Recognizing that dietitians are not typically trained on the origins of food, a course at the University of Arizona is trying to bridge that knowledge gap and prepare future dietitians for the many questions their clients will have about food and how it’s produced.
While the courses that dietetic interns often take involve pathophysiology, disease states, metabolism, and digestion, the basics of how food is raised and produced are often overlooked. Agriculture and Food Literacy for Nutrition and Health Professionals aims to equip dietitians with a comprehensive understanding of food production and how to influence policies that ensure access to affordable and nutritious foods.
The statistics are staggering regarding how far removed most U.S. residents are from growing food for income. In many cases, it goes back to their great-grandparents having been involved in agriculture, but that is the closest most get.
Dietetics isn’t insulated from these stats. Thousands of dietetics professionals are like the general public, with the majority not directly connected to farming. However, unlike the average person, dietetic professionals are trusted to advise people on how to eat.
“When dietitians share their background and their profession, folks almost always have questions about food and where it comes from. They want to know if it’s safe, and they want to be able to ask questions from a verifiable source,” said Ashlee Linares-Gaffer, one of the developers of the University of Arizona course. “They might have ethical considerations about eating meat. They might say something like, ‘Do you recommend that people eat meat? Isn’t it bad for animals? The environment? Your body?’”
Dietitians have a unique and complex role. They have to navigate people’s concerns, share and execute the science of nutrition, and balance the cultural needs of each client. They must also remember the basic human instinct of pleasure and desirability in their clients’ food.
These topics alone are a lot to ask a person to balance, but when the education of where food comes from is missing from the curriculum, it can make it even harder.
Concerns about what someone should eat are more than what nutrients the body needs. People find eating to be a very personal act and want to ensure they are doing the best for their well-being. When dietitians are asked questions about food, they can be “loaded” and extend far beyond human nutrition.
Agriculture and Food Literacy for Nutrition and Health Professionals, which is offered as a three-credit online class for students pursuing a dietetics master’s degree, starts with a discussion on the significance and connection between dietetics and agriculture.
“We asked students why it is important that nutrition professionals know a little bit more about where food comes from and how to have some basic level dialogue with people when they have these complex questions about food, how it’s grown, and how it’s produced,” Linares-Gaffer said.
A significant factor to the creation of this course was that the University of Arizona is a land-grant institution, and the nutrition school is part of the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences.
Both Linares-Gaffer and her course co-developer, Kayle Skorupski, Ph.D., had an interest in this particular topic. Skorupski’s first degree is in animal science. Linares-Gaffer says she studied traditional nutrition and dietetics training from the beginning and became more interested in agriculture when she was out of school and practicing as a dietitian.
“That was always an area that made me feel insecure. People would ask me the more nitty-gritty details about where food comes from and what to choose with regard to not only nutrition, but also the ethics and environmental impacts. I felt so unprepared to answer these kinds of questions,” said Linares-Gaffer.
She said that this thought process continued for her when she took an assistant professor job at the university. She said she thought it was odd that they were in an agricultural college with no emphasis on the subject in the nutrition curriculum.
It was a missed opportunity that Linares-Gaffer identified quickly.
After a few years coordinating the dietetic internship program at the University of Arizona, Skorupski came on board as the co-coordinator, and this is when the school started incorporating production agriculture tours into the program utilizing the Arizona Beef Council and Dairy Council of Arizona as partners, along with other agriculture groups. They called it agricultural immersion.
When the program was first developed, a week of field trips — an intensive exploration of food and production — was scheduled for the dietetic interns.
Over the years, the tours began to be scheduled further apart. Students were exposed to various operations, from small business owners making different food products to organic controlled environments, urban farms, and traditional ranches, farms, and dairies. The students were having experiential learning opportunities, where they could talk to producers and entrepreneurs and learn where food comes from.
The dietetic profession now requires all new dietitians to complete a master’s program. Instead of a dietetic intern program, most students are now entering a one-year master’s program with an emphasis on dietetics. When Skorupski designed the new version of this study track, an emphasis was placed on what was learned from the dietetic intern program, including the agriculture tours.
The development of policy within the government and how to advocate for the profession is a critical component of the course. Students explore local government, whether that is a city council or a board of supervisors, or even higher into state and federal level government. They are asked to find out who their representatives are, and then look into policies that relate to agriculture, food, and health on a broad level.
Students are allowed to choose what they research so the topics remain relevant to their own experiences and goals. They wrap up this research by choosing a legislator, taking a position, and writing a letter to their lawmaker advocating for their position as a future dietitian.
In this way, students are learning about laws and how they’re made and developing advocacy and professional leadership skills. They’re also learning different agriculture production methods. They’re learning about animals and plants, the regulations behind those production practices, and who establishes these regulations.
They also learn a little bit about processing and manufacturing while considering the drivers of the food system, including the economics. It’s basically Food Systems 101 for the future dietitian – with a chance to apply their expertise and knowledge about the food system.
The program leaders say that the students respond well to the advocacy portion. The overwhelming majority of students highlight the empowerment they experience from participating in food systems policy advocacy activities and how doing so makes them feel less intimidated to engage with lawmakers to promote policies that improve access to affordable food that is good for people, animals, and the environment.
Another part of the class is writing evidence-based recommendations on hot-button topics. Students are given a prompt, such as a quote from someone at the grocery store saying they hear meat is terrible and asking for the dietitian’s recommendation. They are then required to form a recommendation with scientific research, citations, and referrals for the lay audience to read more about the topic.
Students are not given a bias toward a specific recommendation but are just told to cite the evidence. On this particular topic, Linares-Gaffer said all of her students have prepared recommendations that meat is nutritious and works in a healthy diet.
Nationally, programs like this one are few and far between. Montana supports a food systems-focused dietetic internship program, and select programs to give their students choices of different courses they would like to take in a food system setting.
In a profession where a person is giving science-backed nutrition recommendations, it makes sense that the client receiving the feedback would expect someone who is an expert on all things food, including where it comes from and how it is raised. With the average person not having any direct connection to address questions and concerns about their food, it can make choosing and eating food stressful and complex.
There is much speculation in the food industry about how important it is for consumers to be more connected to agriculture. The easy answer to this issue is to train the people who talk to clients every day about food, in the way that the University of Arizona is doing. Provide the resources, connections, and information to the influencers who are already sharing nutrition recommendations.
Tiffany Selchow lives on a working cattle ranch in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. With a life entrenched in the Western lifestyle and agriculture, her goal is to share worthwhile, intriguing, and exciting stories of the rodeo world, ranchers and farmers, the outdoor lifestyle, and more.
