In the United States, as in many parts of the world, we face a crisis in terms of food. The quality of diets continues to decrease even as the quantity of food available increases. At the same, we face major challenges in terms of engaging the public in science. Scientific literacy has, at best, stagnated even as the proportion of challenges that require a scientifically literate public is increasing. A major opportunity exists at the nexus of these two problems if we are able to educate the public (and children in particular) about science through the stories of food. Here we have a simple proposal. We will tell the stories of the science of food through an audio guide that can also be read as as e-book (or in the longer term, through our ongoing partnership with the University of Chicago Press, coffee table books). The guide will tell the stories of particular ingredients in foods in light of their evolutionary past, cultural history, natural history, chemistry and physics. Through exciting stories, it will simultaneously engage a broad public in science, history, and nutrition. The book will begin in the kitchen and then spill out into the yard and the supermarket.

This project brings cultural resource management into regional and local decision contexts for climate change planning. Cultural resources hold multiple and diverse values to local communities, visitors and the public. Yet, climate change threatens many coastal cultural resources and developing strategies for climate adaptation or mitigation is needed. Before adaptation decisions are made (move, stabilize or document a resource), it is critical to understand the types of cultural resources on the southeastern coastal landscape so that decisions can be made with information on (a) the extent to which a resource type may be lost from the landscape (vulnerability) and (b) the degree to which a resource is rare within the landscape (uniqueness). This project develops a cultural resource vulnerability index to assess the vulnerability and uniqueness of cultural resource types in coastal landscapes within the southeastern United States. The index will be used in a pilot study of planning for cultural resources at Plymouth Village, a historic site within Cape Lookout National Seashore that will also be informed by the perceptions and values of local communities and the visiting public. This pilot study will enable evaluations of the usefulness of region planning tools in local decision-making.

It is a commonplace that American food is industrial and placeless. Both producer and consumer are divorced from their environment: The former by machines and chemicals, the latter by distance and ignorance. The result is that prepared foods like hot dogs and hamburgers are supposed to be the all-American foods (Schlosser 2001). If these industrial foods have a history at all, it is imaginary: At some hazy point in the past industrial food overcame regional diets of locally produced foods. In this telling of events, industrial food seems regrettable and inexorable, but it is finally inevitable. This story isn������������������t historical. Rather, it treats human beings as passive recipients who simply consume what they are given. This is at odds with generations of humanist scholarship that finds agency in all sorts of everyday actions. This has been particularly true in urban histories (Kasson 1978, Duis 1998). The story about modern food especially ignores the complicated and remarkable evolution of food production in the age of the city. From the 1870s to 1920s, new migrants, new kinds of work, and expanding cities transformed who was an American, what they did, and where they lived (Wiebe 1967). Outstanding existing scholarship describes how technological systems, industrialization, urbanization and migration transformed both nearby and distant landscapes, converting agriculture into a commodity industry and supplier of factories (Cronon 1991, Fitzgerald 2003, White 2011). That work, however, has less often considered food production within urban areas, despite the crucial role it played into the 20th century (McNeill 2000, Kurlansky 2006, Douglas 2013). This is a book about oysters in the industrial city. Oysters are important because looking at their history in America provides a window onto reasons for the transformation of the American diet, the growth of American cities, and the changing conceptions of food safety that were a result of industrial growth.

This proposal supports an environmental history of San Francisco Bay from the time of American settlement to key events in 1972. This will be the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of what is both the largest contiguous tidal wetlands in the American West and a key urban and economic hub. The author is well equipped to carry out this investigation thanks to training in both ecological science and history; the project will contribute to important research questions from both disciplines and to the interdisciplinary questions motivating the middle ground between the humanities and sciences. The site of investigation is also relevant to North Carolina because many of the historical processes occurred simultaneously in North Carolina estuaries.