• And you would think "fiber is fiber," but no. Isolated fiber. Also, an example of "nutritionism". Real fiber needs are not a fad.
• Intact (soluble and insoluble) vs. Isolated (synthetically produced) - Resistant starch, polydextrose, indigestible dextrins. Research question: Are these MACs? Guessing not. FDA FAQ on dietary fiber
• Examples of intact fiber in traditional and modern global cuisine. (Haven School CB)
• Define nutritionism.
• Demo nutrition site. Are there sites that track intact vs. isolated fiber?
• Personal optional exercise: Review your diet for fiber. Try to distinguish intact vs. isolated.

Food Budget Exercise

Recall question 21 from our First Day Food Survey: "Q21 - Organic food is too expensive to afford on a $15 / hour wage (about 25%percentile by household in US)." 8 strong agree, 7 agree, 6 somewhat, 1 disagree.

First part of the discussion involves "organic" (recall notes from previous class)

Next we should try to put some numbers to the problem. (On board calculation).

• Small group exercise: Compare notes on monthly food costs for a single eater (or divide if shared) omitting alcohol, non-food items, but including take out, coffee, soda, etc., and restaurants)? If possible, try to estimate Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, and non-meal eating.
• Compare your budgets and then we will consider the question of the cost of an organic or, better, “high food value” food budget. (7-8 minutes)
• Cost of a "high value foods" diet vs. cost of translating your current diet into a "high value foods" diet. Probably can't do the latter for $500/month. But you can, in Spokane anyway, have an optimal food value diet for about $600 a month.

Sonnenbergs, C 7, "Eat Sh*t and Live" (Recommended)

• This chapter is more focused on diseases that have been treatable with new knowledge about the M, and the limits of that research currently.

• Gastroenteritis, infectious diarrhea, -- culprits like Giardia, Salmonella, and norovirus.
• Immunological effects of the M: "colonization resistance" - mechanisms (165) - crowding out, bacteriocidal chemicals. Problematic nature of antibiotics in the M.

• C. difficile (Cdiff) -- associated disease CDAD. 14,000 deaths in US a year. why antibiotics don't always help. spores.
• 2013 Dutch FMT therapy for CDAD - 94% cure rate (note earlier researcher in 50s who tried this.)

• Antibiotics -- Interesting that Americans not only eat the Western Diet, but take high levels of antibiotics. Effects of Cipro on M. -- decrease in volume (-10-100x) and diversity of bacteria (25-50% of species). Test subject had diverse responses. Some recovered M in several weeks. Some sustained damage. 2nd round of Cipro hurt everyone's M. Microbes in the gut can trigger immune responses and some even release anti-biotics directly at pathogens.

• IBS and IBD - 177: Finding your personal "transit time".

• Difficulties with FMT as a therapy: dangers in introducing new bacteria into someone's gut. Might be hard to remove. (Like issue of releasing GMOs in environment.)
• Limited results from FMT in humans for obesity treatment. or inflammatory bowel disease.

Some implications of Microbiome research

• The form of the food you eat partly determines the kinds of nutrition you can get from it.
• Nutritional information about the food is incomplete for assessing potential nutrition from the food.
• Which part of you eats the food affects what kind of nutrition (and other benefits) you receive from it.

4: SEP 16

Assigned Reading and Writing

• Nestle, Marion. Chapter 2, Politics Versus Science -- opposing the food pyramind, 1991-1992 (pp. 51-66).
• US Dietary Guidelines (150) (browse with worksheet questions in mind).
• The Lancet, Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat
• American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
• Note: The remainder of this unit consists of three chapters on nutrition, which we will time to the end of the next three units.
• Self-Assessment of Diet in Relation to USDGs (Points, ungraded, analytic, short writing)

Some terms to track from today's class

• dietary transition
• healthy eating patterns
• nutrient dense
• Permissive guidance "health intake of added sugars"
• Regulatory capture
• The "consensus diet" - The areas of general agreement or overlap of findings among mainstream nutritionists, physiologists, and medical researchers regarding a the features of healthy eating.

Nestle, "Chapter 2: Politics Versus Science -- opposing the food pyramind, 1991-1992"

• Tells the story of the blocked printing of the 1991 Eating Right Pyramid. Lots of drama and intrigue!
• Meat and Dairy did not appreciate being "narrowed" in the pyramid.
• She highlights the USDA mandate (over HEW) after 1977 to produce nutrition information, the tension between that agency and then "HEW" (health education and welfare), (now DHHS) where the Surgeon General was.

• 53: specific law in 1988 preventing DHHS from issuing nutritional advice that might adversely affect agricultural interests.

• 54-55: documents the development of the 1988 pyramid. Clearly a multi-year process with lots of professional review.

• p. 55. Specific design process for the pyramid. Compare other countries approaches. [3]. Compare to current US Dietary Guidelines for 2015-2020. [4] [5]

• the controversy over the pyramid was mostly about the diminished size of the meat group and it's proximity to the sugar, fats, and oils. If you look at the previous chapter's image of the "Basic Four" design, meat and dairy were "in front" and "on top" of the image. The ensuing controversy had partly to do with gov't officials dodging responsibility for the nutritionists work.

USDGs, Lancet, and AmAcad of Nutrition

• US Dietary Guidelines -- Paging through the guidelines, what new ways of representing health eating patterns do you find that supplement our nutrition study?

• Note letter from both USDA and HHS - in light of our reading in Nestle.
• more use of phrase "healthy eating pattern" "nutrient dense"
• xv: Guidelines at a glance
• Lots of survey data on diet in the population.
• p. 18: Table 1-1: note classification of protein foods (!) protein is still the master macronutrient in our cultural perception of dietetics. also p. 51
• p. 26: chart on oils and fat types.
• p. 28: Why start a section on "Added Sugars" with a subheading "Healthy Intake"? -- it's a permissive guide.
• p. 35: Note that veg are now recommended by colors.
• Chapter 2 - Norming data.
• p. 50. Note use of "protein group" to refer to meat, dairy, and eggs.
• p. 53: illustration of nutrient density and industrial preparations.
• p. 54: note age curve for added sugar.
• Appendix has some good diet pattern examples.

• The Lancet -- "Carcinogenicity of Consumption of Red and Processed Meat"

• Major conclusions, evidence, authoritativeness

• curing, frying, grilling and barbequing produce carcinogenic chemical
• 17% increase risk of colon cancer at 100/grams of red meat and 18% for 50 grams of processed meats.

• Note mechanistic evidence for red meat strong, for processed meat moderate.
• What are the specific thresholds and risk factors by consumption?

• Many hundreds of studies across many countries. less certainty about the red meat conclusion from epidemiological data, though mechanistic evidence seemed stronger for red meat. Note studies on second page. More on HAA and PHA, which are chemicals formed at high heats that we often cook meat.

• American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Position on Vegetarian Diets

• What is the overall assessment of the Academy of the healthiness vegetarian and vegan diets?

• bio availablity of iron lower for vegs, but not all bad. No longer higher DRI for iron due to new evidence

• What are the major recommendations for dietary supplementation or monitoring?

• Vit D, B12, maybe calcium, (but these are common supplements for non-vegs as well)

• To what degree do low and no-meat diets reduce your risk of Western Dietary Diseases? 12ff: long list of health benefits. Please read through this part especially.

• Note: effect of both the Lancet and Academy articles: most of benefits from veg diet available to low-meat diet, most of hazards of high meat diet concentrated on red & processed meat.

Self-Assessment of USDGs, either in relation to your diet or generally. (Points, ungraded, analytic, short writing)

• Please write a paragraph (of no more than 500 words) in answer to the ONE of the following questions by September September 18, 2020, 11:59pm. Include your word count in your answer.

• 1. After reading through the USDGs (and Lancet article), identify aspects of your diet as they relate to both norms and recommendations. Are you a typical American eater, as defined by the USDGs? If not, where do you differ from the norms?

• 2. After reading through the USDGs (and Lancet article), identify norming data that you think documents some of the Americans' most unhealthy eating habits. Is there evidence of improvement in any areas?

• • Follow this link to a google form when you are ready to post.

5: SEP 21. Unit 2: Critique of Industrial Food Systems

Assigned Reading

• Taxonomy of Successes and Failures of the US Industrial Food System
• Moss, Michael. Chapter 4, "Is it Cereal or Candy," Salt Sugar Fat. (pp. 68-93)
• Rubric training and practice review of student writing on USDGs.
• Begin Peer Review: Self-Assessment of USDGs, either in relation to your diet or generally. (Points, ungraded, analytic, short writing)

Rubric Training

• Discussion of Flow and Content areas of assignment rubric. Typical point assignments. Advice about norming as your review: Case of high / low grades. Sometimes it helps to look at more than the ones you review.
• Examples from Spring 2019 student writing. The prompt was:

• What do critics of industrial food mean by "industrial food" and what are the most significant and authoritative criticisms of industrial food and the industrial food system? Are there healthy industrial foods?

Peer Review: Student Writing on USDGs.

• Stage 2:

• 1. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will only be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment.
• 2 Identify the papers you need to peer review by visiting the Sharepoint site, Student Writing, and opening the file "Student Writing - USDGs and me". The file is sorted by Saint names. Find your Saint name and then evaluate the next six Saints. Score the writing using the rubric and training you received in class and provide brief comments. September 25, 2020, 11:59pm.
• To submit your evaluations, use this Google Form. Submit one form for each of the papers you review.
• Do not start reviewing until after Monday's class, when we will do some grade norming.

Digression on Food Extrusion

• [6]
• So, if extrusion damages nutrition, what about pasta? Why doesn't it have a high glycemic index like breakfast cereals?
• "In pasta products, gluten forms a viscoelastic network that surrounds the starch granules, which restricts swelling and leaching during boiling. Pasta extrusion is known to result in products where the starch is slowly digested and absorbed (59,60). Available data on spaghetti also suggest that this product group is a comparatively rich source of resistant starch (61). The slow-release features of starch in pasta probably relates to the continuous glutenous phase. This not only restricts swelling, but possibly also results in a more gradual release of the starch substrate for enzymatic digestion. Pasta is now generally acknowledged as a low glycemic index food suitable in the diabetic diet. However, it should be noted that canning of pasta importantly increases the enzymic availability of starch, and hence the glycemic response (62).[7]

• Possible research paper. Are the starches in pasta altered by extrusion? Perish the thought! A clue

Moss, Ch. 4, "Is It Cereal or Candy?"

• John Harvey Kellog vs. Will Kellog. Drama at Battle Creek Michigan. Will adds sugar. No turning back.
• note early ad claims by Post for Grape-Nuts and Postum -- shows something about food psychology and tendency to fad diets.

• $660 million to $4.4 billion 1970 to mid 80s.
• breakfast cereal growth coincided with increased labor participation by women. Easy meal to eliminate cooking for, especially with cheap milk.
• Ira Shannon, Dental activist!, measures sugar content on breakfast cereals after Feds refuse. 74
• Jean Mayer, Harvard nutritionist, big deal, early obesity research. title for chapter from an essay of his. urged moving cereals over 50% sugar to the candy aisle.
• note nomenclature issue in the public policy discussion: breakfast cereals v. breakfast foods. who cares?

• 76: Key theoretical claim: The breakfast cereal industry responded to concern over sugar in part by developing market campaign to children and by putting marketing in charge of product development (85)

• 76ff: political story of sugar in 1977 -- FTC over responds to concern about marketing of cereals to kids by banning all advertising to kids, arguably overplaying their hand. Battle between advertising lobby and FTC. advertising ban failed. Washington Post labels it "the National Nanny". role of gov't issue. "social engineering". still, FTC report was credible and damning on the topic of advertising sugar to kids. note the industry documents showing the industry's effort to "engineer" their consumer.
• 2/3 price of the cereal is in the advertising (!).

• 1990's competition from store brands -- 82ff: note value of minute market share movements. "product news" - continual change in marketing. Kellog is losing out at one point, p. 85: "This team (to address market share loss) would turn the traditional Kellogg way of creating products on its head. Instead of having the food technicians toil away in their labs experimenting with tastes and textures, the marketing folks hunted for ideas that suited the advertising needs at Kellogg first and worried about pleasing the palates of consumers second. Interesting. Possible thesis: We entered a "post truth" era in the food industry before politics.

• Moss finishes chapter with their strategic response: concept of "permission" (when a taste is close enough for the consumer to say that had an experience of a real thing through the taste, example: the taste of rice crispy treats in a cereal. "We didn't have to be literal. We just had to have the flavor spot on." (87)

• Key theme from Kellog's market share loss: This is a real crisis for a food company. 87ff. CinnaMon/Bad appple campaign
• odd twist - the "Cinnamon" and "bad apple" commercials. [[8]]. Best one was taken down! Here's a page with some others. Images from Bad apple commercial
• Frosted Mini-Wheats became "brain food". fraudulent research. 91-92 Commercial in this NPR story Also, check out these oldies. [9]
• Kellogg even tried comparing kids who ate Mini-Wheats to kids who skipped breakfast!

• The Kellogg story reinforces the idea that food may be a difficult business to subject to the demands of publicly traded corporations. (Note: Doesn't mean food can't benefit from other market realizations.)

6: SEP 23

Assigned Reading

• Pollan, Michael. Part 1: From Food to Nutrients (pp. 19-27) (8)
• Pollan, Michael. Part 2: The Western Diet (pp. 101-136) (35)

Pollan, Michael. Part 1: From Food to Nutrients (19-27)

• claims that in the 80s we started describing food in terms of nutrients.

• credits William Prout with discovery of centrality of protein, fat, and carbs. Liebig credited also. Also discovers role of nitrogen phosphorus, and potassium in growing plants. Claims to have solved problem of nutrition. (Reductive theory).

• discovery of vitamins 1912. Casimir Funk.

• 22: 1977 McGovern Committee: first Diet Goals for the US.

• Lipid hypothesis: claim that high levels of heart disease in the US were result of dietary fat consumption, especially from meat and dairy.

• Committee rec. reducing fat intake. Backlash. To avoid targeting a particular food industry, the committee started to use broader catergories of foods and nutritional markers to identify dietary goals. Foods seen as delivery systems for nutrients. Some scientists like T. Colin Campbell objected, claiming that food and diet is still a legit level to see relationships. Heart disease might not only be about fat intake, but also lack of plant based foods.

• Nutritionism.

Pollan, Part II of In Defense of Food

• Part II : Western Diet and diseases of civilization

• Chapter 1: The Aborigine in all of us

• Summer 1982 - W. Australia aborigines study -- "metabolic syndrome" -- defined, theorized as signature disease of western diet. [10]

• O'Dea's results p. 87. Note that she didn't look for a silver bullet, a single factor. Just the diet change.

• Major premise: Compare us to many traditional diet populations and the difference in diseases profile is stark. It might be the "whole diet pattern" rather than a single imbalance. (The imbalances are symptoms.)

• Chapter 2: The Elephant in the Room

• Group of early 20th c intellectuals/doctors (bot 90) noticed absence of chronic disease in populations they traveled to.
• British doc Dens Burkitt: "Western Diseases" -- diseases attributable to western diet and lifestyle.
• Pollan chooses the story of Weston Price from this group.

• Two objections to hyp that Western diet is to blame: disease/race theory (but evidence from mixed ethnicity/race cultures like US suggests not), demographic theory (we live longer, so we get more disease). In both cases, the evidence refutes the claim.

• Weston Price -- b. 1870. diseases of teeth are effects of Western diet. 1939 major work after global travels looking at teeth. Lots and lots of teeth. kind of an amateur scientists, but collected important data (and seen right by later dental research). hard to find control groups. Price found big differences in Vit A and D. (Note comment about Masai -- . Multiple successful diets for omnivores.) pl 98: note comparison of groups with wild animal flesh and agriculturalists.
• first to make comparisons of grass fed / winter forage fed animals to find vitamin differences. Example from Pure Eire Dairy
• decline of nutrition in current vegetables and fruits: [11]

• Albert Howard 99 -- "father" of organic farming movement; early 20th century; similar time period, making argument against synthetic nitrogen (more later). both pioneers in what would later be seen as an ecological approach to food production.
• Important: Among first to see a connection between dietary diseases of the food system as part of an "ecological dysfunction". (This is a theme that will occupy alot of our attention in the course.)

