UPDATE: Farming and our relationships to animals

UPDATE: We have the opportunity to meet with Gene on Tuesday, February 23 at 10 am in 221 Chambers Building. Mark your calendars.

What do we owe animals if anything? Gene Baur, the president of Farm Sanctuary, will be coming to Penn State to give a presentation on this issue on February 22nd. Farm Sanctuary "works to end cruelty to farm animals and promotes compassionate living through rescue, education and advocacy. We envision a world where the violence that animal agriculture inflicts upon people, animals and the environment has ended, and where instead we exercise values of compassion." The presentation is sponsored by the PSU Vegetarian Club.

Now here's a goal for schools

Want a good justification for gardens that are integrated into schools? Here you go.

Michael Pollan writes:

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

That's what the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture hopes for too. As I've been working and reading lately (posts forthcoming) this is a move we need to make in schools...private and public. We live in a breadbasket of the world with good rain, beautiful mixes of forest and cropland, and splendid water. We have a foodshed here. Let's move to bring it to the fore.

So where should we go to look for the answers? How do we do it?

Factory Farm-acology

Johns Hopkins Magazine has an excellent and terrifying piece out about the problems of factory farming, titled "Farmacology." In short, when we pump 50-80% of available antibiotics into the animals that most of us eat, we are playing a game of chicken (no pun intended) with evolution and anti-biotic resistance. The huge concentrations of animals we breed create incredibly drug-resistant microbes that get into our air, water, and move about on factory farm workers. In short, this is worrisome.

The article features 1972 JHU graduate, Ellen Silbergeld. They write,

After Silbergeld first heard about farmers feeding antibiotic additives to broiler chickens, she asked two faculty members in Maryland's poultry science program to show her the school's chicken barns on the Eastern Shore. As soon as she walked into one, she thought, "This is really serious." There were thousands of chickens crowded in tight confines. She says, "They are raised — how can I put this nicely? — they are raised on top of their own shit. They walk around on litter, which is sawdust or some kind of substrate, covered in feces. It's the most unhygienic thing you can imagine." The air was hot and full of dust. Periodic partial removal of litter from the barns created large piles of manure that were stored outside with minimal containment measures. Any farm worker laboring in such a facility had to be exposed to microbes, Silbergeld thought. If the chickens had been fed antibiotics, then some of those microbes had to be drug resistant.

But it doesn't stop at the air inside of the barns. What if you are in a car on a highway driving behind a poultry truck en route to a euphemistically named processing plant. Well, Silbergeld and her students created an experiment:

One day, a Bloomberg School colleague down the hall from Silbergeld came back from a weekend on the Eastern Shore complaining about how disgusting she'd found having to drive behind a truck hauling chickens to a processing plant. Silbergeld remarks, "When somebody says 'disgusting,' I say, 'Wait a minute, there's got to be something going on here.'" She and two of her students, Ana Rule and Sean Evans, designed what they called the "baby-you-can-drive-my-car" study. They loaded passenger cars with sampling equipment, figured out that an intersection on the Eastern Shore near the Virginia border would have a lot of poultry trucks passing through on the way to Perdue and Tyson processing plants, and drove to an adjacent shopping center parking lot. Whenever a poultry truck stopped at the traffic light, the researchers would slide in behind and follow it to the processors. Afterward, they sampled the air inside the car, as well as the car's exterior door handles and an unopened soda can they had placed in the car's cup holder. They found that the air in the car and both surfaces showed increased levels of enterococci after they'd driven behind the chicken trucks. Samples obtained before the car followed the trucks contained no resistant enterococci; a quarter of the bacteria isolated after the trucks showed resistance to antimicrobials, including tetracycline, erythromycin, and streptomycin.

I am of the opinion that to be an educated person is to have some idea of where your food comes from and how it became the food it became. These conditions are unacceptable (and they say nothing about how hens are treated elsewhere) and bring me back to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and all of the filth. But modern technology enables the development of super-bacteria in these animals. A dangerous game we play with nature here. A very dangerous game.

How does our thinking about developing teaching as farming and farming as teaching play into this? What is a sustainable source of meat (if you eat it) and how do we make that real? How can schools help?

"Cultivating Minds" from Edutopia and Sidebar Links Updates

Edutopia has a really nice article up titled "Cultivating Minds" on the advent of what Alice Waters calls the "Edible Schoolyard" and others call the "farm curriculum." Whatever we call it, it's gaining momentum and bringing teachers and children to consider our place in the biosphere as integral to schools. The article highlights a few of the star programs from around the country and bits and pieces about the programs they are implementing, from simple gardens where children find a purple heirloom carrot, to chickens that brought out the participation of Somali immigrant children, to some places that function on the order of farms. It is an invigorating read.

Problems lie ahead because legislators, policymakers, administrators, and teachers either don't know how or why food can be or should be so central to education because they might view at as some kind of narrow farmer-training program. As NCLB tells us and assumes, we are competitors in a "knowledge-based" global economy. What can this possible do to help us? That might be a difficult for some invested in narrow definitions of what schooling ought to serve.

But, the article makes a good point to show that this is about as broad-based a movement that exists and is growing. Josh Vertiel of Slow Food USA makes it clear, saying

We're giving away the right to teach our students to the most appealing bidder right now, and not the best teacher. And if we don't teach them what eating is, where food comes from, what health is about, and what it is to gather around the table, someone else is going to do it, and it's going to be someone who stands to make a profit. Instead, we should teach kids about what's good for them, what's good for the environment, and what's good for the people who are growing it.

This is just another way of saying what Wendell Berry has been saying for years, that every act of eating is an agricultural act. Food comes from somewhere and knowing where it has come from and how it has come to be is to know a great deal about one's self. To know one's food is to understand something about the very nature of the physical substance that makes up your body. Food has within it an ethical character that we can develop but are not when we invite Pizza Hut and Pepsi to run our school cafeterias. What these programs do is alter and recalibrate education such that the speed and scale of production shrinks and slows. It makes teacher and student, at least for a little while, into farmers and stewards of their own health and well being making them responsible for themselves and others. How Deweyan!

In other news, I have been loading the sidebar with some new links. I've updated some of the Pennsylvania links and the Education links with a bunch more to help us find curricular materials related to gardening, place-based education, our own region, and climate change issues. Check them out.