3 credits
Fall 2026 Lecture Upper Division
The food system is one of the biggest contributors to global environmental problems, including the biodiversity crisis and climate change. Its impacts come from activities that are unnecessarily reliant on chemical and fuel inputs and are damaging to soils, water, and human health. This course will investigate the many ways people produce food. It will consider historical, traditional and conventional farming systems both small- and large-scale. It will analyze "sustainable," "regenerative," "industrial," and "organic" agriculture and consider farms small and large; diversified and streamlined; and crop, livestock, and integrated. The class will investigate food and farming systems that build soils, reduce reliance on petroleum products, and promote human health.
Learning Outcomes1Analyze the modern food system to gain an appreciation of its impacts on the environment including soils, water resources, and human health.
2Study the historical events and key innovations that led to the formation of the modern food system.
3Gain an appreciation of alternative food systems from around the world, both past and present, and consider features of those systems that might make them sustainable or unsustainable.
4Consider the food systems in a world ecology of ecological and economic realities and possibilities.
5Create new ways of thinking about sustainability from the analysis of the component parts of the food system and the food system as a whole.
6Propose and justify systemic changes that might empower food and farming systems to better promote environmental and human health.
made by Purdue students.