• Chapter 3: The Industrialization of Eating

• thesis: Calling for a more ecological way of thinking about food. think of food as mutual adaptation of plants and animals to humans. propagation/place in ecology of food chain. example of fruit: ripeness, transportation, high nutrient state. Corn vs. corn syrup. (Note point about possible future humans who could use HFCS. also true of milk in history of agriculture. Pollan doesn't quite give the details on milk. not like a light switching on. Textbook example of gene-culture co-evolution. Selective advantage for those who keep lactase expression going past breast feeding. You can always leave it to natural selection to favor those who can get on with the new diet.)

• Types of Changes that mark the Western Industrial Diet

• 1. From Whole Foods to Refined

• prestige of refined products: prior to roller technology, white rice and flour would be labor added, story of grain rollers 107, Refined flour is the first industrial fast food. Fresh flour lasts days. 108: specific details germ/endosperm, but also local mills, water power. Fortified bread. B vitamins added back in to reduce pellagra and beriberi.
• 1996: added folic acid.
• Jacobs and Stefffen study: epidemiological study showing effects of whole grains, but also that groups not eating whole grains, but getting equivalent nutrients did not enjoy benefits. alludes to possible wholism in effects. Sugar intake since 1870's. Sugar data

• 2. From Complexity to Simplicity

• The flip side of food degradation is soil degradation. nitrogen fertilizers. simplification through chemical processing. control. Documented nutrient decline in foods (also article above).
• simplification of plant species in industrial foods. Again, appearance of greater variety in industrial food store, but products actually represent a small variety plants and animals. 116 for details.
• details on loss of food crop diversity. [12]. Industrial publication on loss of crop diversity.

• conclusion: there may be a false economy in industrial food production. varietals, soil, diversity of food have values that are lost in assessing costs at the retail level and without this knowledge.

• 3. Quality to Quantity

• Industrial food system has favored cheap macro-nutrients over cheap whole foods. (whole foods in Italian significantly cheaper.)

• decline in nutrient content (118-119: review), "nutritional inflation," interest in "phytochemicals" -- seem related to anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

• False food value lesson from "nutritional inflation" : You get a larger variety of X fruit or veg with less nutrition, but it's cheaper. Problem is that you have a limited volume of food intake, so you lose value in the end and possibly compromise nutrition. Simplification of species diversity and monoculture of ag. corn and soy are very efficient producers of carb calories. but then we draw less food diversity by focusing on these two.

• decline in food nutrient content from food grown in impoverished soil. Calls the result "nutritional inflation" because you have to get greater volumes of food to get your nutrition. some details on how soils matter: growing time affects mineral and vitamin levels (bio-accumulation). some evidence that organic plants have chemicals related to immune responses.

• "overfed and undernurished"

• cites Bruce Ames, serious researcher interest in micronutrition and cancer. Interesting theory (unproven) that "satiety" mechanisms are tied to nutrition such that a malnurished body always feels hungry.

• 4. Leaves to Seeds

• shift from leaves to seeds decreases anti-oxidants and phytonutrients in our diet.

• Mentions Susan Allport's The Queen of Fats

• more seeds tilt in the fat profile of the food product toward O6. less healthy fat. O3 fats spoil faster, so tend to be removed from industrial food. nutritional advice to move toward seed oils didn't originally distinguish O3 from O6.

• Claims that lipidphobia led us to shift to seed oils (give up butter --which has some 03 fats and move to corn -- which is high in 06 fats) and that led to a change in ratio of O6/O3 from 3:1 to 10:1. note the connection p. 129 between fat profile and sense of "food security" -- interesting digression here. Could we have a deep fear of hunger that still leads us to choose overeating, especially of caloric foods?

• O3 decline also related to mental health. 130

• 5. From Food Culture to Food Science

• shift from reliance on national / ethnic food cultures to science.

Resisting Industrial Foods (Alfino)

• You can reverse each of the trends Pollan identifies in his discussion of industrial food and the Western Diet that it supplies.

• From refined to whole foods. Simple to Complex. Apple confections to apples, Starbucks muffins to a home made muffin (digression on Bob's Red Mill muffins using N, S, and P).

• Quality to Quantity: "Pay more eat less". Comparisons of taste (and nutrition) between industrial and non-industrial foods. Taste (in a basic food) as guide to soil quality.

• More leaves. Omega 6 and 3 issue. Fiber and microbiota. How do you get more plants in your diet? N S P. Practicality in the supply chain is the hardest part here. Maximizing taste and freshness, food deserts. Examples in Spokane: high quality produce and CSA/Linc foods.

• Back to Food Culture: Charms of American and global cuisine.

• Is American cuisine different from traditional cuisines? Might be considered an "interrupted" or "melting pot" cuisine. Based on expansion into a territory abundant with meat and commericial industrial culture in which novel taste and marketing drive market share. A culture of consumers not tied strongly to cuisines of ethnic origin (note exceptions). We're weird.
• Value of traditional historical global cuisines -- long history of creating nutritious and tasty diets (not just dishes) under conditions of food scarcity. Pre-urban cuisines had greater use of higher quality oils (digress on Italian oil buying habits), access to fresh herbs (expensive in urban food culture). Again with "cucina povera". In terms of practicality, traditional cuisines often create diversity of dishes from common patterns of herbs, spices, and cooking methods. Compare to stocking and supplying an international/global cuisine kitchen. Food waste. A foodie could have a very austere yet satisfying and practical kitchen modelling cooking on a traditional "cucina povera".

7: SEP 28

Assigned Reading and Viewing

• Moss, Michael. Chapter 8, "Liquid Gold," (pp. 161-181)
• Watching segment from "Earth" in the Netflix Food series, "Cooked" with Michael Pollan, "Mother Noella" in Shared content on SharePoint (about 20 minutes)

Mother Noella Cheese Segment from "Cooked"

• Story Mother Noella and the appreciation of creation through cheese. The bacteria come from the earth, from death, and hold the promise of nourishing life! Mention Soler article, "The Semiotics of Food in the Bible".
• Diffs between US and French approaches to cheese. You don't need quality conditions if you are planning to process the milk industrially. Is that a benefit of industrial food? Mention burgers.
• Story of the wooden cheese vat.
• Connection between cheese ecology and other ecologies like forests. (Connects with microbiota and food from health soil)

Some "Fat" Details

• We'll study Fats in some detail from a Nutrition textbook later in the term. For now, we should learn a bit about your "fat budget" and reasons why you might want to track the proportion of Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats in your diet. This is relevant to choices of basic foods as well as the choice to eat industrial food.

• Your fat budget: 2000 calories, 20-35% from fat, 9 grams/calorie, 44-72 grams per day. Below 22 grams. Less than 10% incompatible with health. Recommended less that 7% from saturated fat (15 grams). Let's use the Starbuck Carmel fudge brownie as an example!
• Tracking O6 / O3: The two essential fatty acids (ones we need and can't make).

• Go back to Pollan notes on O-6/O-3. Old nutrition news focused on reduction of saturated fat, which is still important, but new research is focused on proportion of O6/O3.
• Go ahead to Nix, "Fats"

• Some O-6 / 0-3 ratios of foods -- Note the peculiar emphasis on kangaroo meat, but also the differences between grass fed and grain fed beef.
• Ratio of O-6 to O-3 NIH on fat ratios; Nutrition science on fat ratios and obesity

• Fatty Acid Profiles of Common Fats & Oils from US Dietary Guidelines

• Important functions of fat: energy storage in apipose tissue, lipoproteins (lipid transport system), cell membrane structure, satisfaction!

• Since we are talking about cheese today, here's some information on fatty acid profiles in milk.

• Follow-up exercise: Compare various Trader Joe's packaged and prepared foods with your fat budget. TJ's trades on its healthy image, but some of its product are very high in saturated fat.

Moss, Ch. 8, "Liquid Gold"

• Wallace and Grommet on cheese: [13]

• Stories told in this chapter: Dean Southworth and Cheese Whiz; James Lewis Kraft, cheese entrepreneur!; story of cheese in the US food economy; Kraft marketing of Philadelphia cream cheese and Paula Dean story; closing research on visible/invisible fats. There is no upper bliss point for fat!

• Cheez Whiz; altered from original, but never a gourmet experience. Pretty much no cheese in it.

• Am cheese consumption: 33pounds/year; 50 gallons of soda
• traditional consumption of cheese (mention Cesare & Ornella)

• Kraft orgins story: invented canned cheese. used in field rations. 1928: Velveeta, high sodium as by product of industrial process.

• point is that industrial cheese can be made in a few days. fresh cheeses are quick, but real solid cheese can take 18 months or more to mature. (Is that a real value or just an old way of doing something?). note 167.

• Cheese in US food economy

• anti-fat campaign of 80s led to overproduction of milkfat ("Cows can't make skim milk" - maybe a clue that something's backwards), gov't subsidized milk and cheese; huge warehouses of cheese (1.9 billion pounds at a cost to taxpayers of 44billion a year) ; Reagan admin stopped this, but also raised funds from the industry for new marketing efforts to promote milk consumption. Note the gastronomy segement 171-172 - ex Kraft cheese expert Brookmann.

• Current data on US Government cheese purchases. [14]

• Philadelphia Cream Cheese

• "sliced" didn't work. spreading is part of the fun, but also suppresses serving size information. p. 174: no bliss point for fat.
• Kraft Mac & Cheese. Nutritional profile might not look bad at first glance [15], but check out this comparison [16]
• Early social media marketing effort using Food network star Paula Dean (read 178) and social media to generate interest. creating food culture. 5% boost in sales.

• 2008 Dutch research

• visible / invisible fats and satiety, perception of fat. results: everyone underestimated fat content, visible fat group full faster, about 10% more.
• Personal advice: buy whole fats and eat them sparingly and mindfully. Compare satiety with Costco sized skim-fat products.

• Puzzle: many cultures eat much more cheese than Americans. French 53, Italy 44, Germans 46, yet do not suffer dietary disease from it as we do.

• Previous student comment: "This material makes me really glad that I don't like cheese."

• Brief class discussion: What's your cheese strategy?

8: SEP 30

Some questions I'm considering for a student "engagement" survey

• Do you feel there is less participation in "hybrid" courses such as ours vs. similar traditional face-to-face courses?
• Do you like the option of turning your video off?
• Why do you like the option of turning your video off?
• Do you turn video on in break out rooms?
• Would it helpful to turn video on during times when questions or discussion are solicited from the whole class?
• Would you like me to make more use of Zoom options to express agreement, etc?
• Are there other things I could do or we could do to improve the course experience in any way?

Assigned Reading

• Kessler, The End of Overeating, Chs 1-9 pp. 3-45

Kessler, The End of Overeating, Chs 1-9 pp. 3-45

• Some comments about approaching "unhealthy eating patterns" (expand list), some baseline data, and Kessler's basic theory.

C1

• obesity trend of the 1980s. by late 80s 1/3 of pop bt. 20 and 74 overweight. (2017: 42.4% obese (note: not just overweight). J

• Historic comparisons: 1960-2000, average weight of women in their 20s goes from 128 to 157. Also other deciles. Data also revealed that some people were gaining a lot more than the average.

C2

• obesity is the result of eating too much food. Confusing to separate metabolism, etc. People underreport consumption. Studies to support claims. P.8

• homeostasis: tendency of body systems to maintain bodily states within a particular range of variation. Communication occurs throughout the body to this end. But homeostasis can’t explain weight gain. Homeostasic system can be overwhelmed by the “reward system”. Anticipations of reward motivate exertion. Some animal studies show direct stimulation of reward seeking behavior. Even to cross electrified floor.

• Can some kinds of food stimulate us to keep eating?

C3

• palatability - def. a food with an agreeable taste, but in food science - a food that motivates more consumption. [Let's think about the definition a bit: Does it have to be connected to overconsumption?]

• palatable foods engage sugar, salt, and fat, but also sensory cues. Research (13) on combined effects of sugar and fat. Underlies many palatable features of food. Combinations of fat and sugar chosen over other mixes. Can make food hyperpalatable. Example of "hyper-palatability" in industry and as a research concept in food science.

• 15: research showing that consumption of SFS optimized foods increases further consumption. (Very consequential, if true!)

• Sclafani research. Neat fruit-loop lab detail. Just chillin' with his rats.: feeding rats a supermarket sample of palatable food makes them obese.

• Some palatability research not in the reading:

• Can the Palatability of Healthy, Satiety-Promoting Foods Increase with Repeated Exposure during Weight Loss?

C4

• examples of foods that layer S F and S. (Gordy's lemon chicken, much like p. 20 "Chicken Pot Stickers")

• reports from food execs confirming that industrial food design focuses on highly stimulating and palatable foods. Common popular restaurant foods described in terms of stacking fat on fat on sugar on salt on fat, ... etc. fat with a little lettuce!

C5

• critical of “set point theory” more interested in version he calls “settling point” theory. A kind of equilibrium between appetite (which both a drive to eat and capacity to be satisfied and expenditure - physical work and body that burns calories effectively. Constant access to highly palatable foods drives up settling point. (Kind of acknowledges that there is wide variation in the hold (capture) of high SFS foods.

• p. 25: Discussion with other people who find weight control challenging. note descriptions. Important qualification: Food cravings are not unique to overweight people. Significance of this section, I think: Most of you probably don't have similar reactions. His point.

C6

• rewarding foods are reinforcing. Reinforcing measured by willingness to work for substance and whether other stimuli can become associated with it. (Mention Neurogastronomy coming later to show how this works.)

• food can be an effective reward even in the absence of hunger. Animal studies to show this.

• “conditioned place paradigm”. — tendency to prefer the location in which a reward was experience.

• Other influences: portion, concentration of rewarding ingredients, variety.

C7

• Neural account of high SFS / palatable foods. Neuron encodes when it fires more often from a stimuli. Complex patterns can be encoded from food experience.

• Taste is predominant. “Orosensory self-stimulation”. Opioid circuitry stimulated by food. P. 37: mechanisms of the reward system. Imp of nucleus accumbens.

• Claims there is a mutually reinforcing effect between highly palatable foods and opioid circuits.

• Some evidence (Wooley p. 38) that highly palatable foods interfere with or override taste specific satiety (a mechanism that should reduce the reward experience of food at margins), which predicts that we will get tired of a single taste more quickly than if other tastes are present. Stimulation of the opioid circuits in animals overrode boredom with single taste.

9: OCT 5

Assigned Reading and Work

• Nix, Stacy. Chapter 2: "Carbohydrates" Williams' Basic Nutrition and Diet Therapy (pp. 13-30).
• Complete Carbohydrate Worksheet.

Brief Survey on Student Engagement in Hybrid course delivery

• Please take the following anonymous survey.

Nix, Chapter 2, "Carbohydrates"

• Nature of

• Carbs are a source of short term energy. All Carbs break down into sugars during metabolism.
• Scale of simple to complex. Simple sugars (monosacharides) don't even require digestion. Starchs are complex and "slow burning".
• Limits to the "energy" metaphor:

• carb levels and types help regulate other processes like insulin response,
• fiber helps with useful bacteria production, appears to reduce colon cancer, helps with bowel function and avoidance of diverticulosis.
• carb types and level signal body to break down protein for energy or not.
• soluble fiber binds bile acids, lowering cholesterol
• per capita HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) up from .12 tsp daily in 1970 to 11.18 tsp in 2008. p. 15

Note warning on high fiber low iron-rich diet. Phytic acid in this diet can cause iron deficiency. You can get too much fiber, but most Americans don't.

• Functions of p. 21.

• reserve fuel supply is stored as glycogen in muscles [[17]] and blood sugar. Roughly 1-2 hours of aerobic exercise. glycogen also stored in the liver to regulate blood sugar.
• carbs keep us from going into ketosis, but as we've noted, you can have a diet based on having your body in a state of ketosis.

• Digestion

• primarily in small intestine, through enzymes such as amalyse from the pancreas, and from the "microvilli" of the intestine which contain specific disaccaridases: sucrase, lactase, and maltase. (digression from p. 26 text box on dairying as textbook case of gene-culture co-evolution.)

• New and better Fall 2020 link for GI vs. GL
• Glycemic Index vs. Glycemic Load

• As we learned earlier in the term, you can think of carbs as feeding both you and them (the other 15 trillion organisms you walk around with in your gut). Neither fat nor protein get into the large intestine in significant amounts. We feed our gut bacteria with carbs.

