Food, Environment, Agriculture, Science & Technology (FEAST)

Agriculture and Food studies explores issues ranging from the cultural aspects of food to the political character of farmer's markets and community supported agriculture programs, from the new funding patterns for public agricultural science to indigenous environmental struggles against shrimp farming, from the different attitudes towards genetically modified foods in Europe and North America to the factors that contribute to farmer decision-making when it comes to selecting sustainable agricultural practices. MSU is one of the global leaders in the development of this field.

An internationally comparative and often historical approach has suffused the sub-discipline in a manner that resonates deeply with the department's overarching theme, Global Transformations . Whether studies of seasonal patterns of international agricultural labor migrations or developments in the international sourcing of durable food inputs or investigations of the international pastiche that is nouveau cuisine, this area of scholarship has always had an eye to the mutual composition of local production systems and the global market conditions and the differentiation of (some) local consumption patterns in combination with uneven developments in global cultural homogenization.

Faculty within the department use a wide variety of analytic perspectives in their agro-food research. Political economy, science studies, institutional analyses, human ecology, social psychology and media analysis are brought to bear primarily on issues of agroecology and sustainable agriculture, emergent forms of industrial process and product grades and standards, food safety, media representations, biotechnology and development research.

Agriculture and food scholarship in the Department is linked through joint appointments and collaborative activity to the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station, the Center for Integrated Plant Systems, the National Food Safety and Toxicology Center , and the Institute for International Agriculture. Faculty collaborate on the Long-Term Ecological Research Project at the Kellogg Biological Station, and on the USDA National Needs Fellowship in Social and Ethical Dimensions of Biotechnology. Faculty also participate in the MSU Extension Food Safety and Fruit Industry Area of Expertise Teams. Leadership of the Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards and the Partnerships for Food Industry Development - Fruits and Vegetables - also resides in the Department.

Current research, teaching and outreach which link agriculture and food to other interest areas of the department can be expanded and enhanced to further integrate the activities of the department. At present there is already a good deal of work in the area of overlap between the Food and Agriculture focus area and the Environment, Science and Technology area. However, clear links with the Urban, Race and Migration focus area are tied to issues of urban, poor and oppressed minority consumers will relate to spatially and socially distant food producers, as well has how food production can be integrated into urban land use and spatial management. Similarly, changing national and international gender divisions of labor in food production, processing, retailing and preparation represent important potential areas of future scholarship. The development of the production, exchange and consumption of food is inextricably linked with the development of the technoscience of those activities. Exciting possibilities also abound in connection with the Health and Well-Being focus area. In particular, concerns with diet, obesity, athleticism, and anorexia - among others - are indicative of issues associated with the body and the proliferation of medical institutions focused on the embodiment of health and disease.

Food, Environment, Agriculture, Science and Technology (FEAST) at MSU is unique in two ways. On the one hand, the concentration of eight faculty members connected with environmental concerns may be the largest such collection in the United States . On the other hand, the broad pursuit of the contested connections between environmental transformations and technoscientific processes is also rare. In particular, while environmental sociologists have sought to relate natural facts and ecological problems to the social facts and institutional practices historically explored within the wider discipline of sociology, they have had a tendency to treat science as relatively non-problematic and technology in a black or white manner. Similarly, while science and technology studies explore the social processes, and social construction, of science and its technological products - the dominant social institution and material objects modern society privileges in the pursuit of knowledge about and engagement with nature -- it has generally focused on laboratories, medicine, and workplaces rather than on the sciences of ecology and environmental problems.

Pursuing the integration of environmental sociology and science and technology studies - without rejecting in any way the intra-disciplinary research of present and future faculty - has led, and will continue to lead scholars at MSU to pursue some of the following concerns:

•  The integration of realist and constructivist approaches to nature, science, technology and environmental problems.

•  The integration of social and biophysical causes and consequences in the study of environmental problems and technoscientific development

•  The integration of multiple levels of cause and effect then becomes necessary in this process as social and ecological processes operate at diverse scales, scales that are often difficult to disaggregate

•  The generation of ways to conceptualize environmental justice across social groups and biophysical regions emerges from sociological concerns with norms, values and equality once connected to analyses of the complexity of social and biophysical causation at its many levels of operation.

Not surprisingly, then, the departmental theme, Global Transformations , resonates strongly with the Food, Environment, Agriculture, Science and Technology (FEAST) focus area. Here, among many other topics, the processes of global transformation accelerate the multinational movement of commodities in a manner that intensifies the introduction of exotic and invasive species and is inseparable from concerns with tropical deforestation and extinction patterns across the globe. That this process - and local and international resistance to it (including new forms of environmental-labor-indigenous coalitions) - is directly connected to the proliferation of new information technologies again orients scholars to combine environmental and science studies.

Many of these issues are being investigated across the MSU campus by faculty and departments in the natural and social sciences connected to sociology by faculty collaborations and through the newly developed Environmental Science and Policy Program. Other departments and centers to which MSU sociology faculty connect in their environmental work include the Gender, Justice and Environmental Change Graduate Specialization, the Food Safety and Toxicology Center, Kellogg Biological Station and the Long-Term Ecological Research site located there, International Studies and Programs, the Agricultural Experiment Station, and the State of Michigan's Department of Natural Resources (through its connection to Cooperative Extension and the College of Natural Resources), among others.

As part of the analysis of these and other phenomena, sociologists explore patterns of locally specific and generalizable modalities associated with:

• personal, institutional and political regulation of environmental behavior;

• the mobilization for environmental activism across multiple social scales, including national boundaries;

• issues of post-normal approaches to risk;

• concerns about environmental and food safety and security, including those of biotechnology and food irradiation;

• comparative historical studies of landscape biocomplexity;

• issues of privately established product and process standards for the production of agricultural and consumer commodities, including their relation to organic production and acceptable pollution levels; and

• studies of comparative national environmental policy in the context of economic and environmental globalization.

Present faculty at MSU approach these problems borrowing from traditions tied to Human Ecology, Actor-Network Theory, Political Ecology, Environmental History, Social Movement Analysis and Feminist Science Studies, among many others, in this work.

"Tractor" and "Cherries" photos by Michelle Worosz, Sociology graduate student