Incorporating Cultures Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences

Incorporating Cultures' Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences addresses the practical needs of the professors, administrators and students who often face challenges of working together with Indigenous peoples with whom they have no prior experience. Missed communication, failed projects and unrealistic goals are daily realities. Academia and industry often encounter frustration in recruiting and retaining Native American students and other ethnicities.

This text is a guide for anyone working in the food or agriculture disciplines or industries, particularly for those working with people of a culture different from one’s own. Comprehensive, full awareness of one’s own culture is a prerequisite for effective teaching and learning within another culture. This book is replete with stories, examples and peer-refereed journal articles to help build awareness. These stories, examples and articles from multiple voices are placed over a basic underlying framework that is summed up in the title of the book itself.

Provides compelling, well-referenced practical ways to understand the cultural component of behavior related to food and agricultureExplores behavior in setting policy, developing curricula, interacting with communities and in making choices as a consumerConnects the dots between food deserts, the disgust factor and the world’s grand challengesIncludes lessons learned and new approaches in food and agricultural sciences using transdisciplinary, experiential action research methodsContains practical, state-of-the-art methodologies and diagrams to get started improving intercultural competency, inclusivity and internationalization of food and agricultural sciences

Introduction. Grand Challenges and the Millennial Generation

Part 1. Fundamentals of the Culture and Agriculture Relationship 1. Quiet Revolution: Where did you come from?  2. Decolonization and the Holistic Process 3. Immersion 4. Failures

Part II.  Listening In and Between Communities 5. Listening Horizontally: Kenya, Mali, Malaria, Kwashiorkor 6. Listening Horizontally: The Northern Cheyenne and the Apsaalooke 7. Listening Horizontally: Bioregions and Peace Engineering 8. Listening Between Communities and Policy Makers: Montana, Mali, and Mongolia Middle Schools Listen together with USDA NIFA and University Students 9. Listening with students

Part III. Bridging the gap between Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Humanities 10. Two cultures: Humanities and Plant, Animal, Food Science 11. Couples Counseling: Native Science and Western Science 12. Putting it together, comprehensively, inclusively