• Recommendations

• decrease added sugar to less than 10% of calorie intake. Current ly 28 teaspoons of added sugar a day.)
• increase proportion of complex carbs.

• Two practical take aways:

• Calculating Carb amounts for your diet and noticing carb types and values in your diet. Think about your "carb profile". Is it tilted toward a high glycemic diet?
• Understanding carb related advertising and health claims. How and why does industrial food tend toward refined carbs?

10: OCT 7. Unit 3: Deep History of Food and Agriculture

Assigned Reading and Work

• Rachel Lauden, Cuisine and Empire Introduction and Chapter 1, "Mastering Grain Cookery, 20,000 to 300 bce", p. 1-55 (54)
• Amanda Little, The Fate of Food, Ch. 1 "A Taste of Things to Come" (11-29) (18)

Amanda Little, The Fate of Food, Ch. 1 "A Taste of Things to Come"

• opening story about her experience growing food. 13: reflects on the meaning of it.

• 14: snapshot of early agriculture. Agriculture did bring settlements, but some predated it. Agriculture was often a bad deal nutritionally and in terms of food security.

• global food trade circa 700ad. Muslims esp in spice trade. Summary on ag at top of 17.

• connection between food systems and political power. (Mont will also argue this.). 2014 drought in Mid East foretold pol instability.

• Why Malthus’ predictions almost, but didn’t, come true. Nitrogen synthesis, high yield pest-resistant crops (Green Rev. - Borlaug). Extent of dev of arable land and food production. 20: problems with Green Revolution.

• 22: new section reflecting on how alternatives to industrial food seem limited to privileged. Food fetishes. DDT. Trans fats. Glyphosate (Round up), synthetic food coloring.

• sustainable food advocacy

• closing story about permaculture / biodynamic farmers, Chris and Annie Newman. Great food, but expensive.

Lauden, Rachel, "Intro" and C1, "Mastering Grain Cookery"

Introduction to "Cuisine and Empire"

• Introduction - core idea for the book from her Hawaii book. Movements of food, technology, and technique get consolidated into cuisines that spread, often in connection with power and empire or nation state. Wants to displace an older story in which high cuisine is an evolution from humble cuisine.

• Hypothesizes 10 global cuisines, all based on roots and grains. 6

• Chapter 1

• 1,000 bc - 50 million humans, cities no larger than 10,000. Cooking already for up to 2 million years. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire!.

• Major change: technology to harvest food from hard seed of herbaceous plants (grains) p. 12. Lake Kinneret site (Sea of Galilee) 19.4K ya. Only grain cultures were able to support cities.

• Global Culinary Geography, CA. 1000 BCE. see map

• Cuisines of the Yellow River (18), Yangzte River (19), and barley wheat cuisines of Turkey, Mediterranean.

• 24ff: the sacrificial feast. Note food hierarchies, 25. Also, status and meat consumption (18).

• Beer and grain culture: Ninkasi (again, vertical connection)

• Carribean and South American cassava and potato cuisines. Maize Cuisine of Mesoamerica. Corn 7,000 bc, by 3,000 maize extends into Ecuador.

• Grains, Cities, States and Armies

• 3 cheers for grains and roots: favorable labor ratio. Experiment. roots naturally stored and storable. p. 30 technology of thrasing and milling important here. "grinding slaves"

• Early breads p. 34

• 35: interesting chance to reflect on ancient supply chains: everything moves on backs, animals, and carts at 3mph. Kilometer zero easier in the ancient world!

• high vs. humble cuisine. 36

• high cuisines heavy in meats, sweets, fats, and intoxicants. highly processed ingredients (whiter flour). luury foods, appetizers (70% of calories)
• humble cuisines - roots or grains with greens. 80-90% of population, 70-75% of calories from this.

• humble eaters shorter, less energetic, and less clever. malnutrition in pregnancy is a horror for development....

• town poor vs. country poor -- town poor often fared better. "The chicken is the country's but the city eats it". Below the peasant was the nomad.

• (Mention modern parallels to food deserts in agricultural areas.) Two kinds of injustice: food desert and specialty foods.

• some bread history 34. ancient supply chains 35: everything on backs, animals and carts at 3mph.

• High and Humble Cuisines p. 36 defs 37 and 38.

• Ancient Culinary Philosophy

• "Cuisine" is more than the foods themselves. A Cuisine represents a system of food production (food system, and cooking skills) that represent a life sustaining diet. But a culinary philosophy relates our cuisine to larger structures (43),

• Introduced at p. 7, but also at 44ff.

• a principle of hierarchy - nomad, peasant, poor town dweller, ....noble. Monarch's status connected to power to protect harvest. (Power to feed fed power.) moral theory of food values. 44.
• a sacrificial bargain - gets replaced by universal religions and personal salvation. like the transaction with monarch. includes human sacrifice. blood never neutral in cuisine. Either strong positive or negative.
• a theory of the culinary cosmos -- Fire thought to be a thing, not just kinetic energy. analogy of fire from sun in growth to fire in cooking. also, heat in the belly.

• "Culinary philosophy - relates us to divinity, society, and the natural world (2), also, new political and philosophical ideas affect cuisines (6) (ex. Buddhist cuisines) -- "Food situates us." 50 (story of Tuscan friend)

General Claims and Inferences

• This overview of "grain and root" cooking from 20,000 ya should expand your sense of human foods in several ways:

• Food history is not just a binary of paleolithic/neolithic (preag/ag). Cooking grains goes back 20K. "Foodways"
• Long before bread, grain cookery produced cakes, porridges, pottages, ashcakes, flatbreads, pasta, etc. Maize isn't just corn on the cob, but tortilla, polenta, etc.
• Alot of grain in the ancient world went to beer production
• Connections between cuisine and power, cuisine and gods. Food is power. Food is cosmic.
• Old story: high cuisine is a development from humble cuisine. Her story: movement of food, and food tech connected to empire and power. High cuisine involves use of food to express status and hierarchy. High and humble on different tracks.
• Before markets, people still had to make calculations of labor calories for food calories. Lauden argues that root cuisines could not support cities (details at 31-32, also 35). Still, grains are also labor intensive. "Grinding slaves" 32.

• Group Discussion: Are there modern equivalents in our food culture for the categories of ancient culinary philosophy? Do we engage in hierarchical eating? Have we made some other kind of bargain with the forces that we believe sustain our food security? Do we have a culinary cosmos?

Culinary Cosmos Photo Sharing

• One way to documents your culinary cosmos is by looking at the foods you stock in your pantry and fridge. As Rachel Lauden writes, one's cooking and kitchen "cucina" has always mirrored assumptions about how food and cooking are part of a basic cosmic process. We may or may not find that to be true for us, but maybe pictures of our pantries will provide some clues.

• Upload your "Culinary Cosmos Pantry (and Fridge) Pictures" to the Sharepoint site. Shared content, "#Fall 2020 Culinary Cosmos Pantry Pictures" (5 Points) Due Oct 12. Give the two files a pseudonym of your choice, use the same pseudonym on both files, adding "2" to the fridge photo.

• I will ask you to self report your saint name and your self-chosen pseudonym on a google form coming to you later in the week.

11: OCT 12

Assigned Reading

• Soler, Jean. "The Semiotics of Food in the Bible" (55-66)

Practical Eating Series, "Practical Kitchen and Mindful Cooking (Sacred Eating)"

• Recall N S P model. Examples of interactions: N & S, S & P
• Objective aspects of the kitchen as workspace. Cutting boards, knives, cooking and storage equipt., machines (or not). Light.
• Subjective aspects of kitchen space. Separation of time, marking separation from out of house activities, as in other important activities. Cleaning. Ambiance: Music, news, etc. Happy hour and appetizers as prelude to cooking.

• Mentality and Cooking: variables social/alone, sacred/utilitarian, chore/pleasure. If you are religious, start meal prep with a moment...
• If you tend to see eating and meal prep as a chore, how to you change that?
• Reflection of importance of food helps, but skill and knowledge do as well:

• Importance of cutting skills to enjoy cooking space, later we'll consider the more obvious connection bt skills and gastronomy: flavor and satisfaction.
• Importance of confidence in basic cooking procedures, (again the main connection here is to taste and satisfaction (gastronomy).

• Importance of repetition in learning and practicality. Finding flow in food preparation.

Soler, Jean. "The Semiotics of Food in the Bible"

• How do we explain the dietary rules of Hebrews? (and by extension, JCI tradition)

• Background thesis: link between diet and view of the world. "a relationship between the idea he has formed of specific items of food and the image he has of himself and his place in the universe." (note: this was partly at issue in SW2 this term.) Some theoretical nods to Levi-Strauss (see his work, "The Raw and the Cooked").

• Soler gives a detailed account of the transitions through "three plates" of Judaism:

• 1st plate: Biblical vegetarianism p. 56. -- God gave us plants and seeds to eat. (soul not immortal till 2nd cent bc, external concept) Paradise was vegetarian.

• Creation in the image of God, yet not God. Need to maintain boundary. Note the transgression found in duality of "tree of life/tree of knowledge" Elohim expresses concern that, having violated God's prohibition regarding tree of life, man might seek to usurp God. Likewise, to eat an animal with a soul would be a usurpation of God's power to take and give life. Diff bt man and God in the food.

• 2nd plate: Post-flood, covenant with Noah: eat anything but not "flesh with its life"

• Still, meat has negative connotation, concession to imperfection in man. The flood was a response to murder, mayhem, and corruption of man.
• Blood is theorized as the prohibited part. Often part of sacrifice.

• 3rd plate: Post exile covenant with Moses: adds distinction between clean and unclean animals. Still, meat allowed as concession to man's moral imperfection.

• Note: This covenant is only with the tribes of Israel. Food as cultural and cosmic separator. (Note contemporary analogues. Intentional diets, diets that maintain ethnicity.)

• In Numbers, reports of Hebrews rebelling (wanting to eat their flocks, which would presumably be for dairy?). Miracle of the quails p. 59. Hebrews ultimately tolerate meat eating, with focus on prohibition of blood and attention to slaughter methods, sacrifice.

• Passover meal getting back to food origins. 61-62.

• Moral Order and Food Order

• Notion of moral order also applied to "mixed" marriages, prohibition of homosexuality, even to having an ox and an ass ploughing together.
• "hoofed foot" "cloven foot" "chews the cud" -- effort to excluding carnivorous animals. (carnivorous animals out, fish with legs out, winged insects are freaks, Eating deformed animals excluded. Priest can't have crushed testicles (!). Similar reasoning. (more at 63) - excluding mollusks, birds that don't fly, snakes...

• Clean or pure eating involves going back to origins and God's original intent for creation ). Hence exclusion of "blemished" or "unnatural" animals. Note that generally carnivorous animals are not part of the creation plan and Hebrew dietary guidelines try to isolate herbivores.

• But Hebrews didn't go back to original vegetarianism, rather to nomad hunter/gatherer diet. Passover meal "bitter herbs and meat" no agricultural products, no leavening for bread (back to grain pastes!), nothing fermented. food of the patriarchs. Food of the origins is taken to be sacred eating.

• Sacrifice not just about sorting God's share from ours, but atoning for taking the life of the animal. (Meat retains some negative meanings.)

• Christianity comes in as an evangelical religion, so it must break with dietary laws of the Jews. Christ declares all food clean (Mark 7:19). "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man" (Matthew 15:11). Peter's vision of being commanded to eat clean and unclean animals. Goes with a theology of Christ, fusion of man/god. Also, an evangelizing religion cannot really focus on dietary exclusions. Consuming the blood and flesh of God become part of a sacrament. (That pretty much brings things around to a full circle!)

• This recent NPR story about the book Fish on Fridays tells the story of the Catholic medieval promotion of fishing-fasting days and the later decline in the fish market with Anglican church politics. [18]

• Discussion directions:

• To what extent does "sustainability" provide a criterion of "trophic eating" similar to Hebrew food theology?

• Does the choice between industrial and organic eating comprise choices in contemporary "culinary cosmos"?

• Does the Christian decision to "eat God" have implications for contemporary Christian's culinary cosmos?

• Slaughterhouse question:

Writing Assignment: Assessing the US Industrial Food System (short writing, peer review, Points)

• Stage 1: Please write an 500 word maximum answer to the following question by October 16, 2020 11:59pm.

• Topic:

• Since about September 16 we have been acquiring information and research on the industrial food system in the US and the dietary diseases that result from it. Reviewing that information, identify the principle difficulties that have led to these adverse results. Be sure to acknowledge what the industrial food system does well, be focus on problems in this answer. Use the readings and the "Taxonomy" to remind yourself of the types of problems we have been considering. Which do you consider the most serious problems and why?

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes and readings, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "AssessingIFS".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Points dropbox.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using all four areas of the rubric for this assignment. We will tie specific elements of the prompt to the content assessment, so be sure to consider that in composing your answer! Complete your evaluations and scoring by October 23rd, 2020, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be on the Sharepoint site under Student Writing, but please do not edit these files or add comments directly on them. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 28 points in Points.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [19]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. You will receive 5 points for doing your back evaluations and up to 5 points, from the backevaluation score (averaged and divided by 2).

• Back evaluations are due Monday, November 2, 2020, 11:59pm.

12: OCT 14

Assigned Reading

• Montgomery, David. Chapter 1: "Good Old Dirt" Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations(pp. 1-9); (9)
• Montgomery, David. Chapter 2: "Skin of the Earth" Dirt(pp. 9-25); (16)
• Diamond, Jarred. "Agriculture's Mixed Blessings" (180-191) (11)

• Some claims that we have challenged in the course:

• Your gut is only full of waste.
• Food is only nutrients.
• Your diet is part of a culinary cosmos, whether traditional or modern.
• Plants aren't aware. (Previous version of the course.)
• Animals don't have lives. (Coming up.)
• And now, there are ecosystems in the soil. (today)

Culinary Cosmos Photos

• Let's make some observations together of some of the culinary cosmos pantry and fridge photos:

• I appreciate better how constrained the space for food is for some of you.
• Some evidence of plant proteins, but not alot. Exceptions: Hen, Tarsier, Tree.
• Columbia wins biggest pantry award.
• Lots of industrial fridge stable sauces. Many of these are not eaten in quantities that cause a health concern, but they might not be good for your pallette.
• Consider a trade up on some industrial versions of basic foods. Prego has added sugar. Better tomatoes (Cento, for example) might increase satisfaction of a home cooked marinara sauce.

Practical Eating Series, "Dietary Design and Practicality".

Dietary Design

• It might be helpful to use "design" and "optimizing" approaches to review or improving your diet and food practices. By design, I mean that things have to fit a certain way to meet all of your requirements. You can think of it like a puzzle, but you can also think about it like an engineer might. Choose your own metaphor here.

• "Optimizing" can involve individual foods, dishes, meals, etc. Of each of your current meals you can ask the N S P questions. "Trade-ups" are another way of thinking about optimizing.

• Appeal of design metaphor: More consistent with an aesthetic approach, beginning with the space and mood of the kitchen.

• Appeal of engineering metaphor: diets have parameters and requirements. They are "systems" with supply chains, production and storage process, and quality (satisfaction) requirements.

Notes on Practicality

Practicality can be thought of at several levels from food waste in the kitchen, to the logistics of supplying your diet, to sustainability, etc.

• You have a practical diet when:

• you always know what you need at the store, (easy methods here)
• you rarely waste food, (favors batch process)
• you don't spend more time preparing food than you can afford, (But how much is that?)
• your food is portable when you need it to be, (gear, favors something boxable)
• your meals are flexible when they need to be, (can be delayed if you change you mind about eating at home, can be quick)
• you have plenty of opportunities to prepare food when you aren't busy, (time shifting meal prep time)
• but you never have to do it when you are too busy, (measure reserve or quick dinner options)
• you always have something great to eat and many choices about dinner, (assess need for variety)
• And, it's all completely affordable. (cost assessment)

Some measurement and goal setting challenges:

• How much time should you "afford" for food preparation and enjoying. How often? Slow Food thinking supplies some answers to this.
• How much time do you (should you have) have for making meals? When is that time available to you during the week?
• What are the main strategies for "time shifting" your meal preparation? for batch preparation?
• How many different dinners do you need?
• On any given night, how many different dinners could you choose to make quickly?
• When you make food from scratch, how often do you make multiple dinners?

