Chemicals in My Food

Penn State and its wider community have been in a state of shock since the indictment of a former football coach and two senior administrators.  After what felt like a long delay, the Trustees responded by firing President Spanier and Coach Paterno.  (Technically, as both were tenured faculty members they were relived of their jobs as University President and Head Coach respectively.  They continued to be employed at the University).  Immediately following the decision, some students rioted but soon after united in more positive displays of support for the victims of child abuse. 

The Trustees quickly become as a focus of community anger. Some blame them for what they did that night in November; others blame them for what they didn’t do that led to the development of this crisis.  There has already been a change in Board leadership and groups of alumni are campaigning for their complete removal. Motions before faculty senate tomorrow call for their resignation and an investigation of their operations. Yesterday Joe Paterno died from lung cancer and the criticism of the Trustees has reached and ugly and personal level. A letter in the student newspaper explicitly blames the Trustees (as much as cancer) for killing Paterno and a local business has a huge sign condemning them the Hell. 

Perhaps the Trustees are personally incompetent, perhaps the structure of the board made them incapable of acting, perhaps they rushed to judgment, perhaps they were insensitive and perhaps they were plain wrong.  All of these things may be true, but surely they were acting according to what they felt at the time was in the best interests of the University?  At very least those Trustees elected by alumni are freely giving their time, money and expertise to support an institution they love; surely they can’t be accused of malice? In a crisis like last November would you have done better? 

I think we are seeing the Penn State community move to a new and ugly stage of grieving. I hope we can move past it and work to reform our organization, including the Board of Trustees. These very personal attacks on members of our community are not worthy of us.

Professor Chris Raines (@itweetmeat) was recently tragically killed in a car crash. Like many, I first met Chris online but soon got to know him in person as a friend and colleague.  He helped me develop a meat color lab for my undergraduate food chemistry class and taught a lecture each year on the same topic. He was a genuine skeptic and unwilling to get drawn into the “us vs. them” mindset that often characterizes debates about food production.  He was witty and generous and he died way too young.  I leave it to others to offer appreciations of his many personal and academic qualities and instead reflect on aspects of his work in social media.

Chris’ major responsibility at Penn State was in extension, the unique collaboration between federal, state and local government to fund the practical application of the University expertise to meet local needs. The extension system was developed in the United States after the Civil War as part of the establishment of Penn State and the other Land Grant schools. Traditional extension work involves experts going out to farms, companies and groups and providing appropriate research-based advice.  Extension improves people’s lives by allowing them to make decisions guided by research rather than just tradition.

One of the major challenges and opportunities facing extension today is the Internet is redefining the meaning of “local”. Twenty years ago your local community was made up of the people you saw every day; today you may feel closer to online communities of people you have never met. Online communities are still communities but the ways we establish trustworthiness and credibility are different. In particular, online communities tend to self-select towards groupthink and exclude heretical ideas. Chris’ social media efforts jumped into the middle of this conundrum. He shared his academic expertise quickly and informally without regard to where his audience was or who was paying for his time. To pick just one example of Chris’ work I would point out his photoblog “The Academic Abattoir” and in particular this rather gory picture of a cow being bled out after slaughter. 

Meat is a touchy subject. There are groups campaigning against the existence and/or the practices of animal agriculture while others (largely farmers, ranchers and members of the industry) are broadly in favor of the status quo. If you search for video and photographs of animal processing you can find a lot of undercover material showing abusive treatment of animals from the anti-group while the pro-group prefer to show pictures of happy cows in green fields and draw a veil over the processes of meat production. Both sides select images to advance their narrative.

So what does Chris’ photograph contribute? I am not so naïve to argue that a professor of meat science could ever be truly neutral in the debates on animal agriculture but his position at the university provided a measure of insulation from commercial pressures.  In the best sense, Chris didn’t have to care whether his photograph made you more or less likely to eat meat. As an academic he could be satisfied to represent the practice of slaughter as he knew it and to convey it as honestly as possibly to a wide audience.  His photograph provides an informed and dis-interested perspective that doesn’t fit neatly into the narratives of either the pro- or anti-meat groups. It challenges people on both sides of the issue to think about what it means for them to eat meat.

Informed academic engagement challenges the conformity of our digital communities, supports informed debate, and improves our society. The responsibility for engagement is greater in public universities and greatest of all in the Land Grants through the mechanism of cooperative extension. Chris Raines’ outreach effort through cooperative extension and through online communities was pioneering. He touched many and inspired me.