Biology is food, food is biology
- rosemary
- Jul 5
- 5 min read
"The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology - the study of life." Edward Abbey
I'm back to the food curriculum - after a longish break - because I was a bit daunted. Still am. Biology it seems to me, like geography is a somewhat maligned subject in school - a subject for girls. Men don't study biology. I don't think David has ever done any - well that's the impression he gives anyway. And at university it was definitely seen as the soft option for your science choice - everyone had to do at least a year of a science subject if you were an arts scholar. It's not true that it's unimportant of course, but it's a perception from the past, and possibly still from some males.
Break it down into its sub- sciences however - medicine, environmental science ... or link it to chemistry and physics, as one inevitably does - and should - and it becomes more acceptable - to some anyway. The picture I chose to represent biology in the food curriculum, illustrates the latter point very clearly. I mean is dna biology or chemistry? And those other food related sub-sciences - nutrition, food safety, food preservation, food production - definitely have connections to chemistry and physics. Some might well say they are not biology at all.
"The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity." E. O. Wilson
I did my little bit of biology study - biology as part of general science until O-Level - which is only the age of 16, and a year of biology as a subsidiary subject at university for a year during which we studied, anatomy, genetics and parasites - a term each. The genetics, however was basic - we bred fruit flies to see the distribution of curly and non curly wings I seem to remember. My lab partner unfortunately crushed all of our breeding fruit flies - he was a real klutz - and so I remember I had to fake the results. Which actually was quite instructive, because I had to actually work out what the likely distribution would be, rather than just counting what we had. We learnt a bit about chromosomes, but I don't remember much about DNA - but then DNA was relatively new, having been - some say rediscovered - in 1953.
I also learnt a lot about parasites which I really didn't want to know. It was the lecturer
research subject I think. And yet I had no qualms about dissecting a dead rabbit. And maybe you can't be a good omnivore cook without that disconnection between the meat you are cutting up and the animal it came from.
But yes - food cropped up over and over again in biology, and I'm guessing that it does even more these days. It began with anatomy at school, and food didn't play an obvious part there - other than when we came to the digestive system. Also, when I think about it, when I had to ask the butcher for a pig's eye to dissect at school. And when I think about it again, it certainly helps with cooking meat to know what part of the animal you are looking at, and the characteristics thereof.
Later, however, I do remember learning about vitamins and minerals and how they affect us - and also about ways to preserve food. Then there were lessons on the structure of soil and how this affected agriculture. There would have been a bit of botany - photosynthesis and all of that - now is that biology or chemistry? And evolution of course - which contains within it a fair bit of history, astrophysics and geology too.
I guess when it comes to reproduction - tellingly but not surprisingly the Foundation year lecture with the highest attendance - you really are facing life itself - how it comes into being, and all the psychological and medical aspects of that fact. Today it has been proved over and over again that many of the psychological problems of today can actually be traced to chemical reactions within the body - now is that biology, chemistry or psychology in the sociology sense?
Today the curriculum is much further advanced than when I was learning back in the 50s and 60s. I glanced at a little bit of my granddaughter's VCE biology homework, and didn't understand any of it. It looked like university level stuff. The Australian school curriculum opens with these words:
"Biology is the study of the fascinating diversity of life as it has evolved and as it interacts and functions. Investigation of biological systems and their interactions, from cellular processes to ecosystem dynamics, has led to biological knowledge and understanding that enable us to explore and explain everyday observations, find solutions to biological issues, and understand the processes of biological continuity and change over time."
All of that can be demonstrated in the kitchen
“The kitchen’s a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It’s biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there’s history. Yes, there’s artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.” Alton Brown
I began this post some time ago now, and gave up. Today I have added only a very few words. I feel a bit about biology as I do about geography - both of these subjects are unappreciated and generally ignored, and yet there is an argument that would say that both of them are the ultimate in encompassing everything to do with life on this planet - any planet for geography, maybe not for biology. For biology is indeed life. And as such it truly demonstrates that everything is connected - and at the centre of life is food - without it we don't exist.
"Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it." Alton Brown
As you can see I have found it difficult to illustrate this - apart from the foodie/dna, and I probably haven't said much about how you can introduce food into the biology curriculum. Well it's there anyway isn't it? Mission accomplished however, in that I've at least tried to write about it. It's been bugging me.
YEARS GONE BY
June 5
2024 - Nothing
2023 - Mishmash
2021 - Boring then, boring now?
2020 - Deleted
2018 - Wensleydale cheese - one of my very favourite cheeses 2017 - Nothing
Hi Sis, interesting article. When I did O levels I actually took Biology as a separate subject and also Chemistry. Physics I gave up as soon as I could as it was all greek to me!!! I remember some of the things you mentioned, experiments with plant life, osmosis - going onto the field with some kind of equipment to prove osmosis, single cell beings etc etc. Was very up set about the fact couldn't mix it as an A level with the languages I wanted to take.
As to how do you get food into the biology curriculum, as a primary school teacher, we squeezed preparing and cooking food into the science strand under changing states i.e. melting, freezing…
Very lraned and interesting. I always thought the dicision between subjects, physice, chemistry, biology was simple a matter of labels. The more you could measure something, the more it became a science!