Prof. Rossi’s talk was extremely informative about the culture and politics behind food that one would not think about. Food is a daily part of our routine. Everybody needs it. Yet, we still have many problems surrounding it. These problems range from the politics behind GMOs to Food. We can come together and make sure that we are all fed and no one sleeps empty stomached.

Food is a need,
Food is a want.
Grow it from a seed,
or make it with you Aunt.
Don’t fill your plate with greed,
instead share it with some who wants.

I attended Frank Rossi’s talk on food. It was very enlightening and was primarily useful to me on giving another lens through which to analyze the effects of capitalism on our bodies. It is common to see capitalism’s stake in the body through the lens of labor and work, but Frank Rossi’s talk opened my eyes to the ways capitalism permeates the body through food.

He spoke heavily about the Western diet and how it is based on a lot of starch and calories. A main takeaway he left on this point was that the western diet is actually moving towards a place where it effectively has the same effects as malnutrition. I thought this was very jarring, and also disappointing, because it really showed a testament to how counterproductive greed can be.

On the note of greed, perhaps the main point Rossi tried to drive home was that we don’t need more food, but rather need to waste less food. He spoke about how the way to solve this problems we see with our food has to be through a change in the economy globally and through moving towards a more equitable economy. Though I am not an expert on food as Frank Rossi is, I believe that I agree with this sentiment. It is also not a surprise that this solution would probably work for, not just food, but for many of the other problems we face in the world today.

This week we were given a lecture at Bethe House by Frank Rossi about food engineering and his ongoing course at Cornell.  Given that the western diet is composed primarily of mon-agricultural crop, we were given to understand that agri-business was also increasingly in control of our western diets.  I thought this was an important critique to the western food system especially given the relative investment in monoculture that such large agribusiness depends upon.  To this end we talked about the massive research investments in genetically engineered foods  as it has continued at increastingly larger rates after the end of World War Two.  I thought that in an historical perspective, this was an important point to make, not because it was premeditated at the close of the war, so much as how an increasingly globally connected world became increasingly dependent upon large monocultures that could produce high startch foods at low prices.

We also learned about the average distance such a global agricultural business entails our food arriving to our plate has to make.  More that fifteen hundred miles were taken for most of our food staples, more in cities even.  As a midwesterner, I was surprised at this figure because I believe in locally grown food, and have easy access during the summer months to such food grown on small farms in the area that I grew up.  However, in all of those years out in Wisconsin, I guess I was oblivious to the dozen or so companies that actually controlled much of the agricultural crop (not the ‘specialty’ locally grown stuff) but the large swaths of farms in Wisconsin that produced commodities for a dozen or so companies and applied with fertilizer for the other dozen or so companies that control nearly 90% of all fertilizers, I think while it is important to try to buy local, we should nevertheless be aware that the global food system is not going to change any time soon that would allow for increasingly many people on earth to subsists given the amount of waste that and mass consumption allows.

On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Frank Rossi, who is an associate professor at the Cornell Department of Horticulture. He is currently teaching a course called Just Food with Dr. Rachel Kerr. Dr Kerr is a world-class sociologist and is one of the authors of the IPCC Climate Change Report. During the talk, he talked about how the food system in the United States is out of balance. We do not need more land to produce food, what we need is to waste less food. He shared with us how the class got a chance to visit Appel Dining Hall on North Campus and learned about the food system on campus. It was surprising to hear that in the last three years, Cornell Dining reduced 80% of food waste on campus by simply removing the tray from the dining hall. The reason is that humans are greedy, we get more food than we think can finish when we have a big tray. I think this stood to me because even with only plates available in the dining hall nowadays, we still waste a lot of food. Dr. Rossi also mentioned there are also ‘waste police’ on-campus that weigh your food waste before you put in the dish belt. Last Tuesday, I actually saw there are students at Cook Dining hall conducting food waste study. I didn’t realize how important their role until Dr. Rossi explained it. After listening to this talk, I realized that the easiest way for students like us to help recover the food system is to reduce our food waste. Reducing food waste can save our food system, contributing to a more sustainable planet.

