Book Companion
Incorporating Cultures' Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences
Edition 1
Welcome to the website for Incorporating Cultures’ Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences, 1st Edition.
Welcome to the website for Incorporating Cultures’ Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences, 1st Edition.
"Hundreds of students and practitioners have benefited from Dunkel's holisticand visionary approach to incorporating cultural considerations in food and agricultural sciences. This book presents readers with the same opportunity. By carefullydocumenting keen insights and illustrative case studies that have emerged over the course of two decades, this book will prove to be a valuable resource for educators. Dunkel's abundant ingenuity, compassion, commitment, and wisdom inform every page." - Katy Hansen, PhD student, University Program in Environmental Policy, Duke University
About the author
By no means did Florence Dunkel write this book by herself. The writing of it was meant to exemplify the back and forth sharing of reflections and the development of mutual respect that the book itself suggests as a way to incorporate cultures’ role in science. This book has emerged out of hundreds of conversations, many immersion experiences, and more than a few failed projects.
For 51 years, Florence has conducted research, beginning with freshwater protozoa and then protozoa associated with insects, always searching for the natural product solution to food and health security, be it underground, controlled atmosphere of large and small scale grain storage, finding plant chemistry that can solve insect management issues like cerebral malaria, or introducing edible insects to Western culture palates. For thirty-five of those years she has engaged in collaborative research and research mentoring with scientists and subsistence farmers in China and Africa.
She is well-known for the new pedagogy she developed for combining a respect for culture, Native Science, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Western Science. This pedagogy and her use of the holistic process and local plants led to village-based malaria elimination in Mali, success in place-based alleviation of kwashiorkor (stunting), and immersion experiences for students and faculty on Montana Native American reservations. Also well-known is the annual Bug Buffet she initiated in 1990 and held annually ever since, now a week-long series of on-campus events to combine the science with the culture of edible insects.
Florence has received the highest award for teaching in her profession from the Entomological Society of America and from her University. She also received the top award for community engagement from MSU and national awards for her international research and service from Lawrence University and the Lindbergh Foundation. In 1981 she received the US National Academy of Sciences Visiting Scholar Award to the People’s Republic of China. Her Ph.D. is in Entomology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and she currently is Associate Professor of Entomology in the Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology, Montana State University. Florence published 51 peer refereed journal articles, numerous other publications including 4 books and monographs, 4 book chapters, a children’s book and had 2 US patents issue and be sublicensed. She directed large projects, always transdisciplinary and based on innovative intercultural preparation for faculty and students with funding from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and USAID. These projects resulted in creation of the National Food Quality Laboratory of Rwanda in operation since 1984 and Mali Extern Programs at six US institutions of higher education--Land Grant and private urban universities and a tribal community college that provided 130 externships in Mali for graduate and undergraduate students. She has given over 300 invited research and mentoring presentations throughout the world and appeared in a variety of media including the BBC, a TEDx talk on edible insects, and a film titled Dancing Across the Gap which aired on Montana PBS.
She lives in Bozeman Montana with her husband, Robert Diggs, and loves visits from and visiting her eight children and grandchildren in MN, VA, and MD as well as subsistence farm/gardening, and exploring her indigenous Sicilian origins with her extended family.
About this book
Incorporating Cultures’ Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences is a call to action. As the entire population of the world has a stake in agriculture, food, and health it is imperative to ensure that agriculture worldwide includes—rather than excludes—all cultural dimensions. As we transition to sustainable food production with health as the bottom line, we increasingly realize there are useful concepts and ideas saved by cultures that did not take the path of industrial-scale agriculture. Recognizing and then incorporating the cultural component into cropping systems, entomology, animal and range sciences, land resources and environmental sciences, agricultural and technical education, food sciences, engineering, and nutritional science may help us “see” these ideas. To incorporate the cultural component into each course in each of these disciplines, funding programs, research projects, or board room decision processes, scientists and policy makers will need help from colleagues in disciplines not usually included in scientific processes, ….the Humanities.
The book presents a range of voices, not only scientists, engineers, policy makers, and Millennial Generation students of Western cultures, but also from among the far reaching cultures of the world. Insights from those directly involved in agriculture are complemented by lessons from non-food perspectives, highlighting the need to go beyond “farm to fork”.
Through interviews, conversation and case studies, this book focus on the necessity of integrating cultural concerns and priorities into food and agricultural programs to ensure food security for the world.
Incorporating Cultures’ Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences
For Professors and Administrators Section
For Policy Makers
For Students
Dancing Across the Gap: Journey of Discovery Film
The Experiences of Linwood Tall Bull
Marcel Dicke’s TED Presentation: Why not eat insects?
For Professors and Administrators Section
The book Incorporating Cultures’ Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences is at the intersection of teaching, scholarship, and engagement. In large part the nudge and push to get this book written came from the Millennial Generation who were quite clear that this is what they are about “connecting the dots between our technical education and real people in the real world.” This connection process so many of the millennials speak of is not about a time and place after graduation but for action taken during their degree. This book and the pedagogy that led up to is meant to address the Millennial’s requests about changing the teaching process.
The material gathered for you here in the website is designed to nudge your own creative thinking processes. The result will be much more important than these examples because it will reflect your own communities and their cultures. What is important is that your classroom, laboratory, department, college, university becomes a safe place to explore cultural aspects with the actual members of that community you are focusing on in your teaching or at your institution. The goal is to begin a conversation and then to keep it going, growing in a way that addresses the resources to create what your community(ies) of focus believes will create for them their perception of a good life.
