"Feed Me, Seymour!" Dealing With Our Own Obesity Epidemic | Peer to Peer Review

One of the highlights of the year at Gustavus is our annual Nobel Conference, a two-day series of talks and events focused on a single issue. This year the subject was "making food good." It's tempting to use this time while classes are suspended to catch up (and my shift at the reference desk suggested that many students are doing just that), but it's a shame to miss the chance to gather with a few thousand people to bask in the light of ideas discussed by really smart people. So, this year I indulged in attending a full day of lectures, that included a presentation on a seed vault that is trying to preserve plant diversity and a lecture by a researcher who (with others) identified leptin and the complex neurophysiology that influences our appetites.

Food production and social responsibility
I was most struck by the opening speaker this year, Marion Nestle (no relation to the food conglomerate), who spoke about the politics of food and how the intensely competitive arena in which giant food corporations fight for market share has shaped (quite literally) our eating habits.

Two things happened at the start of the 1980s: first, a revolution in shareholder expectations upended the definition of success in the corporate arena. Once satisfied with long-term investment in "blue chip stocks" that could be counted on to provide slow but sure growth, shareholders began to demand return on investment every quarter. At the same time, government agricultural policy made a complete reversal. Instead of the old strategy, paying farmers to avoid planting crops that we didn't need as a means of regulating commodity prices, we began to pay them to generate an artificially huge surplus of a few crops that are used to create foodstuffs that aren't good for us. In the mania to generate quick profits, food production and nutrition don't have much to do with each other.

Food corporations mass-produce food that can be shipped great distances. (Nestle mentioned that she found American sodas and snack foods in remote villages in India where little else was available for sale-because Americans can only eat so much; we are exporting our worst eating habits and the poor health that goes with it to new markets.) This not-fresh food wouldn't taste very good unless it were filled with things we crave: sugar, salt, and fat. Essentially, our tax dollars are being used to create an excess of crops that are used to make food that is bad for us, fostering an unhealthy, unsustainable system that creates serious environmental and public health risks, all in the name of short-term profits.

You can probably see where I'm going with this.

An excess of access
When I read Iris Jastram's guest essay at ACRLog titled "The Age of Big Access" during a break in the conference presentations, I couldn't help but see the ways that the very same drive for short term corporate profits has distorted the way we produce knowledge and think about how it has endangered our entire knowledge ecosystem. As librarians, we want to provide access to knowledge, and we can't seem to stop ourselves from doing everything we can to provide more and more of it even when we know the system is completely out of whack. Faculty are in a similar bind: they have to produce publications to prove they are productive, and they need us to provide access to a growing body of publications so that they can add to it. It sometimes feels as if our libraries have become a Little Shop of Horrors, the tree of knowledge transformed into an alien life force, demanding to be fed.

Jastram asks what this means for our instruction efforts, and it's a great question to which I haven't given enough thought. We struggle mightily to create navigable websites and guide students to appropriate resources, and students in turn struggle to find ways to narrow their results to a few "perfect" sources that always seem tantalizingly out of reach. We get frustrated when they take shortcuts, but they are taking a perfectly rational approach to artificial abundance. They check out the banquet and grab the five or ten sources specified by the assignment, usually from a trusty database that they've used before. "That's all I need, thanks!" But, but . . . we have so much more to offer, and that's part of the problem.

Graduate education takes students into the kitchen, where they learn to be master chefs. They get the techniques down, but don't really learn anything about where their ingredients come from and how economic and social forces have turned the production of knowledge into an unsustainable monster that has had its appetite regulators switched off. While we teach them how to round up their sources and manage the abundance so they can join in, we aren't helping them understand the big picture.

I'm not certain how I'm going to work this sustainability issue into my instruction, but it seems more and more pressing to help students (and their faculty) understand just how endangered our knowledge ecosystem is by this cult of excess and a mistaken belief that mindless productivity leads to knowledge.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has recently been published by Minotaur Books.