The talk by Frank Rossi at the Bethe house today about food was both informative and inspirational. I had no intimation to think of food beyond the nature of what it says on its label. At the talk, I learned that while a product in a supermarket may be labeled as “organic,” it does not mean it is immune to pesticides. In fact, being organic may mean it has even more harmful products applied to it than its non-organic counterpart. This is extremely concerning as a consumer as I attempt to put the best fuel into my body as possible to be the best version of myself possible. To think that my food may be doing me less justice than my intention feels like an injustice. The speaker’s definition of the hopes of the millennial generation speaks best to this philosophy, we want transparency. 

In the hopes of achieving said transparency, I believe political action and legislation overhaul is necessary. This talk by Rossi has inspired me to support the changes necessary in US FDA law to force the transparency of our food. With that said clarity, we hopefully will find out the truth behind the curtain and eliminate the malpractice and societal poison fed to the masses. Evidence that change follows transparency can be found after the movie Super Size Me. After a month, Morgan Spurlock proved that McDonald’s’ popular products and limited availability of healthy alternatives were responsible for the destruction of his once healthy lifestyle through his controlled experiment. This forced the McDonald’s industry to change the way they marketed their products and offer healthier alternatives. Either through legislation forcing the change or through proven, well-documented experiments such as Spurlock’s, I believe we can instigate this change and fundamentally change the FDA standard of food in the United States in our lifetimes.

I attended Bethe Ansatz: Frank Rossi, which was hosted at the Bethe House Professor’s apartment. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from an event named “Just Eats”, but I’m extremely glad I attended. I’d always been very interested in all aspects of food despite being a computer science major in the College of Engineering. There was a wide range of topics discussed during the event, but I’ll just touch upon a few of the ideas that I took away, so the paragraphs won’t really connect.

Dr. Rossi talked about the idea of intellectual property being “stolen” by large corporations that work with scientists that develop products for them, something that isn’t really smiled upon in academia. I’d never thought of GMOs as patented, intellectual property. However, that’s the reality of America. (Of course, excuse me if I’m relaying any information I misinterpreted.) From this, there’s the issue of companies being able to patent certain modifications for GMOs so that it’s nearly impossible for new producers to get into the food industry. There also poses the question as to if there’s a better GMO out there that just isn’t able to break into the industry due to the size and control of main corporations. 

Food waste is also a huge problem in the world. Dr. Rossi strongly believes that we don’t need to produce more food—we need to waste less food. Of course, this was something that I’d been hearing more and more over the past few years, but I think that especially with the precarious future of the Earth and its ecosystems, it should be a much larger issue than it currently is. Cornell Dining has been trying to reduce food waste (as well as cut other costs like water) in the past few years that few students are really aware of. At Appel (which, in my opinion, is superior to RPCC), the removal of food trays was a push to reduce the amount of water being used to wash dining objects, but also resulted in an 80% reduction of food waste. That number is astounding to me, but the psychology behind it is so clear. With a smaller plate, people are more inclined to take less food, due to the plate looking so full so quickly. Without a tray, people won’t get multiple plates of food at one time and the employees won’t have to wash extra objects. 

The last thing I want to talk about is the value Americans have for food. I don’t even think about my view of food at all. Sure, I love it but probably not like other cultures around the world love food. Dr. Rossi compared Americans with the French. In France, it is considered almost barbaric to eat while working, because food is so sacred. In France, people will mainly eat with others and it’s seen as a social interaction. On Cornell’s campus and around America, people do tend to eat alone and often. Dr. Rossi claimed that this almost devalues food because it’s just something that we have to do and we do it quickly and without emotional ties. Americans have this stereotype around the world of being more obese, eating too much, and I really wonder how this type of culture of devaluing food was instilled in a large portion of our population.