What's for dinner?

“If we are what we eat, what is it that we’re eating?”

Normally when someone asks that question, they’re thinking in medical terms: Am I eating healthy enough? Are there harmful chemicals or pesticides in my diet? But when anthropologist Elizabeth Fitting poses the question, she’s trying to provoke a broader discussion about how our food is produced and what its path from producer to product says about our values as a society.

In a global food system, food not only travels enormous distances, but it encounters a wide variety of regulatory regimes, political decisions and cultural meanings.

“Food is a good window to look at cultural, social, political and economic systems,” she explains. “In a global food system, food not only travels enormous distances, but it encounters a wide variety of regulatory regimes, political decisions and cultural meanings. There’s a lot we can learn from that.”

The days in when we could draw a straight line from the farm to the family table are long gone, replaced by a system of mass production that interlinks companies and consumers around the world. And while we are inundated with health information about much of what we eat, its origin is often more mysterious. That’s why people are increasingly asking tough questions about where their food comes from, and why terms like “local source” and “fair trade” are becoming common chatter at the supermarket.

In Dr. Fitting’s case, questions about agriculture and community have taken her from the farmlands of Mexico to the Dalhousie classroom. She’s currently working on a manuscript exploring how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has affected peasant farming in Mesoamerica. NAFTA has led to a dramatic increase of U.S. corn flooding the market in Mexico, not only making it difficult for small-scale producers to sell their maize, but in some cases unintentionally introducing genetically modified corn to areas where it is prohibited. Reacting against this, a political movement of scientists, academics and farmers’ organizations has emerged, operating under the banner “Sin maiz, no hay pais” (Without corn, there is no country).

That connection between food and national identity is one of the many ideas that Dr. Fitting will be exploring in her new course, “Food and Eating Across Cultures,” starting this fall.

“The idea is to really get students to think about the food they eat, the journey it takes and who participates in that journey, from peasant farmers through to multinational corporations,” she explains. “Take corn as an example. What does it mean to a Mexican peasant versus a middle-class professional in Mexico City? What does it mean to a Canadian farmer? What does it mean to you?”

Nathan Pelletier has seen first-hand what food means to people. The PhD student in “ecological economics” set off a cyberstorm earlier this year when speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. With a headline referring to hamburgers as “the Hummers of food,” news stories about his research into the environmental impacts of meat production led to harshly polarizing reactions on blogs and message boards across the Internet.

A reporter came up with that provocative title; Mr. Pelletier prefers to describe his findings in less-sensationalist terms. Still, he concedes that there’s quite a bit of truth to the sentiment.

“Beef is a cultural icon in so many ways, and it wasn’t until I engaged the beef question that people really got riled up about my research,” he explains. “But I think most people would be shocked at the role that livestock plays in environmental degradation on a global scale. It seems counter-intuitive to a lot of people that food systems are such a key driver of environmental change.”  

The numbers speak for themselves. On an equal weight basis, beef produces 10 to 20 times more greenhouse gases than chicken or salmon. It accounts for only 30 per cent of meat consumption but a staggering 78 per cent of emissions (not including land-use changes). And a household that chooses not to eat red meat or consume dairy products for a year saves the same amount of carbon emissions as if they cut 13,000 kilometres out of their driving.

“Chris Weber [engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University] raises the point that we don’t really make day-to-day decisions about a lot of things that affect our environment, such as what we drive, where we live or where our electricity comes from,” says Mr. Pelletier. “But our food consumption is affected by conscious choices that we make all the time. It’s not that we have to give up entirely on these products. We just have to be more cognisant of our consumption habits, recognizing that eating better will not only improve our personal health but the health of our environment.”

Just as North Americans feel a strong connection with beef – and Mexican farmers with corn – peoples around the world are using food as a way to express and define their identity. Amal Ghazal of the Department of History examines the global and historical dimensions of this in her course, “Food for Thought: History and Culinary Cultures of the Islamic World.”

“When my students and I explored the role that community dinners play in Muslim culture, they were surprised to see how much food was shared between the different facets of society,” says Dr. Ghazal. “They started to see a more multicultural perspective.”

In the course, Dr. Ghazal and her students travel through the history of Islamic civilization with food as the guide, from the counterculture foundation of the coffee shop – originally an Ottoman invention that terrified the governing elite – to exploring why certain countries compete to claim certain foods as their own. For example, Baklava is cited as a Turkish, an Arab and a Greek creation – evidence of the shared Ottoman history of both a pastry and three peoples.

“What students learn quite quickly is that they’re not exploring a homogenous Muslim community, but one with many borrowed cultures and various traditions,” she says. “Muslim society is defined by different connections, including food. It helps us break down the stereotypes and misconceptions.”

As our disparate societies around the world continue to connect through globalization, such mixing and mingling of food cultures is only going to expand – as will the environmental, political and identity issues alongside. The dinner plate of 2109 will likely be unrecognizable to us, just as today’s meals would seem foreign and strange to earlier generations. We are what we eat, after all – and “what’s for dinner?” is always up for debate.