Excerpted below is portion of a December 31, 2013, USA Today op-ed from CALS Dean Kathryn Boor highlighting the damaging effects that Americans’ ignorance about agriculture has on the science that sustains our food supply.
“Ironically, the continuing popularity of television channels and shows devoted to culinary pursuits has not translated into a more educated, or healthier, public. The typical American will spend a little under 30 minutes a day preparing food and yet may spend hours watching cooking shows. Food has become a spectator sport. We may see chefs as celebrities, but we remain uninformed of the multifaceted systems and actual superstars far off-screen, whose livelihoods and lives are dedicated to farming, and the applied agricultural research that makes what we eat everyday possible.
Many might, and some do, think that we know all we will ever need to about farming, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. That disconnect can be illustrated by the recent history of a dish likely on your holiday table: pumpkin pie. There are only two plant breeders who work on pumpkins at public universities in the U.S., with even that number expected to shrink to one in the next few years. One of those is a colleague at Cornell, whose seeds are providing a critical solution after a devastating 90% loss of pumpkin pie-filling pumpkins several years ago that created a filling shortage.
Without his research program, we may very well have had years without holiday pumpkin pies, and I am confident that most of us had no idea that was even possible. What happens in the field makes a real difference to what is on our plates…”
Read the full editorial here.
