STOCKSCH 171 – 4 credits Gen Ed (BS)

How to Enroll

Course Description: Food is essential to life. As a 12^th century Persian proverb goes, “A person who has bread may have many problems, but a person without bread has but one problem.” Food is intimately linked to our health in all sorts of ways. This course looks at those links through the twin lenses of ecology and history. Modern, industrial agriculture grows most of the food we eat, but in the process, it creates water pollution, pesticide contamination and climate change. In developed countries, in eating modern diets we may have too much food and unbalanced nutrition, leading to obesity, heart disease and autoimmune problems. Food systems are generally controlled by governments, which too often fail to deal with natural calamities like droughts or floods, or human calamities such as war, leading to famines and epidemics. And food is really at the heart of diseases – some microbes eat our crops, others eat livestock, and a number eat us! They are all infectious disease, microbes eating other living things. There are other microbes which live inside our guts, crucial to our nutrition and health. Some microbes produce antibiotics, which fight diseases, and which we use to make cows, pigs and chickens grow faster. The result: disease-causing microbes have become resistant to many antibiotics. Fungi that cause plant diseases can produce drugs. Some are useful as medicine, others are more recreational, some are both. The literal roots of agriculture are in soil, which may be healthy, but more and more is “sick”. This course looks at these interactions and more, and asks “What can we change about our food systems to make a healthier, more sustainable world?”

Instructor: Dan Cooley, Professor

Contact: dcooley@umass.edu

The course is based on PowerPoint lectures, videos, reading, quizzes and exams. There is no textbook. You can do the class on your schedule. As they say in the online ed. world, it’s completely asynchronous.

Learning Platform. The course is on Canvas.

Grading

Grades are based on 9 quizzes, 3 short writing assignments, 3 online discussions, and 3 exams. There’s an optional final exam that can help your grade, if needed, but does not need to be taken.

Course Modules

Modules	Topics
1	It’s All About Food: Diseases and Food Intro Infectious Pathogens
2	Abiotic Pathogens & The Epidemiological Transition Absorbing Food – The Gut Microbiome
3	How our Bodies Fight Diseases – The Immune System
4	Was Agriculture a Mistake? Agriculture and Infectious Diseases Rinderpeste, Smallpox and Vaccines
5	Influenza, Animals, and Vaccines Bush Meat and Disease Outbreaks
6	Anthrax and Germ Theory
7	Cereal Killers: Cordyceps Fungi: Ergot, Drugs, Witches and Zombies.
8	Fungal Poisons in Food: Mycotoxins Famines: Ireland and the Great Hunger
9	Cereal Killers: Wheat Stem Rust, Monoculture Problems, and Plant Breeding What is Sustainable Agriculture?
10	Genetic Engineering: How’s it Done? Is it Sustainable? What’s Good & What’s Not?
11	Pesticides and Health
12	Healthy Soils, Healthy Plants and Healthy People Organic Agriculture
13	Don’t Drink the Water: Food Systems, Sewers, Water and Diseases Pathogens on and in Our Food – Bad Burgers, Mad Cows, and Brain Worms
14	Not So Busy Bees: Pollinator Decline and our Food
15	Darwin, Diseases and Sex – How the Fight for Food Shapes Diseases and Biology

To begin planning for the future, see….

Annual Class Schedule

NOTE: The UMass Sustainable Food and Farming Certificate has been declared eligible for Veterans Educational Benefits. For instructions see: Veterans Benefits.

This class costs $550 per credit.