Incorporating Cultures' Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences

Incorporating Cultures' Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences addresses the practical needs of the professors, administrators and students who often face challenges of working together with Indigenous peoples with whom they have no prior experience. Missed communication, failed projects and unrealistic goals are daily realities. Academia and industry often encounter frustration in recruiting and retaining Native American students and other ethnicities. This text is a guide for anyone working in the food or agriculture disciplines or industries, particularly for those working with people of a culture different from one's own. Comprehensive, full awareness of one's own culture is a prerequisite for effective teaching and learning within another culture. This book is replete with stories, examples and peer-refereed journal articles to help build awareness. These stories, examples and articles from multiple voices are placed over a basic underlying framework that is summed up in the title of the book itself. - Provides compelling, well-referenced practical ways to understand the cultural component of behavior related to food and agriculture - Explores behavior in setting policy, developing curricula, interacting with communities and in making choices as a consumer - Connects the dots between food deserts, the disgust factor and the world's grand challenges - Includes lessons learned and new approaches in food and agricultural sciences using transdisciplinary, experiential action research methods - Contains practical, state-of-the-art methodologies and diagrams to get started improving intercultural competency, inclusivity and internationalization of food and agricultural sciences

Editor-in-chief of The Food Insects Newsletter since 1995; recipient of 1981 US National Academy of Sciences Visiting Scholar Award to People's Republic of China; member of design team for state-of-the-art pre-departure training for US faculty, graduate students, and families to work on USAID food, storage, marketing project and live in Rwanda; author of 50 peer-refereed journal articles, 4 books and monographs, 2 patents; recipient of national and campus-wide awards for research, teaching, and service; principal investigator of numerous USDA and USAID, food, health, and agriculture related grants; presented 11 invited, food-related keynote addresses in US (e.g.,World Bank), Korea, Italy (FAO), Canada, Morocco, and the People's Republic of China and a TEDx talk. Dunkel has worked with subsistence farmers in Asia, Africa, and Native American reservations for the past 33 years. She has also prepared and served insect feasts throughout the US including for more than 200 guests each at events in: San Francisco, California; Bozeman, Montana; and Charleston, South Carolina. Cultural aspects of food have been the topic of many TV appearances by Dunkel including PBS Evening News, Discovery Channel World of Wonder as well as radio interviews throughout the US, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Dr. Dunkel has initiated a pedagogy for food and agricultural sciences, the Expansive Collaborative Model, which she implemented in 2000 and taught every semester since. Dunkel has helped faculty adapt this pedagogy in several colleges at MSU and in other land grant institutions including a tribal college, and at a private urban university.