Forces Driving More
scientists who peeled away slices of nature and the environment, then
set out to decipher how they worked. What they discovered became the
building blocks of knowledge that benefited all of society and ratcheted
up our standards of living.
But looking ahead, the modern food system’s most foreboding
challenges trace back to previous advances in specialized fields of science
and technology. The system still clings to this independent mode of
research, with its few roadmaps and incentives to collaborate, despite
mounting and more-ominous challenges that cut across narrow fields
of expertise. Specialized expertise alone, for example, does not address
the connections among rising rates of obesity, exhaustion of fossil waters,
escalating nitrous oxide in the atmosphere, noxious weeds immune to
legacy pesticides, growing antibiotic resistance—all the result of how the
modern food system operates and how society now lives.
My initial foray into such challenges at Michigan State benefited
from collaboration with Scott Winterstein, who was the interim director
of the Food Safety and Toxicology Center, where my office was located.
Whenever I dropped by and peppered him with questions, he responded
with thoughtful insights. In addition, he was a walking who’s-who
directory on this fifty-thousand-student campus, where plenty of ex-
pertise in food certainly exists despite being compartmentalized in dif-
ferent departments and colleges.
In our casual conversations we began to envision collaborative
research across diverse disciplines rather than within narrow fields of
study. Joining forces with David Frayer from the business school and
Rick Foster from the college of agriculture, we reached out to various
faculty. With support of a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation
and Ricardo Salvador, we articulated a core set of challenges and their
intersections, which we displayed on a wall-size graphic titled “The
Global Food Platform.”
For a year and a half, we convened periodic informal gatherings
for further exploration. To push our horizons, we invited individuals
outside academia, including a former US congressman, urban leaders
from Detroit, and multinational companies. At one event, I counted
five college deans present. We also met separately with the university
president and the provost.