Why Science Education Mediates the Way We Eat

Abstract

Neoliberalism is at the heart of the North American food system. This understanding drives food choices that are concomitantly embedded within education and not generally mediated by school. Neoliberalism’s metaphors of competition, individualism, and the economic mindset drive conventional farming practices, which rely heavily on synthetic herbicides and pesticides and inexpensive labor. These metaphors influence how people in North America eat, how food is produced, and how much is wasted. Around the world, many farmers use culturally and environmentally responsible methods of cultivating their produce. These trends are breaking “new ground” in North America with local, organic, responsibly nurtured, fresh, farmers’ market vegetables and fruits. This chapter explores organic market farming culture as a ‘pocket of resistance,’ a place/context for dynamic polysemic knowledge that evolves in social concert with change/adaptability, positionality/relationality, and ecological condition. The curricular trajectory of science education in the farmer’s market is a site for children to investigate whether their cultural traditions and skills serve to protect them from hyperconsumerism or overreliance on the dominant types of produce. What we eat affects how we understand and the way we behave in relation to it. Our eating has the potential to transform school science. This transformation can be an activist force in our society.