Food for Thought: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Summer" (1573)

Doug Auld, "Golden Girl 2" (1993)

Food for Thought: The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Course Forum

"The desire to have it all and the illusion that we can is one of the principal sources of torture of modern affluent free and autonomous thinkers." Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2003)

“Some philosophers have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since a creature that could conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals.” Michael Pollen. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006)

This College Seminar was designed by a biologist and a literary critic to explore how we--as “free thinkers” with “open-ended human appetites”--might learn to make thoughtful decisions in a world that we may experience alternatively as both too-constrained and too-bountiful. We will draw on disciplines ranging from statistics to food studies--including anthropology, neurobiology, philosophy, psychology and literary interpretation--in our search for guidance in how to select among our options in what
• to eat?
• data to attend to?
• interpretations to accept?
• counts as ethical behavior?

Readings will also include two contemporary novels: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and a selection from Sena Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife. Students will be posting weekly comments in an on-line forum. Forty pages of more formal writing will also be required in the course of the semester: a sequence of linked weekly writing assignments will culminate in a paper on an ethical dilemma of the students' own choosing.

Weeks 1-3: Choosing Our Food
1. Tues, Sept. 2 Introduction to the course: from food to philosophy

By 10 a.m. Thursday: introduce yourself & your favorite food on the course forum

Thurs, Sept. 4
Michael Pollan. “Our Natural Eating Disorder,” The Plant: Corn’s Conquest” and “The
Processing Plant: Making Complex Foods.” The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Penguin: 2006. 1-31, 85-99.

Fri, Sept. 5: 3-pp. paper describing a typical family meal @ your house

2. Tues, Sept. 9
By 10 a.m. (every Tuesday morning) post on course forum
Michael Pollan. “Big Organic.” The Omnivore’s Dilemma. 134-184.

Wed, Sept. 10 Writing Conferences Begin….

Thurs, Sept. 11
Michael Pollan.“The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” The Omnivore’s Dilemma. 287-303.

Fri, Sept. 12: 3-pp paper analyzing your family meal through the lens provided by Pollan:
What are its pleasures, and what are its (economic, emotional, political, social) costs?

3. Tues, Sept. 16
Andrew Revkin. Dot Earth. New York Times.
“Energy, an Ingredient in Local Food and Global Food.” December 11, 2007.
“Can People Have Meat and a Planet, Too?” April 11, 2008.

Thurs, Sept. 18
Elisabeth Rosenthal. “Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World.”
New York Times. April 26, 2008

Alex Wiliams. "That Buzz in Your Ear May be Green Noise." New York Times. June 15, 2008.

Fri, Sept. 19: 3-pp. paper analyzing the global environmental dimensions
of your family meal: how far can you take this?
How might you eat differently, away from home?

Weeks 4-6: Selecting Our Data
4. Tues, Sept. 23
Gary Taubes. “Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?” New York Times Magazine. September 16, 2007.

“Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?” Letters to New York Times Magazine. September 30, 2007.

Abigail Zugar. "Achieving Wellness, Whatever That Is." New York Times. June 24, 2008.

Thurs, Sept. 25
Wil Franklin, Do Caterpillars Make Choices?

Lisa Belkin. "Coincidence in an Age of Conspiracy," or "The Odds of That.” New York Times Magazine. August 11, 2002

Fri, Sept. 26: 3-pp. paper describing one of the health choices you have made since you have been living on your own, @ college: what are your sleeping/eating/exercising/working habits? How have you made these choices?

5. Tues, Sept. 30
Barry Schwartz. Part I: “When We Choose.” The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.
Ecco, 2003. 1-75.

Thurs, Oct. 2
Barry Schwartz. Part IV: "What We Can Do." The Paradox of Choice. 221-236.

Fri, Oct. 3: 3-pp. research paper reporting on current studies done on your health choice:
how are most college students handling the choice you are confronting?

6. Tues, Oct. 7
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Introduction. "Biases and Blunders," "Privitizing Marriage," and "Objections." Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 1-39, 215-226, 236-251.

Thurs, Oct. 9
Catching up….
including re-writing our metaphors for writing

Fri, Oct. 10: 3-pp. research paper reporting on local data-collection
(your floor? your sports team? your work team? your CSem class?):
how is this group of women handling the choice you are confronting?

October 14-16 Fall Break (read Prodigal Summer)

Weeks 7-10: Making Our Interpretations
7. Tues, Oct. 21
Ambiguous Figures--"Reality": Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction

Illusions, ambiguous figures, and impossible figures: informed guessing and beyond.

Pop-Art Quiz

Natalie Angier. “Blind to Change, Even as it Stares us in the Face.” The Science Times.
New York Times. April 1, 2008.

Thurs, Oct. 23
Benedict Carey. "While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks." The New York Times. August 22, 2008.

Stephen Macknik, Mac King, James Rand, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson and Susana Martinez-Conde. "Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research." Nature Reviews Neuroscience. July 30, 2008.

Fri, Oct. 24: 3-pp. paper reporting on your experiences gathering
data on ambiguous figures and/or change blindness

8. Tues, Oct. 28
Lewis Hyde. “Slipping the Trap of Appetite” and “That’s My Way, Coyote, Not Your Way.” Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 17-54.

Paula Gunn Allen. "Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale." The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminie in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. 222-244.

Thurs, Oct. 30
Barbara Kingsolver. Prodigal Summer: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Fri, Oct. 31: 3-pp. paper "foregrounding" some portion of Prodigal Summer:
how did you decide what data to select?
how did you turn that selection into a story/interpretation?

9. Tues, Nov. 4
Barbara Kingsolver. Prodigal Summer.

Thurs, Nov. 6
Barbara Kingsolver. Prodigal Summer.

Fri, Nov. 7: 3-pp. paper re-reading Prodigal Summer through
an alternative (ecological or psychological?) lens

Weeks 10-14: Facing Ethical Dilemmas
10. Tues, Nov. 11
Prisoner’s Dilemma

Thurs, Nov. 13
Garrett Hardin. "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968). 1243-1248.

Benedict Carey. "Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That Switch?" The New York Times. July 1, 2008.

Fri, Nov. 14: 3-pp. paper reporting on your experiences with the prisoner’s dilemma

11. Tues, Nov. 18
Jared Diamond. “Living Through the Donner Party.” Discover. March 1, 1992.

Thurs, Nov. 20
Jonathan Haidt. “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814-834.

Fri, Nov. 21: 3-pp. paper thinking about the cannibal's dilemma:
what would you do, and why?

12. Tues, Nov. 25
Sena Jeter Naslund. Chapters 25-28. Ahab’s Wife; or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel. Harper Perennial, 2000. 142-167.

November 26 Thanksgiving Break

13. Tues, Dec. 2
Sena Naslund. Chapters 29-37. Ahab’s Wife. 168-209.

Thurs, Dec. 4
Sena Naslund. Chapters 38-54. Ahab’s Wife. 209-253.

Fri, Dec. 5: 3-pp. proposal/draft for 6-pp. paper on an ethical dilemma of your choosing

14. Tues, Dec. 9
Catching up….
including re-writing your metaphor for writing, as per
Lad Tobin, "Bridging Gaps: Analyzing Our Students' Metaphors for Composing."
College Composition and Communication 40, 4 (December 1989): 444-458.

Thurs, Dec. 11 Final Performances

All work due 12:30 p.m. Friday, December 19, including
portfolio, and final 6-pp. research paper on dilemma of your choosing


Anne's class notes

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