Issue date: 11/14/07 Section: Opinion

Most people wouldn't mention "ag school" and "Ivy League" in the same breath. This is probably because along with Penn, everyone forgets about that school up in Ithaca. Nonetheless, I was surprised to learn recently that Yale did, indeed, have an ag program of sorts - a food-and-agriculture concentration within their environmental-studies department.

That's where Penn comes in. Like Yale, we should create a department dedicated to studying the issue of food and farm policy in hopes of creating a sustainable system for the future.

The old model of agricultural education gets kids while they're young. They join 4-H clubs in rural areas, get their license at age 14 so they can drive a tractor and then go off to the land-grant state school to learn how to work for the system that already exists.

But the structure that already exists, intertwined with vocational ag schools, is in trouble.

The average American can't afford healthy, natural food due to federal farm subsidies. Farmers are paid to grow massive amounts of feed corn, and are effectively discouraged from growing produce that real people can eat, making healthy food artificially expensive.

Why? It's the same old story. The farm lobby is enslaved by its debt to large corporations, which profit from the current system and aren't about to give up that source of revenue anytime soon.

We all eat, and it's our tax dollars going toward farm subsidies, food stamps and everything else that falls under the umbrella of food and farm policy in this country. America needs honest academic programs dedicated to an understanding of this sector - programs that aren't funded by big ag.

Penn prides itself on the breadth of education it provides. We hit all of the traditional areas and many nontraditional areas. But, living in a city, we unintentionally ignore a discipline without which very few modern societies could function.

We're well-positioned to approach the issue. Penn prides itself on its interdisciplinary strength; agriculture and food policy touches on everything from natural sciences and health care to the arts and religion, and should be studied from multiple perspectives.

Furthermore, though we're an urban campus, our city is one of the leaders of the urban-agriculture movement. More and more vacant lots are being used for community gardens and small-scale farms. No other university situated as we are has quite the opportunity to study this phenomenon only blocks from campus.

We also have the New Bolton Center, the large-animal and field campus of the veterinary school, just down Baltimore Pike in Kennett Square.

While I'm not suggesting that we build an undergraduate vocational-agriculture department, which would be inconsistent with our mission and the country's needs, New Bolton's expertise with practical farm management would be invaluable to an agrarian-studies program.

"It's an interesting notion," said College Dean Dennis DeTurck.

And it wouldn't be extremely difficult to start such a program, provided there was faculty and student interest. "The role of the administration," he said, "is to channel people's enthusiasm for something."

That enthusiasm seems like it's there, but dormant.

Penn's health system is definitely interested in how people eat, for obvious reasons, and from tutoring projects to the Urban Nutrition Initiative we're interested in helping local K-12 students eat better to learn better.

A bit further afield, DeTurck mentioned many Penn students' interest in international development, "but you can't start talking about education and democracy … if people are hungry," he said.

Penn students are interested in food policy; they just don't realize it.

Agriculture isn't (usually) sexy. Getting up every day at dawn so you can work your ass off to grow endless acres of corn you can't eat and that are promised to the Man? Penning up your cattle and force-feeding them offal and antibiotics? I don't think so.

But sustainable agriculture - now that's hot. It's about connecting to the land and the animals, understanding where we came from and how we can preserve that history for our kids, and getting some good eating into the bargain.

And it's up to universities like ours to help break the current system and propose an alternative, especially as other universities funnel workers and research into today's big ag.

It just might take some idealist up in an ivory tower to dream us out of the present mess, and that ivory tower may well be in West Philadelphia.

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Meredith Aska McBride is a College sophomore from Wauwatosa, Wis. Her e-mail is mcbride@dailypennsylvanian.com. Radical Chic appears on Wednesdays.

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