Seeing Beyond the Package

Abstract

Teaching about the food system is not easy given its complexity. Every one of the more than 30,000 food products available to consumers in today's supermarkets can be seen as a representation of the food system. Just as food products vary in taste and nutritional value, they can also differ in terms of the multiple steps and processes involved in transforming crops as harvested on a farm into processed food products on a grocer's shelf. While students in nutrition classes gain in-depth understanding of the nutrient content of food and health implications of diets, courses devoted to an understanding of the food system are less common and present an interesting challenge to professors. Recent investigations of the food system employ a geographic, historical, and structural analysis. This paper describes the use of a food product as a starting point for food system study undertaken by students in an undergraduate nutrition course. This tangible and engaging approach to discovering the food system embedded in a food product leads to interesting insights into the “knowability” of the food system.