Studying Sustianability: A UChicago Class Goes to the Farm

Talk about higher learning: University of Chicago professor Pamela Martin is teaching a yearlong class called “Feeding the City: The Urban Food Chain,” that attempts to quantify vague buzzwords like “sustainability” and “locavorism.”

Martin’s course is based on the unsubstantiated assumptions that most consumers have that eating locally means they’re making a positive contribution to the world. To that end, twelve of her students are spending the calendar year analyzing data — as well as creating it. For the summer, her students will be interning at urban or small rural farms, during which time “they’re responsible for communicating with the farmer during this whole time, helping them keep records, because this is all about record-keeping.” They’ll be keeping track of farm inputs (fuel consumption, seed consumption) and outputs (crop yield).

The university is taking Martin’s course and making it interdisciplinary: David Weisbach, the Walter J. Blum Professor in Law, is working with Martin on research into the practicality of a tax-credit system for agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions; while Sabina Shaikh, Instructor in Economics and the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, is hoping to find a relationship between economic factors and environmental efficiency on the farms where Martin’s students are working.

At the end of the day, Martin and her students will be crunching the numbers to see what methods are, in fact, deserving of the praise we’re generally willing to fling onto anything labeled “sustainable.” Martin says farmers and consumers “just assume …‘we’re not transporting the food as far. Let’s subtract those miles and that’s the difference.’ But it’s not that simple. There are a lot of qualitative ideas about this and some intuition, but not a lot of hard numbers.”

Urban Food-Chain Class Examines Sustainable Farms [Newswise/UChicago]
[Photo: tlindenbaum/Flickr]

Studying Sustianability: A UChicago Class Goes to the Farm