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Teaching about the food system is not easy given its complexity. Every one of the more than 30,000 food products available to consumers in today's supermarkets can be seen as a representation of the food system. Just as food products vary in taste and nutritional value, they can also differ in terms of the multiple steps and processes involved in transforming crops as harvested on a farm into processed food products on a grocer's shelf. While students in nutrition classes gain in-depth understanding of the nutrient content of food and health implications of diets, courses devoted to an understanding of the food system are less common and present an interesting challenge to professors. Recent investigations of the food system employ a geographic, historical, and structural analysis. This paper describes the use of a food product as a starting point for food system study undertaken by students in an undergraduate nutrition course. This tangible and engaging approach to discovering the food system embedded in a food product leads to interesting insights into the "knowability" of the food system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quaker Oats advertising campaigns have long aimed not only at the stomach, but the conscience:"Think you don't have time for a hot breakfast?" asks one. "Think again." The implication is clear: there is something especially wholesome and nourishing about a piping-hot bowl of oatmeal, and the smiling man in eighteenth century garb offers a product that makes it easy to do what another Quaker ad calls "the right thing to do." But how can we be sure? What makes food "right"—health effects alone, or ethical/moral considerations about the business of getting that food from the farm to the grocery store? This paper rubs the sleep out of its eyes and takes a closer look at what's in the steaming bowl on the breakfast table. It turns out that a dollar spent on Quaker oatmeal is a dollar in PepsiCo's bank account, and that part of that dollar goes to one of the world's largest suppliers of beef cattle. Meanwhile, it's no coincidence that the suicide rate is climbing among the farmers of the Canadian Great Plains … In the increasingly globalized agribusiness industry, think there's any such thing as a "safe" food? Think again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]