WHILE THE ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES PROGRAM PROVIDES PLENTY OF food for thought, faculty environmentalists also devote a great deal of thought to food. When Katheryn Doran, associate professor of philosophy and director of this year's Hamilton Program in New York City, read bioethicist Peter Singer's work in the late 1970s while she was in graduate school, she realized she would have to convert from an avid hamburger fan to a "very reluctant vegetarian," based on Singer's case that the suffering imposed on animals raised and killed for food was unethical.
"At the time, my diet consisted pretty exclusively of, I confess, hamburgers, and I well remember the sinking feeling," she says. Today, Doran, who follows a mostly vegetarian diet but occasionally eats fish, has funneled that "sinking feeling" she felt 30 years ago into a desire to connect her students in environmental ethics courses to "what are among the most important problems facing humans today."
The topic of food in fact provides an ideal entrée into environmental discussion because it combines an elemental fact of life with the countless forces that shape its production and consumption: corporate economics, political policy, class, technology, history, the arts, nutrition and health, the developing world. In effect, food becomes a lens through which to observe how humans interact with the world. "I want people to think hard about their political priorities, and the nitty-gritty decisions they make every day about where they go, what they buy, what they throw away and what they eat and where it comes from," Doran says.
When Guttman first approached her colleagues several years ago about developing the course that would become Food for Thought — a staple of interdisciplinary study at Hamilton — she wanted to approach such issues by exploring the historical realities behind contemporary habits. "Students don't understand how much time was spent just being fed … what it means to cook," Guttman says. "It's thought of as a time-consuming activity rather than a way of literally sustaining yourself and sustaining a world."
