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Wholesome: An agroecology professor called on me to describe the primary contradiction of capitalism
(hexbear.net)
And then after class said that she would like to teach another one where the question is "should we even have a livestock industry at all?". I told her that I'd love to teach one where I just make the students repeatedly read The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath until they start burning shit down and she replied that it already seems like we're heading that way.
My only good professor.
Agroecology people have always, without fail, been the coolest people in food studies events or conferences. Something about working with the land rather than forcing it to give food just soft radicalizes you.
I'm going the ecology route because it's just getting paid to be a Marxist. Nature is the proof of dialectics and the most interdisciplinary field I could find in urban ecology is the most intersectional political project at the root of eco-Marxism. Agroecology consulting is one career track I considered because it's turning dialectical materialism into a fun little puzzle with tractors.
I couldn't hack the biology of it all, so I went the social sciences/humanities route, and now I'm looking to go to grad school for Food and Rural social Geographies.
The hard science classes were so difficult for me, only proving that I'm not a biologist/chemist/physicist/programmer/mathematician. My only scientific skillset is what made me good with medicine or the humanities. I can apply a bunch of analytical angles to a messy subject that I understand contextually and spot the contradictions as part of dynamic processes. Geography seems like it'd be such an amazing field for that. David Harvey's work was huge for me refining those skills.