Seeds of equity: cultivating critical food literacy in the land-grant undergraduate classroom

ABSTRACT

This pedagogical piece reports on the successes and challenges of developing and teaching an undergraduate “critical food literacy„ course in a land-grant university’s college of agriculture. The United States agricultural industry is built upon a foundation of stolen land and stolen labor, and depends to this day on the labor of marginalized populations. Despite these hard truths about who grows our food, colleges of agriculture remain overwhelmingly white demographically, culturally, and epistemologically. Though scholars have called for greater incorporation of social justice themes in college-level agriculture courses, there is little research to date on the effectiveness of various suggested teaching methods. To address this gap and contribute to the necessary work of diversifying curricula across colleges of agriculture, we conducted a qualitative assessment of the course “Seeds of equity: Exploring race, class, and gender in our food system„ while simultaneously developing and teaching it. We use our personal experiences and research findings to argue that critical food literacy is an effective framework for teaching students at a large, Midwestern land-grant university about race, class, and gender in the food system. We also offer concrete suggestions of course materials, assignments, and teaching methods that can be utilized in myriad food studies and agricultural education classroom contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• pedagogy
• critical food literacy
• intersectionality
• identity
• agriculture

Acknowledgments

We thank the Student Teaching as Research (STAR) project funded by Mizzou Advantage for the financial support of this research. We thank the Office of Graduate Studies and School of Natural Resources for fiscal and programmatic leadership. We thank the Honors College and the Division of Applied Social Sciences for their support of this course.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Student Teaching as Research (STAR) project of Mizzou Advantage and the Honors College of the University of Missouri.

Notes on contributors

Sarah E. Cramer

Sarah E. Cramer holds a Ph.D. in agricultural education and an MPH, both from the University of Missouri. She is currently the Brown Visiting Teacher-Scholar for Sustainable Food Systems at Stetson University in DeLand, FL, where she teaches courses on food and agriculture. As a researcher, she uses qualitative methods to explore the human dimensions of alternative food networks.

Leslie E. Touzeau

Leslie E. Touzeau holds an M.S. in rural sociology from the University of Missouri. Her graduate research examined the lived experiences of young Black farmers like herself. She currently works as the Material Review Specialist for the certifying body of Florida Organic Growers.

Mary K. Hendrickson

Mary K. Hendrickson holds a Ph.D. in rural sociology from the University of Missouri. She is currently an associate professor in the Division of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Missouri.