People

My interests lie at the nexus of public health and alternative agrifood movements.  As a graduate student at ESPM, I conducted participatory action research within the farm to hospital movement, exploring how an ecological nutrition approach to food and health is being used to create food system change.  My dissertation explored bodies, food, and ecology as metaphor and metabolism - laden with cultural meaning and enmeshed in complex material processes.  I examined the ideational drivers of the farm to hospital movement as well as the on-the-ground supply chain consequences of farm to hospital food procurement initiatives.

All apples are not created equally.  This is one of the underlying tenets of the ecological nutrition approach emerging in the farm to hospital movement.   Actors are making the case that the history of food matters - that a food’s path through the food system results in particular health and environmental benefits or costs.

In the traditional approach to food-related  health captured by the term nutritionism (Pollan 2008; Scrinis 2008)a ‘balanced meal’ sits on the plate devoid of history, measured only in terms of its constituent parts – carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, isoflavones.  In an ecological approach, the microscope of nutrition science trained on the biochemistry of food zooms out to examine the entire eco-agri-food system, involving complex networks of social, political, economic, ecological, and techno-scientific practices and processes.

An ecological nutrition approach takes measure of the entire eco-agri-food system, and according to its assessment, the modern industrial food system does not measure up.  Farm to hospital actors are leveraging a growing body of scientific data to problematize the modern industrial food system and to legitimize and inspire alternative food system models.  They argue that the modern industrial food system impairs human health while also undermining the ecosystem functions and processes on which we depend for survival.  For example: pesticides destroy soil biota and wildlife while contributing to rising rates of cancer, neuro-developmental and reproductive disorders; likewise, manure lagoons at Confined Animal Feeding Operations leach pollutants including phosphorus, heavy metals and ammonia while providing ideal habitat for foodborne pathogens and creating noxious, asthma-inducing odors.

Here, human bodies are both flesh and metaphor - beset by a growing array of health woes attributed to agrifood systems, as well as the portal through which we begin to tell a different story about our relationship with agrifood and ecological systems.  Our bodies become locations of resistance to the degradations of the modern industrial food system and sites that inspire transformation and change of food commodity networks, public health and agrifood policy, and notions of what constitutes healthy food.  The locus of responsibility for food-related health shifts from individual bodies to the collective political body – from personal choice to social, economic and political structures of power that shape agricultural policies and practices, food processing and distribution networks, and the food environments that constrain and enable food access and choice.