Seriously.

About a month ago, I got an e-mail that lists the “25 Strangest College Courses.” Number five on the list was one from State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta, a course entitled “Cultural Aspects of Food.” Never mind that this list was compiled by “CollegeDegree.com,” an organization whose goal is to promote on-line start-up colleges against traditional, brick-and-mortar schools — it still got my dander up. After all, I’m piloting a course this term called “Food, Literature, and Culture,” which, while it may fall into the cracks between disciplines as they’re currently defined, is hardly one of the twenty-five strangest courses, and ought not to be laughed at, at least not too loudly.

We are reading Shakespeare and Virgil, after all. But here’s a better explanation.

As a society, we know more about the biochemistry of nutrition than any people who have ever lived (did you know the intestines affect and are affected by autism?), and yet we suffer the highest rates in history of diabetes and obesity, on the one hand, and malnutrition and starvation, on the other hand. “Hand” is the wrong word. “Hemisphere” would be better. We produce more calories than we could possibly need, and yet millions of people in a world supposedly evened out by globalization go hungry. Fathom that.

But no, what strange topics for academic discussion! How silly of academics, whose job is intellectual inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of others, to waste time on such conundrums! Better to leave these matters to Cargill, ConAgra, Monsanto, and Archer Daniels Midland. They will tell us what we need to know. Speak, Nestlé and Kraft, for your servants are listening!

Just this week, fishermen in California announced that the entire population of Chinook Salmon south of Alaska has reached the brink of collapse. Why? (I realize that this is a strange question in a strange college newspaper, asked by a strange assistant professor, but bear with me.) Why should a species, which just five years ago had nearly 800,000 spawning salmon swimming up the Sacramento River, have so suddenly precipitously declined to far less than 100,000? Natural variations have been proposed: the size, strength, timing, salinity, temperature of ocean currents and krill. But it’s clear that diversion dams are also responsible, taking too much water from the river (in 2005, in particular) in order to irrigate large agricultural fields across California’s Central Valley. The salmon may have died, in other words, because expansive farms — if the word “farms” isn’t stretched beyond all recognition by the immensity of these thirsty fields — took away their water as surely as John Huston’s character did in “Chinatown.”

How do diet fads affect fish populations (my “Men’s Health,” for example, tells me to eat more salmon)? What about our nation’s labyrinthine farm policies, which generate intolerably large subsidies for the wealthiest of farming corporations, while making it virtually impossible for small farmers to stay afloat?

You and me, with our taxes and our food dollars, whenever we demand dirt-cheap produce, we subsidize the damming and diverting of the Sacramento River. The American family spends less than ten percent of its monthly income on food. Why so little, the smallest percentage on record? Because we let the food giants externalize their enormous costs. We accept, as one of their externalities, the health of the very species we depend upon. In other words, we subsidize the depletion of animals we ourselves desire! Our dollars, our desires, our diets are all involved. It’s inane.

But, please. Let’s not study this. It’s beneath us.

Fact is, disciplinary boundaries change over time. They always have. The Greeks and Romans required their citizens to be literate and numerate and to know a little something about agriculture. Confucian standardized tests included agriculture and tax law, as well as geography and classic literature. How strange they all were!