Montgomery Chapter 1, "Good Old Dirt"

• David Montgomery's on what's new in soil science.

• At the start of agriculture 98% of food producers supported a small ruling elite that controlled food distribution. Now only 1% of the population work in agricultural food production.

• Wants to tell a history soil and of human use of soil. Historical failures, but also interested in sustainability.

Chapter 2, "Skin of the Earth"

• Darwin's studies of worms. Worms are moving a heck of a lot of dirt. 10-20 tons per acre per year. digestive juices.
• Note the recentness of our lack of knowledge of this. Also why antiquities sink.
• Darwin's calculations were off: underestimated the time scale for effects. Didn't know about isostasy - a process which lifts rock as well. But did understand soil formation as breakdown of minerals.
• 15: overview of soil ecology relationships. read. even theories that soil formation was involved in first forms of organismic life.
• guanine and cytosine in clay-rich solutions.
• 15-16: overview of plant colonization of cooling earth (350 mya). earth plant life accelerated soil formation. lots of other physical and chemical processes (17).
• nitrogen fixation (18): note mechanism. "nitrogen fixing plant" a misnomer.

• effects of agriculture:

• tilling releases nutrients, but also disrupts soil life, short-totation farming reduces soil diversity, increases vulnerability to parasites,

• p. 20: Connection bt farming methods and soil erosion and soil health.

• Note how starting your account of food from soil gives you deeper sense of your trophic relationships.

• you are what you eat. you are what you eat eats.

Diamond, Ch. 10, "Agriculture's Mixed Blessings"

• Old "progressivist" view
• Ants practice agriculture and something like animal husbandry [20]
• Details about the spread of agriculture - not like other great ideas (hand ax designs). Spread slowly, failed alot.
• Advantages of hunter gatherer lifestyle

• short work week, more leisure - as long as you have enough Mongongo nuts!
• better nutrition (in some comparisons)
• no impact from crop failures
• (new research, not Diamond): very violent and competitive.

• 185: paleopathology and medical anthropology: what you tell from old bones and cookware Am. Indians who changed to ag.

• health evidence from early adoption of agriculture
• height, nutrition, cavities, anemia, tb, syphillis, mortality
• mono-crop dependency a risk in early ag.
• low carb, varied nutrients
• class structures emerge after agriculture: diff outcomes dep. on class
• sexual inequality

• other differences that sustained agriculture

• increased population density made hunt/gather politically vulnerable
• hunt/gather requires lots of room
• agriculture created society that could produce sophisticated art (churches).
• grants that agriculture led to lots of great things, but also to large populations, which affects the equation about quality of life.

13: OCT 19

Assigned Reading

• Montgomery, David. Chapter 3: "Rivers of Life" (pp. 27-47) (20)
• Montgomery, David. Chapter 4: "Graveyards of Civilizations" (pp. 49-81) (32)

AssessingIFS: Stage 2

• Original assignment at October 12.

• Stage 2': Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise and keep it by you while you review. We will be using all four areas of the rubric for this assignment. We will tie specific elements of the prompt to the content assessment, so be sure to consider that in composing your answer! Complete your evaluations and scoring by Friday, October 23rd, 2020, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be on the Sharepoint site under Student Writing, but please do not edit these files or add comments directly on them. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

Montgomery, Dirt, Chapter 3, "Rivers of Life"

• connection between humanity and soil in language: adama (earth) hava (living). We are living earth. In Latin "homo" from "humus", living soil.
• short digression on "food ontology" -- some candidate answers, but then if we take the linguistic associations literally, how would we define food?

• suggest myth of the garden represents transition to agriculture, climate change.

• Long history

• 20,000 years ago - last major glaciation (though not a single event). Europe freezes, Africa dries.
• 2 million years ago - earliest evidence of migration of homo erectus from Africa. separation from Neanderthal (note some evidence that we ate 'em [21]),
• 300,000 year ago - first modern humans.
• 45,000 years ago - another wave of migration from Africa (movement occurred in both directions).
• 30,000 years ago - sharp stone tools (much later than the handaxe .5 mya) and at 23,000 yrs bows and arrows
• Human Evolution Timeline

• modifications in skin color and other features a response to UV radiation and Vitamin D production, selection effect.

• Emergence of agriculture

• oasis and cultural evolution theories. p 30 - problem wit oasis theory - food variety in mid-east expanding at time of agriculture. problem with cultural evolution theory -- not everyone adopted ag (though in other examples, like hand axes, everyone does adopt).

• increasing population density -- agriculture a forced option. Note climate of the Levant 13 - 11,000bc - major food abundance. could have supported population explosion.

• mini-glaciation at 10,000 bc called the Younger Dryas -- recovered pollen samples drop by 3/4 -- decrease precip. forests recede.

• site evidence from Abu Hureyra, on Tigris -- evidence of cultivation of grains, drought tolerant ones (drought sensitive ones disappear from the record), for example.

• more work to produce a calorie at start of agriculture --(recall crucial calculation here). population grew to six thousand. evidence of settlements chose for ag condition.

• note -- using evidence from burnt food remains, we can track the migration of food, independently of human migration.

• agriculture developed in several places, but we missed this because in some places it developed before settled towns. Mesoamerica, China.

• Spread of Agriculture

• spread through levant and Turkey. Growth allows defeat of nearby hunter/gatherers in contest for territory.

• the dog - 20k. The cat 4K.

• domesticated livestock a huge leap - animal labor, fertilizer, and stored food on the hoof.

• after agriculture, population doubles every 1,000 years.

• by 5,000 bc, evidence of overcultivation in Tigris valley, hillside erosion. emergence of irrigation. 37

• Early agricultural infrastructure and control by governing elites. Emergence of class, armies, fight for territory.

• very interesting: Mesopotamian religious elite controlled food production and distribution. (Later we'll see that Jewish authorities do the same in the Levant). population growth.

• Uruk grows to 50,000. agruculture bring property, inequality, class, gov't administration, (philosophers). Writing 3,000 bc - (mention Field Museum in Chicago).

• back to the environment -- Babylonian Empire emerges from Sumerian cities around 1800bc. But irrigation led to salination of the soil, silting of rivers -- 39-40 evidence of lack of understanding of soil. Babylon falls! Pop peaks at 20 million. Temple records tell the story.

• Egypt
• story in Egypt - p. 40 on: short story, the Nile fed civilizations for 7,000 years in rough sustainability, ideal combination of new silt and humus (Blue Nile and While Nile). Harvests increase over time.
• But, desire to grow grain for export led to year round irriation. 1880's salination extreme. Then Nasser damn. (Thinking about the logic of export crops for maximizing revenue. Very similar to situation of local overpop leading to exploiting the soil.)
• Irony of Nasser dam producing electricity to make synthetic fertilizers that are now needed because of the dam and poor soil management.

• China

• story in China - interesting, administration of ag recognized many grades of soil. Yellow River (name from mineral erosion upstream) damned and diverted starting 340 bc. Process of raising levees around the river led to 30 foot levies by 1920s. 19th century flood killed millions.

• story of Walter Lowdermilk -- 1922 - working on famine prevention. First to write about soil management and civilization. Follows major river up stream documenting 400 miles of levies and evidence of ancient mismanagement of early ag sites.

• thesis going forward: Civilizations are defined by their management of soil. And, everyone has messed it up eventually, even the Egyptians.

Montgomery, Dirt, Chapter 4, "Graveyards of Empires"

• Thesis: Soil degradation doesn't directly cause declines in civilization, but makes civilizations more vulnerable to "hostile neighbors, internal sociopolitical disruption, and harsh winters or droughts."
• Tikal (Guatamala) - Meso-American (Mayan, in this case) civilization reclaimed by the jungle. 1840s re-discovery. (returns to this at the end).

• Ancient Greece

• (In this section, he implies that we tell "false histories" of ancient agriculturalists when we imagine that they took care of their soil.)
• As land degraded, needed more slaves to feed owners. Sporadic use of fertilizers. Hills around Athens bare by 570 BC (before Plato).
• Evidence of knowledge of erosion (from hillsides) as public policy, but failure to address it.
• By time of Peloponnesian War (431-404), Egypt & Sicilian provide 1/3 to 3/4 of food to Greece. (In news this am (2017), Yemen imports 80% of food.)
• (Comments by Plato and Aristotle on soil degradation.)
• Greeks repeat pattern of Mesopotamia -- intensified cultivation as population grows. Plow a significant step. p. 54: 1,000 year cycle of soil erosion / pop density decline.
• Evidence of movement from small diversified farming to large plantations with fewer crops.
• We associate Greece with olive trees and grapes, but that's partly because they do well in the thin rocky soil left from millennia of soil erosion.

• Rome

• 146bc, conquest of Corinth, incorporate of Greece into Empire
• Research of Vita-Finzi, mid-60s: Was soil erosion (in Libya) from climate change or mismanagement? Found two major periods of hillside erosion: one ancient,attributable to climate, the other dated to late Roman era. Climate also involved when you mismanage soil because land is more vulnerable to climate variation. (Note: In light of climate change, food security (or price stability) might become a greater concern.)
• Roughly 5,000 to 4,000 bc.: agriculture introduced to Italian pennisula by immigrants.
• Significance of Bronze Age (2,000bc to 800bc) and Iron Age (500 bc on): depth of plowing and deforestation.
• 500bc -- highpoint of productivity - 1-5 acres / family. "farmers" had social status.
• Erosion in south (Campagna) also produced malaria from pooling of water on eroded land.
• Cato's De Agri Cultura - p.59 Cato brought plump figs from Carthage to the Senate floor, arguing that Carthage was a threat to Rome because of its food productivity. Ended all his speeches with "Carthage must be destroyed." Third Punic War took care of that. Roman model become colonial system of agriculture around N. Africa and Sicily. Pliny the Elder (23-79ad)
• Varo, De re Rustica, 117bc, focused on intensive high yield ag for the times.
• Like Greece, Romans in Empire Period relied heavily on slaves to feed them.

• Evidence of soil mismanagement in Roman Republic and Empire.

• Difference in Roman case: extensive knowledge of husbandry. 1960s studies of erosion around Rome: 1" every 1,000 years before the Via Cassia was built, 1"per 200 years after.
• substory: emergence of the latifundia system of agriculture in 2nd cent bc due, in part to post-war availability of cheap land, lots of slaves. 63
• by 300 ad, productivity of central Italy dramatically declined. (Campagna and sicily currently desertifying).
• Empire needed to annex parts of N. Africa to secure food. Mid-80s UNESCO research moved us away from climate explanation for decline.
• 66: early 20th thesis that agricultural policy contributed to decline of Roman Empire. Farm debt a problem then and now.

• Egypt

• 30bc - Egypt becomes a colonial food source. after Cleopatra dies. Emperor Augustus (1st cent ad) forbade senators and nobles from entering Egypt due to fear of its ag power.67
• story of 19th American, George Perkins March, research in Italy on soil erosion. early hypothesis of Roman land misuse. land doesn't always recover.

• North Africa - Mideast

• Lowdermilk in Tunisia, Algieria. Then on to Levant. Lebanon and Israel.

• Back to Meso-America, Tikal, and the Mayan case

• Maize domestication about 2000bc. greatest erosion around 600-900ad, along with evidence steep population decline. from 1million in 3rd c. ad. to 1/2 that 200 years later.
• mechanisms: slash and burn agriculture. fertility declines. but worked at low population levels.
• lots of studies of silting and erosion. p. 75ff.

• General points:

• Soil degradation characteristic of major civilizations. Usually the result of over-exploitation of resources in the face of population growth.
• Soil degradation not the sole cause of civilization decline, but it "leaves societies vulnerable to hostile neighbors, internal sociopolitical disruption, and harsh winters or droughts"
• Reflected in commitments to slavery, expansion, and exploitation of neighbors.
• Happens regardless of knowledge of good practices.
• Often in connection with development of a food export industry.

• Civilizations which left records often assigned blame to climate change, disappearance of water sources. (Remarkable exceptions include famous intellectuals like Pliny the Elder, Tertulian, Plato, Aristotle.)

14: OCT 21

Assigned Reading and Work

• Montgomery, David. Chapter 10: "Life Span of Civilizations" (pp. 233-246) (13)
• Pinker, "Sustenance" (68-78) (10)
• Montgomery, "Green Manure" (90-114) (24)
• Writing Assignment: Assessing Agriculture (short writing, peer review, Points)

Montgomery, Chapter 10: Life Span of Civilizations

• Framing the soil / civilization argument in broadest terms:

• estimates of the carrying capacity of the earth: Catholic Bishops say 40 billion (is that true?!). Might get to 15 billion "if we share the planet with nothing else" some biologists think we are over the limit. Both capitalists and marxists theorize land as infinitely productive or infinitely substitutable. General endorsement of effective of markets, but point out that resource depletion is not adequate theorize or accounted for in practice.

• Lifespan of civilization measurable in relation bt initial soil and rate of erosion. Estimates of rate: 1" in 1,000yr vs. 40 years. 238: can't move anymore. estimate of hectares per person. Explores physical and genetic limits on productivity. Key globalization point: There's not much left to cultivate. Nice analysis about how large vs. small societies respond to problems. 20th cent food production doubled by increase N fert 7x and Ph 3.5x

• 241: Agro-ecology: Need to treat soil as a "locally adapted biological system rather than a chemical system" (Note bad reductionism, as in nutritionism.)

• 241: not just about organic, but about enriching soil. mentions California’s monoculture organic. "unglobalization of ag" as oil becomes expensive. example of 19th cent. Paris use of horse shit to fetilize fields. (urban farming -- look up new examples [22])

• connections between climate change, Syrian civil war, ISIS and refugee crisis. [23]

Pinker, Enlightenment Now, Ch. 7, "Sustanance"

• some reviews.

• nice evocation of the history of famine in human condition
• examples of famine leading to consumption of human flesh and viscera.

• Good News

• Calories up globally as well as US.
• Stunting down, undernurishment under 5% globally, 13% in dev. world.
• Famines down

• Reviews 70's era population bomb literature. Malthus assumed the population curve wouldn't change as family wealth increases. Also, underestimated increases in the food supply. Dates that to Enlightenment knowledge.

• Food claims

• The food supply can grow geometrically with knowledge (74) ?
• Food prices in relation to wages are historically low. T
• GMOs and transgenic crops are ready to go but opposed by fanatical environmentalists. Hmm. Y & N

• Account of Haber-Bosch method for syn N, and Green Revolution (notice detail in what makes for a high yield grain)
• Critical point: Green Revolution is very important; part success of plant breeding (landrace system), part extension of industrial fertilizer and mechanical inputs. Not clear there is another Green Revolution out there. Plant breeding is as old as agriculture, but here it is recruited as part of the Enlightenment narrative.

• Closing statement, importantly identifies major causes of famines in political organization and war rather than agricultural efficiency. Most 20th century famines in autocratic communist countries.

• Pinker makes many very persuasive points, especially related to population dynamics (see chart in Chapter 10, also in links). If population stops growing, or declines, then declines in soil productivity might be offset by increases in yields from plant engineering and sustained high levels of chemical fertilizers.]

• Demographic Transition excerpt:

Montgomery, David. Chapter 6: Green Manure

• Primary story: Dwayne Beck, Dakota Lakes Research Farms. Beck has chemistry background and Ph.D. in agronomy and is a farmer. Many success stories of farmers using his soil conservation methods:

• problem of water runoff in plough vs. no till fields.
• 92: competitive wheat yields vs. high-disturbance input intensive. Big effect on South Dakota. Conservation farms had new everything.
• 96: Critique of ag extention system for keeping farmers in intensive industrial ag.
• 99: incident: Beck challenged by chemical company demand for retraction on statement weeds. Set up test.

• glyphosate digression 99-100 (bring in GMO connection, v2, cancer suit judgements).

• Grow it yourself fertilizer

• value of cover crops. multiple crops in a field.
• 102: on site wind powered small scale fertilizer production.
• precision ag. image from "Fate of Food"

• Pest self-management
• examples of unintended effects of herbicides that throw off insect ecology 104 106: corn rootworm experiment.

• High Tech No Till
• Story of Cronin Farms - economics of no till, biodynamics -- 108

• 109: looking at carbon in soil as stored fertilizer worth $600/acre.