Links to Videos:
For Policy Makers
Health and access to familiar foods seem to be a desired part of most human’s desired quality of life. As a policy maker, this puts the responsibility of ethical action in the area of health and culturally familiar foods as a formula for peace, nationally and globally. This part of the website is designed for you to be able to recognize the subtle roles that culture has in food choice, and healthy living. In this part of the website we provide ideas for high impact ways to incorporate culture’s role into food and agricultural policy.
Next after personal health is environmental health, which also circles back and affects personal health as well. The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) have made reduction of agriculture’s environmental footprint a priority for at least the next 15 years. We suggest your first stop in this website is to contemplate the image developed by Dr. Sonny Ramaswamy, Director of the USDA NIFA to explain what the four main parts of the footprint, or food-print, are and what per cent is contributed by agriculture and food production. Your efforts in developing policies that reduce this footprint will be lauded. Recognizing culture can significantly help this process.
Links to Videos:
For Students Section
Dear students, I have chosen for you with the help of my students several of our favorite video parts of the course AGSC 465R Health, Poverty, Agriculture: Concepts and Action Research. To be perfectly honest, after the first 3-hour class session, students begin to quietly ask me why I used “poverty” in the course title and not “wealth.” I leave the answer up to each of you visiting this part of the Website.
My students and I chose these videos to give you a mini-immersion with a Plains Native American Tribe, the Northern Cheyenne (video entitled East meets West) and with Malians of several ethnic origins, both scientists and a Bambara subsistence farming village. We also included a presentation to our class and the community of Bozeman, Montana by an American University, Washington, D.C., professor from Ghana, Dr. George Ayittey who was instrumental in forming some of the fundamental concepts of this course and the book accompanying this website.
Please be forewarned that the videos entitled Visit to Sanambele, Mali and Women’s Work (also taking placed in Sanambele) are not polished, have no subtitles, and no storyline. They are simply as you might experience a couple of days in Sanambele, a village of 1250 people without cars, electricity, relatively remote. The Sanambeleans have a complex social structure and a democratic government by consensus.
In a separate section of this Website, you will find the professionally constructed documentary, filmed in this same village as well as on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. This documentary, Dancing Across the Gap, shown on Montana PBS, highlights wealth and poverty in a subtle way, leaving up to you, the viewer to determine which is which.
Thank you for taking time to explore this Website and particularly these videos. You are on an important journey.
Links to Videos:
A visit to Sanambele – Immersion videos(opens in new tab/window)
- Write up will be provided by FD
Women’s work(opens in new tab/window)
– Write up will be provided by FD
Dancing across the Gap: Journey of Discovery Film
Introduction to the Film Culture is the sum total of all the things you do that make you, YOU.
Sometime we expect all other people to be like us or we try to make other be like us or we criticize others because “they” are not like “us.”
Sometimes we have two or more cultures at war within our own self.
This is a film about the violence of forced assimilation.
This film is also about the keeping of the good parts of one’s culture as you modernize or as you are being forced to assimilate into another culture. For example, Western culture has lost the nurturing closeness of their extended family as they “modernize.” This film is about reaching across a cultural gap without criticism to learn or to relearn important life lessons.
In this film, three Native American women travel to and live in an African village. They discover the profound happiness, pride, and wisdom of people even when they live in extreme material poverty. They discover the other side, the difficulties of this way of life. These women discover what they had lost by forced assimilation and loss of their own culture. These three women discover within themselves the clashing of two and sometimes more than two cultures.
This film is about searching across a cultural gap, sometimes aided by the dance, to learn useful lessons for one’s own life.
Storyline
Several Northern Cheyenne Native American teams travel to Mali in West Africa and discover what poverty really means. They also discover Malian villagers have traditional knowledge like their own people back in Montana. The Northern Cheyenne share their discovery with non-Native Americans, non-first peoples, students and their professors, throughout the US, from Virginia to California, who follow in their steps as they make their own voyages of discovery. Three of the Northern Cheyenne are chosen to return to Mali to love in a Bambara farming village and to explore what it is like to live in a traditional West African village. They all bring gifts of technology for the Malian villagers. In the end, they discover that the real treasure is the traditional ecological knowledge, knowledge that could save our species on Plant Earth.
Links to videos
The Experiences of Linwood Tall Bull
Linwood Tall Bull, Northern Cheyenne Elder and Ethnobotanist, Shares stories of food, health, and history
To understand the complex interconnection of food, health, and history in any culture, it is helpful to visit an Elder, to sit with them, walk the landscape with them, and listen to their stories. Alisha Bretzman, a senior student in Horticulture at Montana State University, and a student in Dr. Dunkel’s course, AGSC 465R, did just that. As you can hear in the recordings, the birds are singing and the wind is blowing as they sat in the field outside Linwood’s home where his family has lived for many generations. Alisha brought a plate of cookies she had made to share with Linwood and his family, as she shared, she realized the sweets had touched a sensitive tooth, quickly Linwood found an Echinacea plant nearby, dug the root, and handed a piece to Alisha caringly instructing her in how to use the root to numb the pain. It was her introduction to Northern Cheyenne medicine. This was one of several visits Alisha made with Linwood. This recording of the Rose Bush and other recordings were collected by Alisha. She incorporated them into a website which she now turned over along with physical plant tags to Meredith Tall Bull, Northern Cheyenne and Lame Deer High School Teacher for use with the youth and others who visit the Botanical Park in the center of Lame Deer, a vision of Meredith’s that is becoming a reality.
Other recordings about edible entrails in stories told by Linwood are included here. These were recorded by Cory Babb and Jack Duchin with transcriptions by Kelly Murphy and Sidney Howard, all students in AGSC 465R spring 2016. The setting for these recordings was a cow hoof luncheon that Linwood prepared for his student visitors.
MP3 recording – Rose Bush
MP3 recording – Grandmother’s Food
Marcel Dicke’s TED Presentation: Why not eat insects?
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