Community Posts

This essay by Heather Carpenter, Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Studies at UP, is the fourth in a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

Everybody eats. We define ourselves by what we eat. We say: I’m a meat and potatoes guy, or I love spicy food, or even shellfish or mushroom haters unite! It’s pretty easy to answer when someone says: I’ve got kimchi or toum in the back of my fridge, or Old Bay in my cupboard, can you guess where I’m from? Clothes change, language adapts, but if you want to really know a person: find out what they eat. The personal nature of food is the starting point in ENV 160, the Science of the Sustainable Gourmet, where students explore how their individual choices shape the world we all live in. This is one of the many options students have to fulfill their science core, all of which try to reveal the relevance of science to our daily lives.

We all share an interesting emotional vulnerability when it comes to our food. If a student tells their parent to say, pump up their car tires to save gas and be better for the environment, they might not listen but they won’t get mad.  On the other hand, if a student tells their parent they want to go vegetarian for environmental reasons the reactions range from confusion, disgust, to plain old guilt: is the food I cook (slave over the hot stove) for you not good enough? It’s never, is the car I drive not good enough? Friends, and even strangers get involved too.  In ENV 160 I have students change their diet for a class project and almost all of them report the hardest part being the ridicule and teasing from their friends.  And count the side eyes and arched eyebrows when you order no bacon bits on the salad…

What we eat is personal. It’s based on culture, family, religion, even genetics (does cilantro taste like soap to you?). It’s how we show love: chocolates for romance, cake on your birthday, or grandma’s extra serving on an already full stomach (that one goes both ways).  It’s also how we show empathy during grief: food at a wake, ice cream for a break-up, or drowning our sorrows. And food is trendy right now.  Chefs are household names, and young people join the culinary field with the express interest in getting famous. The only reality show that you will like everyone on is the Great British Baking Show.

But here’s the thing, food is also one of the easiest ways we interact with the environment and where our choices make a tangible difference. We have control over what we choose to eat.  We can’t just place the blame on the big greedy agricultural corporations. We could just buy from our local farmer.

Modern industrial food production has ties to present-day slavery, habitat destruction, and climate change.  Agriculturally, we are spending our children’s inheritance. We are losing arable soil, running out of clean water, decimating the oceans, and wasting a very limited supply of usable phosphorus. When combined with our growing population, we reach a rather uncomfortable ethical conundrum.

It’s pretty hard to be apathetic about your culpability and argue that this has nothing to do with you.  Regardless of your major or career plan: english, engineering, theology, we all eat. As an informed eater, you have the real opportunity to minimize your impact and this can lead to many levels of joy. In the words of Wendell Berry “eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.”

I tell my students that the point of a core education is to be able to join any dinner party and not make a fool of yourself.  After a quality liberal arts education, you should be able to participate in any social level of conversation, be it about art history, social welfare, or climate change.  You don’t have to be that computer scientist who only wants to debate the merits of Java vs C++, the historian that doesn’t have a clue about modern issues, or the psychology major that can’t stop psychoanalyzing their conversation partner. Instead, you could leave your dinner companions wondering just what your major was. In my sustainable gourmet class, you also learn about the impact of the dinner being served.  It makes for some scintillating conversation. Just remember, people will take it personally.

This essay by Steve Mayer Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Chemistry at UP, is the third in a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

My calculus professor once said, “Anyone who has not taken a course in mathematics has not been liberally educated.” Mathematics is the language of science and anyone who desires to know our universe in a way that goes beyond simple observation must approach it with the tools provided by mathematicians. While advanced courses in physics and chemistry require sophisticated mathematical tools, core courses only require basic math skills, yet students can gain tremendous insight into how the universe works by using these simple tools; consider how much scientific understanding humans mustered before the invention of calculus (c. 1660 CE).

That said, Sir Isaac Newton catapulted our collective understanding of the universe into a new age of discovery with his publication of Principia. The resulting increase in knowledge lead to the brilliant set of equations postulated by James Clerk Maxwell (c. 1860 CE) that describe the connection between electricity, magnetism and the wave nature of light. This understanding delivered us to the doorstep of quantum mechanics where our collective minds were blown!