• end of chapter

• Reorg of some themes to make broader point:

• Pest ecology stories

• 105: corn rootworm beetle and crop rotation
• BT corn eliminated one pest (earworm), but earworms eat be cutworms. demonstration project showing resistance to root worm in no till field

• Some analogies between healthy soil and a healthy microbiome!

• best weed control is a canopy of well nurished crop. reducing opportunities for weeds. 99: incident Beck asked for retraction.
• herbicide resistance (like germ resistance from anti-biotic use)
• 103: broad spectrum pesticides like antibiotics in microbiome

• Technology of soil conservation

• 95: on-site processing of residues for fertillizer and animal feed.
• avoids compaction of heavy machinery. uses low psi equiptment.
• note: the research farm uses some (a "fraction" of normal) glyphosate.
• importance of leaving crop residue on the ground.
• complex rotations - for soil health and to defeat complex pests.
• mixed cropping 101
• locally produced Nitrogen fert from wind.
• phosphorous management easier without tillage that breaks up mycorrhizal fungus.
• 103: worms, lots of worms

• Precision agriculture:

• no-till planters, small dosing of fertilizers,
• 108: example on Cronin Farm of no-till planter using precision fert. good yields with lower inputs.
• 110: disc planters
• GPS based data system for precision ag.

15: OCT 28

Assigned Reading and Work

• Nix, Stacy. Chapter 3: Fats Williams' Basic Nutrition and Diet Therapy (pp. 31-46)
• Fill out Fats Worksheet (Points)

Stage 4 of AssessingIFS: Backevaluation

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [24]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. You will receive 5 points for doing your back evaluations and up to 5 points, from the backevaluation score (averaged and divided by 2).

• Back evaluations are due Monday, November 2, 2020, 11:59pm.

Nix, Chapter 3, "Fats"

• Nature of lipids:

• C, H, O -- note that Carbs are different arrangements of these.
• fatty acids are chains of C-H bonds with a methyl group on one end (so-called the "omega") and an acid on the other (which bonds to a glycerol)
• Saturated (so called because no spaces in the C-H string), mono-unsaturated (space at the 9th H), polyunsaturated (spaces after 6) (linoleic acid) and, if after 3, Omega-3 or (alpha-linolenic acid)
• Visible fats: saturated fats are dense, form solids at room temp.
• "trans" in structure and implicated in health risks, largely removed from processed foods.

• Functions of Fats

• Essential fatty acids: linoleic acid (omega 6) and alpha-linolenic acid (omega-3). We can produced saturated fats and cholesterol, but we cannot produce these two fatty acids.
• 34: diet of less than 10% calories from fat not consistent with health.
• Lipoproteins: the body's way of moving fat through the blood stream. Wrapped in protein these bundles of fat can be relatively high density (lots of fats) or low density. High density lipoproteins are important because the help with the process for removing carry cholesterol out of the body. C. 19 for more!
• Some interesting detailed functions in phospholipids such as lecithin (for cell membranes), and eicosanoids (signaling hormones that relate inflammatory and immune response, and cholesterol, which we need for cell membrane health. Phospholipids also transport fats.
• Fats essential for tissue strength, cholesterol metabolism, muscle tone, blood clotting, and heart action. As with carbs, you can think of fats as energy sources, but don't forget other metabolic functions.
• Storage of energy.
• Source of fat soluble vitamins.
• Saiety!

• Food Sources

• Fat from meat is compatible with a healthy diet, but better when taken with fiber and balanced with high ratio of polyunsaturated fats. Trade up to lean meats, without skin.
• Fish have mostly unsaturated fat [25] compared to red meat [26] or chicken [27] or a Starbuck's caramel brownie [28]! Think about your saturated fat budget goal.
• Visible and invisible fats - similar point as the Dutch study in Moss.

• Note pull out box on fat metabolism by ethnicity -- still very open research areas as far as mechanisms. Interesting to look into further. Hypotheses....

• Digestion

• In the mouth: Ebner's glands secrete lingual lipase, mostly designed for non-chewing infants.
• Enzymes in small intestine (from pancreas), bile from gallblader, bile emulsifies fat, increasing surface area for enzymes to act. Pancreatic enzymes also enter the small intestine.
• Frying foods at high temperatures makes digestion harder and compounds can break down into carcinogens. (Recall Lancet article.)

• Recommendations

• US overconsumption of sat. fats. should have less than 7% of calories from sat&trans fat combined. Some progress: US eaters went from 13 to 11%.
• Very low fat and fat free diets are dangerous to health (p. 43). Essential fatty acid deficiency.
• DRIs: 20-30% of calories from fat. DRI for linoleic acids at 17 g. alpha linolenic acid 1.1 g/day. Not something a person on a plant based diet needs to track. (notion of "can't miss" diet).
• Note recommendations on p. 44.

• Ratio of O-6 to O-3; [29]
• Some O-6 / 0-3 ratios of foods -- What's up with the meat section?
• Fatty Acid Profiles of Common Fats & Oils from US Dietary Guidelines

16: NOV 2. Unit 4: Ethical Issues in Eating and Food Production

Assigned Reading

• Lawless, Kristin. Formerly Known as Food, Chapter 8, "Food Choice" (197-217)

• Winders and Ransom, "Introduction to the Global Meat Industry" 1-23 (22)

• Mayer, Jane. "How Trump is helping tycoons exploit the pandemic" New Yorker, July 13, 2020. (first seven pages)

Some questions for this unit

• Is the American food production system a result of the American diet or vice versa? Who is driving the demand curves?
• Does Montgomery's perspective apply to the American food production system?

• Some similarities: Mining soil for food export. Stratification in access to food. Contentious foreign policy issues over food. Population increases through the present.
• Some dissimilarities: Global corporations with intensified production and distribution systems and access to new markets. Corporate concentration has its own effects (see "Global Meat")

Slaughter vs. Hyperslaughter

• A few slides from some research on industrial slaughter. On Sharepoint.

Lawless, Kristin. Formerly Known as Food, Chapter 8, "Food Choice"

• We are "upside down" on food

• concentration of companies, controls of foods
• poor disproportionately exposed to BPA (needs more research).
• poor have double the diabetes rate. p. 200 other SES related food/health outcomes
• advertising effects: logos stimulate taste buds. targeted advertising

• Thesis: Am food companies have created a kind of acceptance of ind. foods and set of ideas about health and nutrition that are largely the product of advertising by industrial food companies over about 40 years. - food elites and food desert dwellers alike. interesting.

• At Occupy Wall street protests: vegan oatmeal from McDonalds, veggie sandwiches from Subway.
• Households over $60k eat the most f. food.

• Thesis: Am food companies also divide us, stigmatizing whole foods as food for elites. McD's commercial as example. [Healthy food culture is often stigmatized as extreme, counter-cultural, and obsessive.]

• Bloomberg soda case

• 208: Background to industrial food advertising. Targeted women ('60s): ind food higher SES, part of the future. Critique of food movement for elitism and paternalism.

Winders and Ransom, "Introduction to the Global Meat Industry"

• major concerns and questions, p. 1.
• paradoxically, increased meat production can create food insecurity for some. 2.

• global meat industry is a product of gov't and industry collaborating
• overproduces food animals relative to population.
• creates dangers for environment and workers. (from hyperslaughter)

• Data 1960-2016

• 45 million metric tons to 259 MMT.
• $65 billion to about $400 billion.
• note that US has declined from peak consumption, also some Europeans.
• population increase 1960-2016 3 billion to 7.4. (Recall discussion of dem. transition.)
• increases in numbers of animals: 270% for pigs and 900% for chickens.

• meat exports: mostly from global north. Asian and emerging industrial countries importers. p. 12: increases in China, for example, 3.5kg to 57.6kg.

• How did global meat grow so much?

• increases in feed grains. along with ag tech to put more land into produciton, GE corn and soybeans increased yields.
• WTO - promotes free trade agreements for meat import/export.
• former communist countries became markets.
• increased corporate concentration. both production and processing.

• 3 consequences of global meat for consideration:

• 1. corporate concentration - read at 16.
• 2. tension bt. cheap meat and food insecurity - smallholder meat production in decline from competition.
• 3. social and environmental injustice.

digress on slaughter and hyperslaugter

Mayer, Jane. "How Trump is helping tycoons exploit the pandemic"

• Unionization efforts at meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses (2/3 of beef and 1/3 of poultry workers). NLRB surprisingly open to challenges to union certification in last few years. Wouldn't stay cert. election even in Covid crisis.
• Montaire Corporation - privately held, mostly by Ronald Cameron.

• Characteristics of employment at meatpacking plants.

• Use of temp agency for deniability on immigration status.
• Typical for ICE raids to target slaughterhouses.
• Wages often very low and limited to no healthcare.

• Covid meat crisis: Tyson ad, Emergency order declaring slaughter workers essential (also a crisis in supply chain), limited liability for illness. Hard to credit the shortage scare given export production, but we could have cut production to domestic supply needs. Company could withold health data with impunity.

• Waivers of regulations: Line speeds. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

17: NOV 4

Assigned Reading

• Milligan, Tony. Animal Ethics: the basics. "Introduction and Chapter 1" (1-26) (25)
• Lecture on standard arguments for ethical diets
• Writing: Assessing Animal Ethics claims (short writing, peer reviewed, Points)

A couple of follow-ups from last class

• Elitism in food advice.
• Options for reducing complicity in industrial meat production. [30], [31] or read labels at your local high end food store. "Pay more eat less."
• Sampling some video from industrial confinement pig farming and outdoor pig farming.

The Ethics of Eating Animals

• How we talk about the ethics of eating animals -- very binary, often people mix different kinds of commitments about eating. Think about the difference bt being a biblical vegetarian vs. a climate change vegetarian. Diet ethics discussions trigger strong emotions.

• An Introductory analogy for a better start on the discussion: The Bike Commuter Analogy

• Think about a co-worker who commutes by bike to work. We might offer moral praise without feeling a corresponding obligation to become a bike commuter. Point: Let's separate the moral value of not eating meat from the question of whether you can imagine not eating meat.

• Some starting premises and arguments:

• There is no innocent eating - all eating disrupts intelligent life. Plant intelligence, animal sentience. Agriculture and town life involves controlling pests.
• The sustainability of a culture's diet depends upon trophic levels of eating, arable land/population ratios, types of inputs (level of industrial and petroleum inputs) and efficiency of the supply chain (0 km). Livestock production is one of top 2-3 contributors to climate change. There is a research consensus, roughly since 2010 that livestock production accounts for between 14 and 18% of greenhouse gases. Livestock's Long Shadow -- mention criticisms of this report. Browse the main conclusions here.
• There is a consensus, in both experience and, more recently, research, that land mammals like pigs, goats, sheep, and cows, have complex emotional lives and awareness of their conditions. Many "natural behaviors" have been bred out of domesticated animals (another ethical issue - creepy digression). Mention Cowspiracy. Ok, time for a cute cow video. [32]
• The experience of animals in the hyper-slaughter supply chain is much different than anything in the history of agriculture. Pigs never leave a concrete building until they get on trucks to the slaughterhouse, for example. Research on the treatment of animals in intensive animal ag is disturbing.

Some of standard arguments on the ethics of eating animals

• Extensionist arguments from Singer and Regan in the 1980s.

• Singer: recall "equal happiness" principle and Principle of Utility. Moral concern about the suffering of animals, combined with the fact that their consumption is no longer necessary for us, should lead us to reduce or eliminate animal foods, at least from creatures that can suffer (some debate about clams and oysters, for example - notes trophic level)
• Regan: animals are "subjects of a life" - see also age of slaughter information. We should extend rights from humans to animals because they share this important "rights justifying" trait.

• As Tony Milligan points out, there is a "motivation problem" with these arguments. They do not motivative change in behavior. Rates of vegetarianism and veganism are very low (outside of cuisines that are intentionally vegetarian). Persistence in diet is also low.
• Ecological (and climate change) arguments about sustainable global diets. (See above.)
• Agrarian arguments about "default animal production". Treating animal foods like a luxury. Other agrarians might advocate non-food use of animals or use of animals for food without killing them. (Eggs, milk, etc. - Note practical issues here.
• Simon Fairlie's "default animal production" argument: We should think of meat as a luxury. Like many other luxury foods. Not sustainable at high levels of production. The relationship between meat production and environmental impact is not linear, according to Fairlie:

• Fairlie's ad for his position. [33]
• Hunter's arguments -- There are some interesting arguments for treating "food hunting" differently from a moral perspective.
• Spiritual viewpoints, such as Ahimsa, biblical vegetarianism, life design philosophies
• Arguments about the naturalness (evolutionary or cultural) of meat.

• It is true that we are omnivores and so adapted to a wide range of foods. This perspective is important in understanding the difficulty of transitioning from a high meat diet, but it would need other premises to be a strong moral argument. It was a better argument when we believed (incorrectly) that meat protein was special. (Exceptions: people with plant protein allergies.)
• Cultural arguments are significant, again for understanding the depth of the problem.

• Speciesist arugments

• One might argue that if we are honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge that we are all speciesists. Thought experiments. This line of thought points out some important inconsistencies in our thinking, but it is not clear how it would justify eating meat, rather than, say try to reduce animal testing in medical research.

Age of Slaughter vs. Natural Life Span

• In thinking about the research on animal awareness and consciousness, we are becoming more sensitive to the idea that animals are indeed aware of their lives, many form friendships, have strong individual preferences, and can understand more about what is going on around them than we used to think.

• Note that the more symmetrically you see animal and human interests, the more likely this information is to be problematic.

• Pigs: Slaughtered at 6 months young; Natural life span: 6 to 10 years Farmaggedon segment on China pig farms Outdoor pig farming Drone footage of confinement pig farming
• Chickens: Slaughtered at 6 weeks young; Natural life span: 5 to 8 years for those birds bred as "egg layers" such as Rhode Island Reds; 1 to 4 years for factory layer breeds such as leghorns; and 1 to 3 years for "meat" breeds.
• Turkeys: Slaughtered at 5 to 6 months young; Natural life span: 2 to 6 years
• Ducks/Geese: Slaughtered at 7 to 8 weeks young; Natural life span: domestic ducks: 6 to 8 years; geese from 8 to 15 years.
• Cattle: “Beef” cattle slaughtered at 18 months young; dairy cows slaughtered at 4 to 5 years young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Veal Calves: Slaughtered at 16 weeks young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Goats: Slaughtered at 3 to 5 months young; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Rabbits: Slaughtered at 10 to 12 weeks young; Natural life span: 8 to 12+ years
• Lambs: Slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks young for “young lamb” and under 1 year for all other; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Horses/Donkeys: Slaughter age varies; Natural life span: 30 to 40 years

Arguments for reduction of meat consumption vs. Abolition

• Tendency toward binary thinking if your moral position is absolute (slavery analogy)
• Agrarian perspective, define. Simon Fairlie is one.
• Abolitionists argue that gradual approaches to reduction of animal consumption are not sufficient. Some advocate letting domesticated animals go extinct.

A Final Argument

• What if the ethical arguments aren't the problem with adopting an ethical diet? What if, like climate change, the evidence and arguments are rationally persuasive, but not motivating.

Milligan, Tony. Animal Ethics: the basics. "Chapter 1"

• Main approaches:

• Unifying - focus on key concepts like rights, suffering, sentience
• Relational - focus on historical practices

• Unifying approaches

• Singer — suffering ; Reagan - rights; being “subject of a life” ; Francione — sentience
• all three treat “being human” as irrelevant in the discussion of rights and obligations.

• Some general objections to unifying approaches: based on the parent theories for Singer and Reagan — utilitarianism and rights theory

• complexity — these theories oversimplify experience by reducing decisions to a single criterion. Suffering, for example, is not always morally problematic. Rights and harms often go together. rights talk can be thought of as too restrictive. Maybe we should love animals? (12)
• Separation of justification and motivation — in a live example of intervening to prevent cruelty to an animal, appeals to rights and suffering seem to be more about justifications, but don’t capture our motivations, which might be more direct. 13: problem of motivation in ethics. Problem if theoretical views that don’t motivate action.
• Marginalizing our humanity — unifying theories seem not to track differences bt how we think about animals vs. Humans. “Speciesism”.

