In this course, we will pursue a deep and wide engagement with the issues and conflicts that importantly burden the production and delivery of a safe and abundant supply of food--especially, nutritious food--to the American people and to all people. This pursuit is married to the need to confront current challenges to the immense amounts of freshwater that food production conventionally--with embedded legal permission--demands.
Our need to unlock the challenges of understanding will require that we penetrate interlocking webs of legal regulation and institutional responsibility; nutrition and other scientific groundings; ethical and moral considerations; economic drivers; practical judgments; inter-disciplinary professional commitments; political pressures; the sudden advent of AI-generated food and water security concerns; and the diffuse involvements of consumers and producers within these webs.
Our subjects are inherently inter-disciplinary, though the primary influences on food production and safety of the fragmented U.S. legal system, including its policy-based and politics-encrusted filters, render it the foundational discipline for this course. To enhance inter-disciplinary knowledge-building, I welcome law students as well as those from a variety of other subject areas to shape the class and to fulfill its collaborative aims.
Items of note:
The class will meet for three hours at its once-per-week sessions. This sharply vertical sequencing will serve the analysis of unique as well as recurrent elements of the interlocking webs I mentioned earlier under a new topic heading each week.
In support of a collaborative pedagogy, at least two of the topics to be covered intensively will be chosen by the class's members, after enrollment ends.
The writing requirements for the class will center on journal entries; group projects (one per student, enrollment permitting); and a possibly-pithy research paper or oral presentation with a targeted aim.
There will be one or two optional field trips and, likely, an optional off-campus meal.
Cohen, Jane M.