Our understanding of the universe through the lens of quantum mechanics is everywhere apparent; consider the smartphone. These devices employ the theory of quantum mechanics in the design of the CPU, flash memory and display. Also, the clocks onboard the GPS satellites that are necessary to locate your phone on the surface of the earth all use the quantum states of Cesium (bonus: the precision of the clocks is so great that the theory of relativity must be taken into account in order for them to be synchronized). I would riff on my calculus professor’s sentiment to say, “Anyone who has not been introduced to the quantum mechanical nature of the world has not been liberally educated.”

While quantum mechanics is clearly within the domain of physics, chemists rely on this theory to describe atomic and molecular structure. In fact, all of our courses communicate the importance of understanding the universe at the quantum-level. When we use the term “quantum-level” what we mean is describing the dynamics of very small particles (e.g. electrons) be they bound to an atom or freely traveling through space.

The chemistry department offers several core science courses that range from applying chemistry to our lives – Chemistry in Art and Chemistry of Food and Cooking – to discovering the science that all informed citizens should know – Science for Future World Leaders.  In Chemistry in Art, students explore the chemistry involved in the creation and analysis of art. Topics include paints and binders, glass etching, acid-base chemistry (involved in frescoes and chemical identification of pigments), oxidation-reduction reactions (involved in the etching and coloring of metals), color and light, analytical methods for identifying pigments, light-activated reactions in blue-print art (cyanotypes), determination of authenticity (carbon-14 dating, anachronistic presence of pigments), historical inks, dyeing of fabrics, and chromatography.

In Chemistry of Food and Cooking, Students apply fundamental concepts from biology and chemistry within the context of food and cooking using guided inquiry activities to cover topics such as chemical bonding, protein structure and cell theory. The food-focused topics include meat, vegetables, spices, chocolate, and dairy that students can work on in teams under the guidance of the instructor allowing students to practice critical thinking about the principles of chemistry and biology. Students learn hypothesis design and apply the scientific process to fermentation, cheese making, analyzing food components, and other hands-on exercises. To understand the role of lactase in metabolism of milk and lactose intolerance, students carry out a simple fermentation experiment using baker’s yeast by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide formed.

In Science for Future World Leaders, students are introduced to topics of immediate concern to world leaders (and to all of us on the planet) such as global climate change, renewable energy sources, nuclear theory, weapons of mass destruction, quantum computing and exploration of our own planet and beyond. The students use equipment in the chemistry department, such as spectrometers to directly measure the absorption of infrared (heat) radiation by greenhouse gases (e.g., CO₂ and CH₄). The primary goal of this course is to cultivate scientific literacy in the students, one of whom might one day become President of the United States!

A recent addition to our list of offerings is a unique, team-taught course called Communicating Science in Public. This course, taught by Jeff Kerssen-Griep from the Communication Studies department and Steve Mayer from the Chemistry department, examines how science and communication intertwine in the practice, dissemination, and reception of empirical discoveries in STEM disciplines. Via hands-on experiments using equipment in the chemistry and physics laboratories and investigating others’ studies and popular discourse, students learn ways to understand, accomplish, and more effectively communicate about modern science in light of this knowledge set. The course utilizes both scientific and communication scholarship to help students draw conclusions about those interconnections. The students learn to

• Build scientific literacy through finding reliable resources, evaluating information and making use of that information.
• Connect scientific principles and technologies with events affecting our everyday lives.
• Develop skills and attitudes for communicating, working and making decisions with people of diverse knowledge and identities.
• Understand practices and concepts explaining how scientific thought influences and is shaped by the perceptions of various key stakeholders.
• Explain how we know and why we believe key concepts in the natural sciences and be able to use scientific reasoning, laboratory methods, mathematics and technologies to solve problems.
• Demonstrate theoretically based translation of complex scientific ideas, findings, and implications for lay audiences through writing and presentation aloud.

Through these courses, students are introduced to a scientific view of the universe and through this learning experience, we hope that they will bring their gifts and talents to bear upon society to make the world work better.