• Relational approaches: Often discoursive essays, these approaches explore the lines we draw in our relationships with animals from the care we give pets, how we treat pests and "vermin", to the unspeakably cruel things we do to animals (even primates) in medical research.
• Some examples of relational approaches:

• work of Cora Diamond: exposing assumptions in categories like “vermin” “pet” “livestock” . On the positive side, it is a great historical accomplishment to use terms like “human” and “humanity” to capture what we owe or what is due to others. It seems wrong to Diamond, to treat this as a negative form of “speciesism”. She argues that we need to be human in a way that reduces harm to animals.
• Derrida’s The Animal That I am. - concept of humanity developed in contrast and relation to animals, not in isolation. Not trying to efface the distinction (as unifiers do), but “multiply its figures”. Asks how we are seen by the animal.

Writing: Ethics of Eating (short writing, 600 words, peer reviewed, Points)

• Stage 1: Please write a 600 word maximum answer to the following question by November 9, 2020 11:59pm.

• Topic Prompt: Drawing on both the reading and lecture material from today and Monday's class, as well as your own knowledge and reading, consider the various ethical arguments for reducing or eliminating meat consumption (land mammals and birds). Which, if any, of these arguments do you find persuasive? Are there other ethical arguments you would advance either for or against meat eating? Spend about 1/2 your answer on considering the most persuasive arguments, and indicating whether and why they are persuasive to you, then go on to the "motivation problem" - the fact that people are not widely motivated to change their diets in response to these arguments. This could be because the arguments are weak or in spite of them being strong, so your solution to the motivation problem depends in part on your review of the arguments. Spend about 1/2 your answer trying to solve the motivation problem.

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes and readings, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "EthicsOfEating".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Points2 dropbox.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will only be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Wednesday, November 18th, 2020, 11:59PM.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be on the Sharepoint site under Student Writing, but please do not edit these files or add comments directly on them. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 28 points in Points.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [34]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Five points for completing the backevaluations and up to 5 more from your peers.

• Back evaluations are due November 25, 2020, 11:59pm.

18: NOV 9

Assigned Reading

• Nix, Stacy. Chapter 4: "Proteins" Williams' Basic Nutrition and Diet Therapy (pp. 47-63).
• Fill out Proteins Worksheet (Points)

Nix, "Proteins"

• Nature of

• 20 amino acids, 9 essential; proteins are polypeptides -- chains of amino acids 100s of links long. Proteins exist in specific forms in foods (ex. casein is milk protein) and are broken down by us into amino acids and resembled as protein in metabolism.
• Classes of amino acids: indispensable (9), dispensable (5), and conditionally indispensable (6).
• Conditionally dispensable: Example: If low on Mthionine(essential), then you need cysteine (cond. indis.) from diet.
• About 16% nitrogen; protein is a primary source of nitrogen in diet. Catabolism and Anabolism. 49. Nitrogen Balance is shown when excretion of urinary nitrogen occurs as by product of protein metabolism (ratio of 1 g of urinary nitrogen to 6.25 g of protein). Negative nitrogen balance can be a symptom of protein deficiency.
• Tissue proteins, plasma proteins, and dietary protein. You dietary protein is contributing to a much larger and complex protein manufacture and delivery service. Again, consider a practical philosophical intuition here. (the PKU aspertame story is interesting in this connection.)

• Functions of Protein Metabolism

• Tissue growth/repair: largest component of tissue by dry weight. 75%.
• Water and pH balance; plasma proteins can exert osmotic pressure to help circulation of tissue fluids (I think this is the "interstitium", but I'm not sure).[35] [36]

• Proteins can take up acids to contribute to blood Ph management.
• Metabolism, transport, immune system, energy system. Wide range of functions here. We have already met "lipproteins" that help carry fats around. Here you learn that enzymes, transport agents, and hormones also have protein structures.
• Proteins also help make white blood cells, so support your immune system.

• Food Sources

• Complete proteins mostly from animal sources, including dairy, cheese.
• Soy is the only complete plant protein.
• Completing proteins: p. 52. also compare links ceci beans [[37]], lentils [38], peanut butter [39] and sesame seeds [[40]]. Sirloin steak [41]. Note how you can use the site to find complementary foods for foods with relatively low amino acid scores.
• advice on vegetarian diets -

• Digestion

• Occurs in stomach and small intestines

• Recommendations

• 10-35% of calories from diet
• .8g / Kg of body weight.
• Overconsumption of protein by Americans, p. 59 Men at 181% of DRI

• Debates about protein quality. [42]

Personal Protein Tally

• We've used a "profile" metaphor to talk about carbs and fats (profiles of complexity in carbs and fat saturation for fats), but with proteins, it makes sense to "tally" or add up your intake, while watching for protein quality.

• Risks of too much protein

• Calculate your protein goal in grams. 150 lbs. = 68kg x .8 = 54grams RDI /day
• Go through your diet and look at the amounts of good protein in your day. How hard is it to meet your goal?

Food	Protein Value
Breakfast
Egg/toast/butter	11
Midmorning
Muffin	6
Lunch
Ceci/fruit/yogurt	14
Appetizers - cheese/crackers	11
Dinner Options
Lentils & Rice	12
Lentil Soup	15
Black Beans & Rice	23
Tuscan Bean Soup	10
Pasta	18
Tuna	19
Salmon (8oz)	45

19: NOV 11. Unit 5: Gastronomy and 3 points in American Food Culture

Assigned Reading

• Barber, Dan. Introduction The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, (1-22). (22)
• Andrews, Geoff. Chapter 2: "The Critique of 'Fast Life'" The Slow Food Story (pp. 29-47). (18)

Andrews, Chapters 1 & 2, The Slow Food Story

Chapter 1, "Politics in Search of Pleasure"

(This wasn't assigned for us, but I have these notes to share:)

• context for slow food: social movements of the 60's and 70's. (Italian counter-culture.)
• low power radio stations common means: Radio Bra Onde Rosse.
• politics at Club Tenco, also the pursuit of pleasure.
• revival of traditional festivals: the singing for eggs (Cante i'euv)
• 1982 incident: Montalcino Sagra del Tordo (thrush) Mention Arci clubs.

• in play: Is the pursuit of pleasure through healthy food and culture a capitalist bourgeoisie plot or a fundamental right to be advocated politically?

• formation of an "Arci Gola" (appetite)
• projects: Gambero Rosso, wine guides, Osterie d'Italia, guides to osterie.
• 1986: wine poisoning scandal. McDonalds opens in Rome at Spanish Steps.
• Slow Food Manifesto
• Parallel movement in US embodied on story of Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse. Pollan also finds sources of these ideas in 1960s US counter-culture.
• Eco-gastronomy -- (a great sub-field of food study, by the way! cf. Dan Berber, The Third Plate) and the "politics of aesthetics" (only partly in line with Marxism). (So Carlo Petrini is another candidate for Gramsci's authentic intellectual.)
• Projects: international food exhibitions, then Terra Madre (2004), related movements in Germany (Greens)
• slow food also has a conservative dimension. Restoration and preservation of historical food systems.

• Mention experience with Guido and the ancient grains seminar. Photos.

Chapter 2, "The Critique of 'Fast Life'"

• some key dates: McDonald's in Rome, 1986, incident between the two arci chapters (a moment in which politics and gastronomy interact to great effect!).
• critique of "productivity culture"; efficiency vs. frenzy; idea that you need to live faster because other things are accelerating (financial trade volume, sale, news cycles, social media posting and communication). Especially focused on speed.
• [In terms we have been using, Slow Food manifesto calls into question the "culinary cosmos" of the industrial lifestyle when it compromises basic human modes of experiencing pleasure in authentic and just food. ]
• critique includes resistance to corporate formations and rationalizations (degradation) of taste. Slow Food is tied to leftist politics, but also has a US upper middle class "face" in the US site. [43]
• Castell's theory of time-space compression -- capitalism more and more about speed of transactions. circulation of capital. (on edge of a big discussion about the future of work - piece work is coming back).
• Counter view of Charles Leadbeater and others: fast culture is the answer, the problem is that we have all of these institutions from the 19th century and earlier slowing us down.
• Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through 20th Century Europe -- American hegemony in food expressed in "reduction" of all class and value distinctions in food. Rich and poor eat McD's.
• Ritzer's "McDonaldization of Society" -- "globalization of nothing" (social forms centrally conceived, centrally controlled and lacking in context).
• Schlosser, Fast Food Nation:

• 1970 6 billion on fast food; ("million" in the text is a mistake)
• 2001 110 billion
• 2010 200 billion (not in text)

• British "trolley towns"; American suburbs. globalization of construction and architecture.
• Petrini on slowness: p. 39 read
• Slow cities: features of slow cities

• Slow Food USA

Small Group Discussion: Slow food culture

• Does the slow food movement present an attractive ideal for you? Or do you find yourself agreeing with Leadbeater that "fast culture is the answer"?
• For those of you for whom it is an attractive ideal, identify 3-5 ways that you might implement slow food culture in your life?
• Does Slow Food culture require a loss of productivity or is it more about reclaiming some of your time for an essential activity?

Barber, "Introduction" The 3rd Plate

• Browse to these three restaurants

• Blue Hill and Stone Barnes -- as a project [[44]]
• Chez Panisse [45]

• Story of Eight Row flint corn at Blue Hills. sig. "varietal restoration" "heritage cultivation"

• Story of the summer of corn at Blue Hills Farm when Barber was a kid. Note diffs.
• planted in "Three Sisters"
• polenta not typically thought of as high flavor experience, but in this case it was.
• Barber says (8) that the polenta story is the kind of experience he found himself repeating. What does he mean. What are the main features of the polenta story?

• Barber's "Plates"

• some background on "farm to table" "artisanal eaters" "locavores" -- (another side of industrial food, esp. for a chef, is the effect of varieties and production methods on flavor).
• chef as activist (p. 10 reference to Paul Bocuse) -- Wolfgang Puck -- eventually industrial food system produces a version of the chef's innovation.
• p. 11ff: Barber's critique of farm to table and the 1st and 2nd plates. Criticizing the way we eat: protein-centric plate, small side of veg Protein consumption per capita by country
• Some detail on Blue Hills.

• lamb chop story-- Problem: farm serving table. Table is still in charge of the plate. "cherry picking ingredients that are often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow" So, eliminate the menu! p.14 top of 15. Note characterization of American cuisine vs. French and Italian. No peasant heritage to base it on. Am: immoderation, big slabs of meat. (Carla's story Fall 2018 - What it means to have a place based culinary identity).

• 16: Note discussion of cuisine - based on ingredients local and sustainable.

• 1st, 2nd, 3rd plates 17. Claim: "The future of cuisine will represent a paradigm shift, a new way of thinking about cooking and eating that defies Americans' ingrained expectations." 18 Note that he gives another definition of the 3rd Plate at p. 21.

• 18: "truly delicious food is dependent on an entire system of agriculture. .... 21: the thrid plate goes beyond raising awareness about the importance of farmers and sustainable agriculture. I helps us recognize that what we eat is part of an integrated whole, a web of relationships, that cannot be reduced to single ingredients"
• The food "supply chain" is an ecology. The implication is that we can assess it in terms of sustainability, flavor, quality, diversity...etc.

Practicing Critical gastronomy on your own diet and supply chain

• How much of the following is true of your diet?

• When I think of dinners, I think in terms of the first or second plates. +3
• I typically check to see where produce comes from and try to buy seasonally. +3
• I know which of the things in my pantry and fridge are least sustainable and I have concern about limiting them in my diet. (Not just meat, but certainly meat. Also, coffee, strawberries, fruit from Chile or any distant place, industrial foods with high processing, industrial ag products.) +3
• I agree with the consensus of nutritionists about protein, contra my culture's practice. +3 Or, I'm thinking about it more now. +2
• I want my supply chain to maximize not only sustainability, but also flavor, which means good soil health and food grown with care. +3
• I regularly look for "trade ups" or incremental improvements to move me toward better gastronomy and better food values. +3

20: NOV 16

Assigned Reading

• Gopnik, Adam, "Who Made the Restaurant?" from The Table Comes First, 2012, (pp. 13-57). (44)

Gopnik, Adam, "Who Made the Restaurant?" (13-57)

• from The Table Comes First

• opening description - follow -- illusion of dining room, relation to romance, difference from previous types: table d'hote, traiteur, caterer.

• Traits of modern restaurant: waiters, menus, tables, mirrors, closed kitchen, seduction, silences..(privacy in public)

• personal experiences -- HoJo to Paris - Grand Vefour -- restaurants and writers' scenes. (search "Howard Johnson's Simple Simon and the Pie Man—1950's images" to see the original HoJo restaurant sign.). Interesting how many of the characteristics are in common between the two restaurants.

• 19: account of origin of restaurant starts here:

• old story - post french revolution, displaced help from nobles. But restaurant starts 20 years earlier. Restaurant not like home service.

• three factors: intellectual causes (health and simplicity), commercial causes (new site for restaurants in/around Palais Royal), moral/social cause (breakdown of caste/class leading up to Rev)

• Mathrurin Roze de Chantoiseau -- first restauranteur. note root meanings of "restaurant" - associated with bullion and restoratives. Early restaurant served healthy foods that you couldn't source (22), not esoteric or exotic. Chantoiseau introduced more of a pleasure motive to the restaurant. women could go together in public (!). Also, the restaurant can make you feel rich. Fancier than your stuff. Another early restauranteur, Vacossion, focused on simple foods that individuals could not source themselves. "nouvelle cuisine"

• French Revolution actually problematic for the early restaurant -- communalism of the table d'hote more suited to egalitarianism.

• commercial scene of the Palais Royal -- first mall. 27: 1780-1830 -- period of growth of restaurants - reflected some international ethnic cusine, but points out that the southern provinces of France would seem as exotic to Parisians and North African cuisine might seem to us. "Provencal" --

• adopted Russian services (sequence of courses, dishes chosen by each diner) rather than French banquet service (piles of dishes on a sideboard from which waiters serve) (consider the individualism in this) -- not how this changes the motivations of restauranteurs. (Wealth of Nations, 1776, just saying.)

• Part two of the chapter: The French Cafe: compares the emergence of the restaurant to the newer cafe, which did come into being by post-revolution licensing law changes allowing coffee/alcohol in same place. alcohol a myopic drug / caffeine a far sighted drug. 33-37, importance of. (Digress to consider how we handle this now and in different places.) note Paris / London comparisons p. 33.

• brings in Bourdieu and Priscilla Park Ferguson -- "social field" , like a "scene" (examples of "gastronomic scenes" -- craft beer, local roasted coffee....) features of a food scene: writing, end of famine, enjoyment of food not seen as a sin, but mark of cultivation.

• Brillat-Savarin, 1825 Physiology of Taste. introduces word "gastronomy" 42ff. defines the "gourmand" in terms of enthusiasm about one's appetite and taste for food. analogy to the pleasure of flirtation, which he also claimed was a french invention (!). "Soft power" (mention slow food, also a political movement). With greater food security, enjoying food for its own sake change form vice to virtue (mention Happiness history here)

• rival, Grimod La Reyniere -- real foodie, spent the revolution eating great food, somewhat abstracted. rated restaurants and gave them stickers for their windows. the discussion here suggests how the vocabulary of the French gastronomic moment developed.

• 54: Habermas' theory about "Enlightenment eating" -- creates social capital. Issue at the end: Is the restaurant a bourgeoisie trap or an instrument of enlightenment?

Digression on some bright spots in the local new food economy

• Here are some links to organizations in the "new food economy" in Spokane. The values in this supply chain give us a nice example of how a new kind of food enterprise can come about.

• The Grain Shed

• Palouse Heritage

• Linc Foods is a kind of "aggregator" for the local food supply chain. [46]

• Here's an interest local eatery concept: Feast World Kitchen

• Another direction to think about is scratch-made local healthy food in a food delivery format. My favorite local example is still Jennifer Stuchell's (GU Hogan entrepreneur) Pantry Fuel

• Here is a link from Main Market (which favors local suppliers) to get a sense of the local food supply scene:[47].

Imagining Future Restaurants

• Since the opening of the first modern restaurants in Paris around 1780, the concept of the restaurant has developed, especially in the 21st century. Think of the variety of eateries and restaurants we have now, from food trucks, to traditional fast food, to healthy concept fast food.

• Use your philosophical imaginations to think through a new combination of values that a new kind of restaurant might realize. During our discussion of the Gratzer piece we will develop a list of "restaurant values" -- both of the first modern restaurant and the ones that followed. Then, in group discussion, try to think about what you can't get from the contemporary array of restaurants, but something you would value. You ideas may range from things you would like to see more restaurants do to kinds of restaurants that do not exist.

