THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION HAS REMAINED A CORNERSTONE OF FOOD for Thought through several incarnations of the course. In the fall, Frank Sciacca, associate professor of Russian, had his Food for Thought students begin the seminar with a meal that a 19th-century Hamilton student might have eaten. "That's always eye-opening for students," says Sciacca, who is also director of the 1812 Garden, the reconstruction of an early 19th-century farm garden on campus that is part of the larger Community Farm Garden and serves as the outdoor "laboratory" for Food for Thought.
The Food for Thought seminar and the 1812 Garden combine Sciacca's interests in gardening, history, food, teaching and research into a "gratifying" hands-on experiment. On the first day of classes last fall, he and his students met in the classroom and headed out to the Community Farm Garden, where a smaller plot of land is designated as the 1812 Garden. The students and Sciacca used pitchforks and buckets to harvest heritage early rose potatoes that had been planted last spring. "The students take to it very quickly," Sciacca says. "We all eat, and I think we all want to be educated about what we eat."
As the class progresses, Sciacca enjoys asking his students to interview their families about their food customs and origins — and specifically to figure out how many generations they themselves are removed from working on the land for a primary income. "It's really great if they are able to get that information," he says. "Particularly if they are unaware of it, because there is an intimacy with the land in growing your own food, which is in fact what we are trying to do. It is really a blip of the last 50 years that has seemed to change everything. Agroindustry has taken over the whole production of food for the nation, with horrible and detrimental impact."
Tom Jones and Charlotte Beck
Charlotte Beck, professor of archaeology, says a sense of historical perspective is critical to teaching and learning about the environment in the sciences as well. Beck and her husband Tom Jones, professor of anthropology, long directed Hamilton's field school in Nevada, a program that introduces students to methods of artifact collection and curation that they learn about in the classroom. Both on the Hill and in the field, Beck has encouraged students to take the long view.
"In learning about the past, they often don't see connections between what people did in the past and what they are doing now," she says. "A couple of years ago I taught a course based on Jared Diamond's book Collapse, in which we examined several current-day examples and several prehistoric ones. One of the latter was Easter Island, where the population eventually cut down all the trees, over-farmed the land and, according to Diamond, caused their own destruction. Students were shocked that the people didn't see what they were doing — didn't they see that they were cutting down the last of the trees?
"So, studying what people did in the past can be quite helpful in making people see what's going on in the present," Beck says.
