Historic Sustainability at MSU

Greetings, Campus Archaeology fans!  My name is Grace and I am a recent addition to the CAP family.  As a new graduate student at MSU it has taken me a bit of time to find my footing, but even as I began adapting to my new intellectual surroundings my love of food has never wavered.  Food in all forms and stages is my academic passion, and I firmly believe it is a fundamental aspect of human culture.  People continuously interact over food, whether to come together or create conflict, eke out a living or luxuriate.  Though the complete study of food involves infinite levels of production and consumption, the first and broadest question is: Where does food come from?

Answering this question depends not only on where it is, but where in time it is.  Evidence of food and food production in the archaeological record is complex and often difficult to interpret, but can help to explain how and why people lived as they did.  MSU, with its roots as an agricultural college, is fantastic place to study food production in the United States.  The original goals of The Agricultural College were in teaching students to be innovative farmers and committed American citizens.  Agricultural experiments were designed to develop new farming methods with an emphasis on high yields while maintaining the environment.  Environmental maintenance is of the utmost importance in farming for long-term production.  While MSU was beginning to develop better methods of farming in the mid-nineteenth century, cash crops were demonstrating the destructive effects of exploitative agriculture over a large portion of the United States.  While sustainable agriculture would not become a prominent issue until the 1960’s, the roots of the movement were already in practice in MSU’s experimental programs.  The question of where food comes from then takes on a new facet, evolving to become not only a question of locality, but production as well.  By asking this question, we can begin to measure historic sustainability within the MSU community.

With my research, I hope to be able to determine the nature of agriculture at MSU since opening in 1857.  How much agriculture was being practiced on campus?  How much of what they produced was available to the community?  These questions will help me to look at the development of the MSU community in terms of sustainability over time.  I look forward to sharing my research with all of you!

Author: Grace Krause