21: NOV 18

Assigned Reading

• Barber, Dan. Chapter 30: "Seed" from The 3rd Plate (382-409) (21)
• Barber, Dan. Chapter 12: "Land" from The 3rd Plate (158-173) (15)
• The big idea from the Land Institute: The Land Institute, big idea in 3 minute video

Food Media Search and Report Assignment

• The assignment gives you the opportunity to find "food media" that might interest you, and to report your findings to the class.
• Food media includes food tv shows, culinary food blogs and sites, food interest blogs and sites. Youtube, of course, hosts video channels from foodies. See some of the examples from Food News! or contact me to help focus your search. For this assignment, let's focus on social media that is in current and ongoing production. Not, for example, a favorite food movie or recipe site. Ideally, you might use this assignment to discover new sites that you would want to return to.
• Examples: Katie Workman, Rich Roll, Sylvia Fontaine. On youtube, I follow some Italian chefs: Max Mariola, IlBocca TV, CookAround TV. Lots more, but you should follow your interests, not mine. In the food and social justice category sites like Civil Eats is interesting. You might search for others if you are not totally focused on gastronomy. In the traditional podcast category, an example would be gastropod.com
• Assignment: Identify some of your current food media and do some searches based on your interest to find news sources of information, gastronomic or dietary or otherwise that appeal to you at this point in thinking about food.
• Reporting and due date: Please report at least three sources to share with the class. Fill out this form, once for each source. For each source, you will be asked to identify the source, provide a link if possible, and write 2-3 sentence about what you found interesting or appealing in this media. Please complete this assignment by November 25th, 2020, 11:59pm

Barber, Dan. Chapter 30: "Seed" (pp. 382-409)

• Introductory story of the tomato fungus. fungus worse because spread from trucks, but also highlighting varietal system. Mountain Magics resist blight fungus and still taste good. We meet the Cornell breeders of this variety. Theme of the chapter: how does the work of plant breeders affect the food system, especially flavor and yield. Story of Flvr Savr Calgene's gmo industrial tomato. discontinued.

• Background on Land grant breeeding programs. 1862, with USDA, experiment station, extension service added in 1914. Can have negative effects from success. Breeding programs raised yields, but also lowered prices. 388: description of the work of the breeder. Really agriculture's artists.

• Terroir for wheat? Aragon 03, kept alive in a corner of Spain, in high demand.

• Palouse Heritage -- take a look at the landrace/heirloom food system for cereal terroir in the Northwest.

• Steve Jones, formerly of WSU, now Washington State Research and Extention Center, Mt Vernon (and Bread Lab) background story - how land grant seed banks work, fateful meeting with Monsanto (p. 395), 1880 Bayh-dole Act. by 1990s majority funding from private industry.

• • Specialty wheat in Skagit Valley. (So, if wheat were a fresh crop, we would also be supporting crop rotation over syn fertilizers.)

• Nice narrative moment with the farmers and Jones. Interesting point about how the flavor yield trade off occurs more in plant that have been selected for size and water. Harder to ramp up flavor with all that water. Also, older wheat variety had higher nutrition. Claim of 50% more calcium, iron, and zinc.

• Digress on Fall 2018 Florence "Ancient Grains Seminar" (Sharepoint)

• Jones wants to move beyond heirloom varieties. Still ways to improve and diversify strains.

• Steve Jones links: The Bread lab, New York mag article, NYT article, "Bread is Broken".

• Related initiative: The Land Institute, big idea in 3 minute video

Barber, Ch 12, "Land" from The 3rd Plate

• Two stories of "terroir" -- gastronomy & ethics

• Eduardo and his geese -- How does Eduardo come across to you?

• In earlier segment, Eduardo is touting the fact that his foie gras does not require force feeding the geese.
• Is the slaughter humane in your opinion?
• Connection between humane slaughter and taste -- pig story 160

• Monesterio and jamon -- [[48]]

• Jamon iberico de bellota (acorn)-- espression of the land. connection with Spanish identity.
• food religion point: 163 eating pork during the islamic occupation showed you were christian.
• the "dehesa" is the locale for the terrior of jamon iberico. enclosure for pasture of sheep built after the reconquista. grass and oaks protected by law. note relationship between the pigs eating pattern in this environment and the arrival of the acorns.
• note the physical limits of the terroir for jamon. note only geographic, but 4 acres/pig. Can't scale this up.

• These gastronomic stories would certainly count as "extravagant" for Fairlie. Note also that they exemplify terrior. and even moral terrior. Cf to the tonnara in Med.

• Remaining pages of the chapter point out the other rich products of the dehesa. The land is very productive. Even the oak trees provide valuable cork. So there is a kind of intensive agriculture here, but it is very specific to what the land and history could create.

22: NOV 23

Assigned Reading

• Wallach, Cuisine of Contact (1-31) (31)

Debrief and Stage 4 of "Ethics of Eating" writing

• General Advice: There is still alot to learn from reading other student work in light of all of this informtion. Compare animals and comments. Discuss with me. Note that not so many points separate us. Grading system is designed to let practice writing without great consequence for your course grade. Just do your best to take lessons from the top ranked writing in the course as you go in to the final work in the course.
• Some observations: Many of you were very impressed with climate arguments, many saw confluence of arguments justifying reduction of meat consumption. On the motivation problem, well, it's a hard problem. Many of you thought the word hadn't really gone out (quite a few said it was Food News! for them), while others really focused on how deeply we are connected to our diets. (Today's reading, along with Rachel Lauden's "culinary cosmos" idea reinforce this.)
• We will consider the question of dietary change in our last few classes in December. It is one of the most interesting problems in food studies today, I think.
• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [49]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Five points for completing the backevaluations and up to 5 more from your peers.

• Back evaluations are due November 25, 2020, 11:59pm.

End of Term Work

• Check with me on optional work at this point. Too to do journals for 10%. Plenty of time for many other options, but it is time to get your grading scheme percentages right and equal to 100% (1) on courses.alfino.org. Please see me if you are unsure how to do that.

• Required work
• Food Media assignment due this Wednesday (see Nov 18 above). I will keep the due date, but I will not "harvest" results until the Sunday, November 29. So if you want to do this over the break, feel free. Same points.
• Final paper: Here is the text from courses.alfino.org for your choice about the final paper.

• "Food Research" Final Paper(10-20%) - This 7-9 page paper is a research paper within the field of Food Studies on a topic of your choice. You may want to connect your major field of studies to the research. You must do either this paper or the "My Philosophy of Food" Final paper. More details can be found at the course wiki page.
• "My Philosophy of Food" Final Paper(0-25%) - This 7-9 page paper is a statement of your "Philosophy of Food," which represents your current views on major questions addressed by the course. You must do either this paper or the "Food Research" Final paper. More details can be found at the course wiki page.
• Please let me know by Thanksgiving break, which paper you will write by filling out this form.

• Final Essay - (10-20%) - At the end of the semester, you will be asked to write one final essay. This will be open book and open note. No names please. I will assign the topic for this essay on Dec 9th and it will be due on Dec 16th. Probably 600-800 words.

From Culinary Cosmos to Culinary Culture

• Today's reading highlights a few themes:

• How we use food to create cultural meanings, sometimes by fiat drawing on a projected past.
• Historical accounts of the Pilgrims and Early settlers encounters with Native peoples and their own ideas about food / food and religion.
• These are also stories of dietary change, so they reflect back on our recent work on the motivation problem in the ethics of eating and forward to our thinking about dietary change.

• How similar is a present day carnivore, resisting compelling arguments about diet and climate, to a European settler to North America between 1621 and 1640? Note that many of our founding stories are about religious emigration and connect food to religion and god's judgement about you in real time. Could that explain something about our current food ideologies? Did we take the prosperity of meat agriculture and high impact agriculture as a "sign"?

Wallach, Chapter 1, "The Cuisines of Contact"

• Note from intro: think about what's at stake for a Pilgrim in choosing what to eat or not eat. "humourial eating" -- food affects character.

• Thanksgiving 1621

• [By the way, who plans to arrive on Cape Cod in November from a three month journey without a lot of food?]
• Thanksgiving, 1621, "Puritans" and Wampanoag Indians. Description of Mayflower diet and transit. ship's biscuits, scurvy.
• Pilgrims steal Indian corn, claiming it was sent by God, but also repaying the Indians later.
• 40 of 102 voyagers died the first winter.
• Encounter with Tisquantum. (His story also told in "1491".) 5: Indian planting methods "three sisters", fish fertilizer
• 6: There was actually a feast in 1621, with a partial account surviving. 90 Native Americans.
• Thanksgiving meals were ordinary rituals, not annual commemorations. Really, thanks to god, not the Native Americans. Not clear how much these were intercultural events in general.
• "Thanksgiving" doesn't become a national holiday until the late 19th century, and even then not explicitly connected to Pilgrim event until a few years later. Later used to promote assimilation 7. (Food/identity) Traditional foods of Thanksgiving shaped in Victorian period.
• 1636 war with Pequot might was food related. Horrible. 7-8 might have been part "famine war".
• Thesis at p. 10 read. Fantasy part is to think the colonist enjoyed their native feast. Likely not.

• Early Modern ideas of food and diet, corn

• Brits diet ideas: Galen rules until modern chemistry: four humours, food and character (11) diet and psychology together (which, given the microbiota research, isn't crazy). But crazy to think wine fortifies blood, eating an animal you take on its character. "Humoral eating" Fish reduces carnal desire. Don't eat too many rabbits or you'll scare easily!

• Note discussion at p. 12: Humble british diet pretty unappealing. Note class markers still present today: variety, high trophic eating (meat), fresh greens... Humble cuisines had pottages, stew pots...

• Pilgrims regarded Native diet as subhuman. Iroquois for corn "our life" "our mother" - read at p. 17: Pilgrims wary of choosing corn because of it's association with Indian identity, doubted its nutritious properties. wheat and fungus. not easily in early modern New England. Tried to "eat savage food in a civilized way" 18 Resistance to corn partly cultural. Disdain in sharing "culinary cosmos".

• Culinary Encounters at Jamestown 1607-09 (19)

• a commercial venture, near complex Indian confederations, Indians fed colonists, but colonists also raided villages and murdered Indians. Powhatan decides to stop helping, 1609 winter of starvation (and cannibalism) 22. native diet 23 -(read, it would be challenging), told from a captive's (Mary Rowlandson) report. 23 read. settlers had trouble foraging, seemed uncivilized. not used to lean times.

• Fasting and Feeding in the City on a Hill 1640s

• Following the Mayflower, the Massachusetts Bay Colony organized arrival of 16,000 by 1640s. "City on a Hill" saw morality of community related to food security. really a kind of theocracy. food pests, crop failures might be consequence of fornication. communal fasting. fasts more typical than feasts due to concern about gluttony 26: simplicity of Puritan diet in part a rejection of perceived upper class English gluttony. Note that Puritans had more extreme views about "virtuous/spiritual eating" than Pilgrims. (p. 27 - use of "humoral eating" theory to quell those desires and promote spiritual purity.) As Puritans became wealthier that incorporated large amounts of boiled meats into their diets. [In many ways, Barber's "1st plate" is a legacy of rich Puritans!]

• "The Puritans were remarkably ambivalent about food (cf. other food cultures). They were fearful of both abundance and scarcity.

23: NOV 30. Unit 6: Gastronomy, Satisfaction, and Dietary Change

Assigned Reading

• Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy Chapters 2, 7, 11, 18, 19, 21, 27 (67)

Final Paper Advice

• My Philosophy of Food -- First steps
• Final Research paper -- Topic suggestions.

• Please turn in Final Papers by December 16th.

• Setting your grade weight for either "Final Research Paper" or "My Philosophy of Food" - Minimums on courses.alfino.org are set at 0 so that you can set one of the two assignments to zero, but please do not set the other one below 15%.

Food Media Search

• Some great submissions from this exercise. We will take a brief look at the spreadsheet under Shared Content. I have separated Saint names from entries so that some of you can comments on items without compromising your saintly nature.

Another 50cent egg lesson

• Recall the 50cent egg lesson on food value

• Prego vs. Cento

• Prego nutrition and ingredients from Campbell's.
• Prego Ingredients label
• No mention of added sugar here
• Cento nutrition label

• Prego: 67 oz 4.37 - 11 6 oz servings -- .39 cents a serving
• Cento: 28 oz.3.50 - 4.6 6 oz servings -- .76 cents a serving.

• How prego is made
• More on sauce gastronomy.

Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy Chapters 2, 7, 11, 18, 19, 21, 27

C2: Dogs, Humans, and Retronasal Smell

• comparison of dog’s snout and sniffing with human. Import how motor functions and anatomy are integrated to behavior. Mice sniff up to 10x a second!
• Inside the snout: modern mammals engage in ortho and retronasal olfaction. Receptors in nasal bulb direct to brain.
• Evolution of the Human Nose: Why we don’t have snouts....bipedalism or diet. Argued in evo theory that decline of the snout led to ascendency of vision. Stereoscopic vision possible without the snout. Human olfaction favors retronasal vs. Dogs. Retronasal more emphasis on what we put in our mouths. 25-26: mechanics of chewing, sampling by taste buds, air flow, heating, humidification, retronasal olfaction,
• Why would retronasal olfaction be favored in humans? Bipedalism increased our range and exposure to food varieties. Cooking. Origins of “cuisine” in emergence of cooking 400,000 years ago. (Note both are food explanations.)

C7: Images of Smell

• The Olfactory Bulb: molecular and neural pathways at the bulb. Glomerulus (glom) - convergence site of receptor cells. Interneurons: often specialized processors. Periglomeral cells, Mitral cells, tufted cells. Granule cells.
• How does olfactory bulb represent smell? Story of discovery: 1930s Edgar Adrian, hedgehogs, noticed how patterns of excitation could create an “image” of the smell. Sokoloff method for tracking energy used by the brain with a marker for glucose uptake. Important work that led to PET and fMRI. Follows his own research from 70s in using this method to track energy use in the olfactory bulb as it is exposed to odors. Confirms idea of a “smell image” or pattern of activation. Started to fill in a “map” of the receptor sites on the bulb. 1990s.

C11 Creating, Learning, and Remembering Smell

• lateral olfactory tract — context output from the bulb to the olfactory cortex in the brain. Long in humans. What is its role?
• importance of pyramidal cells. 100: capable of feedback excitation to stimulating cells. Thought important to memory. Damaged in dimentica patients.
• 101: Olfactory cortex “serves as content-addressable memory for association of odor stimuli with memory traces of odors. “. Structures that support this claim. Herb rule - identifies activity that suggest memory and learning. Interesting parallels between odor recognition and face recognition.
• 103: summary of functions of olfactory cortex. Not clear if perception of smell itself arises in ol. Cortex. Some research suggesting that it can detect the absence of the essential amino acids.

• key ideas: knowledge of mechanisms for understanding memory and flavor; learning mechanism, may even detect amino acids.

C18 Putting it all Together: The Human Brain Flavor System

• opening summary of the "human brain flavor system."
• reference and quote from Brillat-Savarin, the first “gastronome” . Nice continuity between early language and neurogastronomy.
• sensory system vs action system
• sensory system:

• flavor also produced by smell, taste, mouth-sense, sight, sound.
• multi-sensory integration, or “Supra-addivtivity” involves congruent repetition of combinations of stimuli. “internal brain image” of the flavor object.
• read summary sentence, p. 160: “A consensus is emerging....” [Think about this a minute....]

• action system

• chart on p. 161 matching brain structures to aspects of flavor perception. The action system includes emotional response, memory, decision making, plasticity (how the activity of the body/brain — in this case eating— changes the brain) Language, consciousness. (Each treated in next section. We sample the chapter on emotions.)

C19: Flavor and Emotions

• emotions moves us toward action, but also reflect our internal state of desiring and wanting. What is diff between want and craving?

• research from Monell Chemical Senses Institute. Cravings implicated in eating disorders. Dull diets stimulate craving. Marcia Pelchat and colleagues looked at parallels between food cravings and drug craving. In a study, one group of test subjects were on a monotonous diet and another on a normal diet. In brain imaging, the monotonous eaters produced strong activation when asked to imagine a favorite food. Supports hypothesis that there is a common circuitry to natural and pathological rewards (food and drugs). 168ff: discussion of brain structures implicated in the study. Hippocampus, insula, caudate nucleus. Caudate includes high concentration of dopamine. Also part of the striatum, which involves habits (which probably involve dopamine). When we are hungry, we can activate food memories and emotional responses in anticipation of the food.

• [An implication of this for eating is that hunger plays a key role in satisfaction. The hungrier eater produces stronger anticipatory activation. “Hunger is the best relish.” “Images of desire” maybe be important to satisfaction. But also, this research suggests that an unsatisfied brain (one on a dull diet) is more likely to produce cravings . In a sense the brain demands satisfaction. read at 168. Digression on question: Does the industrial diet produce real satisfactions? Mixed evidence. ]

• chocolate-satiety study (Dana Small) — test subjects eat chocolate to satiety while in imaging. Difference in activation can be thought of as a change in the flavor image (for chocolate) under conditions of craving and satisfaction. Mentions concept of “reward value” current in brain research. cool idea here is that our flavor images change with our hunger states.

C21: Flavor and Obesity

• considers the case of french fries in relation to the flavor perception system. Salt, fat, and sweetness (SFS). Discusses the meat flavor from tallow, now artificially added. Adds in the rest of the typical fast food meal. Chased with coffee and a cookie. Coffee has over 600 volatile molecules. Point: the fast food meal involves sensory overload.

• Overeating:

• sensory overload;
• caloric density; reduced roughage.
• But also “Sensory-specific satiety” . Single flavors diminish appetite while multiple flavors amplify it. You can eat more food if it includes multiple flavors. The complexity of industrial flavors increases our ability to overconsume them. 187
• long-term overstimulation of skin and membranes of the lips and mouth. Interesting research shows obese test subjects have more activation of these areas even while not eating. [this supports the idea of a learned behavior from food conditioning]
• Conditioned overeating: Other research by Dana Small. You can induce extra eating in rats with conditioned stimuli (bell). Humans have wide field of potential conditioning stimuli.
• Other research suggests that ineffective inhibitory circuits play a role in obesity.
• Others speculate that the reward value of food for obese is too low. The brain doesn’t register enough pleasure from a normal diet.
• Kessler: combination of SFS culprit (note that in Kessler’s theory several of the above theories are included.)

C27: Why Flavor Matters

• brief summary.
• Flavor at different life stages:

• In the womb: flavors in amniotic fluid, rat study showing odor preference established pre-natally. Diet studies with pregnant women (using anise or carrot juice for eample) show similar results.
• In infants: flavor and preference also communicated through breast milk
• In childhood: research showing kids are hyper sensitive to SFS foods.
• In adolescents.
• Flavor and dieting in adults. Doesn’t work. 238: “key element missing in most discussions of diet is flavor”. Very important point. Cites Brownell’s “Food Fight” (2004) and Barbara Rolls.
• In old age: research on loss of smell sense.

24: DEC 2

Assigned Reading

• Kessler, Chapters 27-32, p.(137-165) (28)

2nd Thoughts on the Satisfactions of Industrial Foods

• Still thinking about some issues in Monday's reading. Fast foods and industrial foods (IF) often involve sensory overload, high palatability, high glycemic responses, and lots of fats, salt, and sugar. It seems like it would follow from this that industrial foods are satisfying? Maybe. But maybe overstimulation can be under-satisfying.

• Some possibilities:

• 1. IF is overstimulating. This produces conditioned over eating. (Kessler's emphasis)
• 2. IF is satisfying at the level of mouth taste and multi-sensory engagement, but it puts us out of sync with stomach and gut satisfactions. (glycemic response, sense of fullness, absence of fiber, etc.) So, IF is ultimately unsatisfying. Research suggests unsatisfying diets produce cravings. (Try to put together research on food satisfaction and craving in relation to IF)
• 3. Picture from the Reno heart diet. You can eat too much food and still not be satisfied. Just as you can be overfed and undernurished. Would this be equally true of a traditional cuisine? Arguably, you can't overeat a healthy diet. (Compare to other behaviors which humans tend to find addictive or objects of obsession. Sex and drugs.)

Kessler, Chapters 27-32

• Kessler's focus is on overeating, but much of this seems to apply to patterns of unhealthy eating as well. So as you are thinking about today's research, even if you do not overeat, think about how well this also explains conditioning to industrial foods.

C27: Overeating becomes more dangerous.

• Strong thesis: 137

• Our brains are designed to focus on salient stimuli. Salient food drives overeating. Reinforcement learning. Role of memory, enhanced by multi-sensory stimuli, Once conditioning is strong, the desire to feel better can be overcome by the desire to follow the habit. Deep habits don’t trigger thought or reflection. (Note, that is a good thing.)

• Hyperpalatable foods are hyper-stimulants. They are effective in creating conditioned hyper eating.

C28 What Weight-Loss Drugs Can Teach Us

• Phen-fen - banned, but apparently effective in blocking obsessive thought about food and drugs. Indicates that they have similar underlying mechanisms.

• Patient: “I’m there, the food is there, but I don’t feel like eating the food. It used to be that I would see the food and I would go completely nuts, and that doesn’t happen any longer.”

C29

• ”Conditioned Hypereating”. Governed by cues, priming, and emotion.

• Cues: example of being cued by a fast food place as you return from the gym. 147: “elaborated thought”. — brain works on details, connections, plan for getting reward. Sets up tension with conscious awareness. “If you eat the salient food today, it’s going to be more salient tomorrow because you have more positive associations with it. “

• Priming: tendency to seek a food reward more intensely once it has been tasted. In studies of hunger, test subjects report higher levels of hunger during the first part of the meal. 149. Research supporting priming effect. Test subjects consumed more of the food they were primed by.

• Emotions: some emotions drive overeating by reinforcing cues and priming. Sadness and Anger . In a brain imaging study (151), test subjects in whom a negative mood had been induced were more stimulated by the prospect of a milkshake than a control group.

• Stress also exaggerates other stimuli. Profound stress can shut down appetite and emotion. Transition emotions (how we feel as we change activities) make us vulnerable.

C30

• Expectations of satisfaction from a food or from eating reinforce the stimulus. Not everyone driven to obsession by this. The “white bear” problem. Suppressed thoughts can become more salient because they are suppressed.

C31: Conditioned Hypereating emerges

• Research questions about hypereating. 158: obesity study showing that overweight women snacked more throughout the day than non. In another study obese test subjects were more willing to work for food rewards than other activities that they liked as well. Not so for non-obese.

• Reno Diet Heart Study: 5 year study of differences in food attitudes bt obese and non-obese. Obese: loss of control over eating, lack of feeling satisfied, and preoccupation with food. 50% of obese and 30% of overweight subjects showed these features. But 17% of lean test subjects. Those showing traits of conditioned hypereating more than 2x likely to be overweight early in life.

• 161: conditioned hyper eaters more likely to rate an aroma pleasant longer. In brain image, heightened response to cookies, etc.

• considers conditioned hypereating a syndrome, cluster of symptoms.

C32: Tracing the roots of conditioned hypereating

• 70s researcher, Shacter — “externality” theory of obesity. Overeating from response to external cues, over internal. In his “cracker study” thin people reduced subsequent consumption of crackers, but obese did not. Theorized that they respond to presence of external stimulus over being partially full.

• Restrain theory. Dieting fails due to ineffective restraint.

25: DEC 7

Assigned Reading

• Burkhard Bilger, "Can Babies Learn to Love Vegetables?," New Yorker, Nov 25, 2019 (12)
• Tarragon & Moreno, "Role of Endocannabinooids on Sweet Taste Perception, Food Preference, and Obesity-related Disorders" Chemical Senses v. 43, 3-16, 2018. (13)
• Rolls, Barbara, "The Role of Energy Density in the Overconsumption of Fat," American Society for Nutritional Sciences, 2000, 246-253. (7)

Burkhard Bilger, "Can Babies Learn to Love Vegetables?

• 1st theme: The Good Tastes Study - Susan Johnson U of Col. pediatrics. Baby taste tests.

• 2nd theme: Calvin Schwabe - veternary epidemiologist UC Davis. Unmentionable Cuisine . We're omnivores. We're passing up alot of food, like cats and beetles. In a sense we are our tastes -- supertasters, low tasters/high sugar preference. Julie Menella from Monell Chemical Senses. omnivores/brain plasticity (recall Shepard)

• 3rd theme: Saskia Sorrosa, CEO of Fresh Bellies -- Ecuadoran, didn't like baby food options for her daughter. Represents traditional cuisine argument for baby food (at the end of the article you get another example): babies eat adult foods, specially prepared. Palette Training - [interesting idea that our palattes are trained, even before birth, and in early childhood (Mennella - everything gets through to the fetus). Possibly the same systems and mechanisms as you would encounter in changing your diet (we are all Judge 7). Fresh Bellies is doing very well (new food economy!) Their formula: no added sugar, natural (acid) preservation instead of industrial pasteurization. 3x price (maybe another 50 cent egg lesson?)

• baby food industry back story -- 9 billion - mostly fruit and sweetened vegetables. Amy Bentley, Inventing Baby Food. Before vitamin discovery, veggies seen as source of illness due to unclearn conditions.

• 1921 Harold Clapp, first baby food. Some details there. 1969 baby food scandals - contamination and research on rats showing hypertension from baby food. 1/3 of baby food homemade.

• 4th theme: Inside Gerber's baby food testing facility. 2/3 market share! "baby black ops site". Judge #7. Baby sugar bliss points are twice adults. From 1970 - 2000 childhood obesity tripled. 7 month olds drinking soda. Gerber adds fruit to everything, not added sugar anymore. [But what sort of palatte training is fruit and veg? Or yours? How does your diet train your palatte?]

• Palatte training claim: it takes 10 tries. Most parents give up after 3-4 tries.

• New industrial baby and early childhood foods in development. More squeezable tubes for delivery.

• 5th theme - from baby food to military foods (big theme in food nutrition awareness historically was from military preparedness. Many battles lost to scurvy and malnutrition). How fighter pilots eat.

• Closing scene at African market in Maine. How people from non-industrial cuisines feed their babies. But you have to have a cuisine to do this. Americans have an "interrupted cuisine"

Tarragon & Moreno, "Role of Endocannabinooids on Sweet Taste Perception, Food Preference, and Obesity-related Disorders"

• You could work from the abstract on this one. I just wanted you to see some technical research to balance the Nyer article. Also, the research paradigm in this article connects with the "conditioned hypereating" theory of Kessler and depends upon findings in neurogastronomy.

• Summary: Claims that highly palatable food is part of obesity problem. References mechanisms of food choice: reward system, environmental cues, internal factors. The article is a literature review of: 1. research on how our food tastes emerge and get fixed, especially sweet taste; 2. how genetics, experience, lifestyle, etc. influence palette; 3. the role of the "endocannabinoid system (ECS)" in setting the palette.

• Some highlights: research on parallel between food cravings and drug cravings (also in Kessler and Shepard). Details of sweet receptors (recently found in the gut, adipose tissue, and the brain, as well). There is a genetic dimension to sweet taste perception. p. 4 - people with particular alleles of the T1R genes have greater sweetness discrimination (note, they may have a more multi-sensory experience of sweetness). (table 1 summarizes some of this research).

• ECS (endocannabinoid system) - mechanisms. [Digresssion: From wiki page on ECS: "A related study found that endocannabinoids affect taste perception in taste cells[60] In taste cells, endocannabinoids were shown to selectively enhance the strength of neural signaling for sweet tastes, whereas leptin decreased the strength of this same response. While there is need for more research, these results suggest that cannabinoid activity in the hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens is related to appetitive, food-seeking behavior.[57]"

• eCBs are synthesized as part of the chemical system that gives us hedonic responses from food. Example practical studies: Argueta p. 6. "Dysregulation" of the ECS is related to decrease in pleasure from food. Some research, p. 7, on effects of high O6/O3 ratios on ECS. Connections also between ECS and inflammation, depression.

• from conclusion.

Rolls, Barbara, "The Role of Energy Density in the Overconsumption of Fat,"

• The nutrition rock star herself. [50]

• Energy density theory - High energy dense, low volume foods cause lower levels of satiety.

• Back to "Does fat make you fat?" - Maybe the energy density of fat, like the density of highly palatable foods, makes you unsatiated (or satiated too quickly). Old idea: fat has a unique ability to make you fat. New research, when controlled for energy density, fats and carbs have similar effects on satiety (measured as subsequent food intake after a "pre load" of some food under study).

• water as beverage vs. water in foods (as in youtube) -

• 269S: studies suggesting that we eat by weight, not by energy intake. So the same amount of food by weight, if energy dense, will increase our calorie intake. [Any speculations on why we might have evolve to connect satisfaction to volume of food, not just energy?]

• Note: High volume, high nutrition, low density foods are typical of humble cuisines.

Final Essay: Satiety and Dietary Change (1000 words)

• Topic Prompt: Based on the reading in this unit, describe the human "flavor-reward-satisfaction" system and show how this system not only connects us to our diets, but helps explain unhealthy eating patterns, including overeating (750). Are there some practical lessons we can take from this research? (250)

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes and readings, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "FoodHappiness".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Final Essay dropbox by Monday, December 14, 2020, midnight.

26: DEC 9

Advice for putting together your "My Philosophy of Food" papers

• Once you have reviewed the course content and made selections of significant themes, ideas, argument, and knowledge, you need to find a way to connection them in a unified paper. Some ideas for doing this....

CIS

• This has been a Core Integration Seminar. We should take a few moments to think about the goals of the CIS class and, hopefully, how we have met them.

• 2. Core Learning Outcomes

1 Integrate the principles of a Jesuit education, prior components of the Core, and their disciplinary expertise (knowledge).

• from Canisius College: "A Jesuit education forms well-rounded students with a passion for knowledge and personal growth. This is one of the main philosophies of Jesuit teaching: cura personalis, or the care for the whole person."

• prior components of the core (hits and misses), integration of your disciplinary knowledge (a bit optional for me).

2 Clearly and persuasively communicate with an audience of diverse educational backgrounds, personal experiences, and value commitments using ideas and arguments based on evidence, logic, and critical thinking (skill).

3 Assess the ways in which the Core has transformed the commitments and perspectives that will inform their future endeavors (attitude).

• For me, more about "being engaged intellectuals" going forward. The Core is really great, in my opinion, but it is what it is.

Assessing major course hypotheses

• Philosophy_of_Food_Course_Research_Questions

Where do we go from here?

• Where we've been: A slow scroll and commentary on our wiki notes TOC. pulling out themes.

• 14. How do I use all of this knowledge to become a healthier and more satisfied person?

• Make sure your food philosophy values food consistently with the lessons you have taken from the course. For me, those lessons are embodied in some of the major slogans in the course (ex. "You are what you eat eats."). But also:

• You aren't just eating for you. Even beyond your microbes, your food choices maintain the systems that produce them. Slaughterhouses, industrial ag, fast food workers, high and low food value supply chains.
• Industrial food processes do some things very well, but are deeply problematic for health and justice. Industrial food corporations exert undue and often unhealth influence on everything from consumer health to soil health.
• Because we have many choices about food, the choices we do make carry a kind of moral responsibility or "complicity" that we should think about. (Analogy to other issues, like climate.)
• Traditional and humble cuisines have something to teach us. They are typically sustainable, satisfying (using high value foods with low energy density), nutritionally dense. Herb and spicing patterns in traditional cuisines are part of the flavor satisfaction of traditional foods. Their approaches to palette training and feeding babies are being born out by research.

• Develop your Culinary Practice and Cuisine - Practical Gastronomy.

• Set goals and "engineer" or "design" your diet to meet them.
• NSP as an analytic tool. Design a diet that satisfies NSP and your immediate lifestyle.
• "Trade ups" - Meet your goals through specific small victories. A new dish, a strategy for avoiding the drive-through lane, less industrial food from the supermarket, new culinary and gastronomic skills.
• Pay attention to your supply chain. Trade up to higher value foods. The 50cent egg.
• Move from science to habit. Once you have studied food and your diet enough, you can move to more intuitive approaches to thinking about food. Knowing food nutritional values and consensus dietary goals helps.
• Beyond a healthy and satisfying diet -- More values, more seasonal and local foods, more ways of using ingredients, more ways of creating choices and flexibility while maintaining high standards.