Chewing on the STEM

Heartbroken. Devastated. Lost in my AM grounding of breakfast confidence.

Twits of various types; Tweets, of course; at least one notable scientific/geopolitical assessment, AKA a World Health Organization presentation all suggested today a devastating lesson: that bacon, ham, and sausage add up to health as zero sum as that offered by cigarettes! Oh. Come. On! SHOW ME THE NUMBERS!

For some time I’ve been teasing people with a proposition I’m now willing to bring out of the closet. The nation should scratch all efforts -- and I mean all efforts -- at teaching math in conventional ways in our schools. All math initiatives should be directed towards instructing children about the satiating numbers tied into the vast array of recipes for making, preparing, selling and consuming food -- preferably healthy and smart food, I guess.  

If you look at the whole menu, such numbers would indeed add up.

How food is grown, how it is harvested, what is done to GMO-itize, all of these activities can and should be understood in terms of the 0s and 1s of what we consume. Kids, and their parents, should be fed glutenous servings of numerical digital transactions about everything from the physics of seed germination to the human biotransformation of vitamins and nutrients to the business of making and selling the good, bad and fast versions of the stuff that ends up on our family plates.

Human survival is massively dependent on us crunching down orders after orders of food-related mathematics, and we might as well get used to swallowing these caloric calculations -- the bitter ones and the sweet ones.

I believe a formulaic case can be made that we can no longer deal with the operational mechanics of most mathematical transactions anyway. Does anyone actually know what happens when spreadsheets or algorithms digest the digits we feed them? Which adds up convincingly to the idea that if we teach children to perform the operations of the tastiest aspects of the math about what they eat, they’ll get the idea behind what math matters and be able to do their own calculations later using just as healthy of logic. 

I haven’t swallowed the supersized logic of the STEM meals being offered because it is overloaded towards heavy, fatty profit-taking, thus mostly being an exercise in filling the bellies and bloating the bottom lines of businesses that savor the science, technology, engineering, and math of their own excess. A totally immersive menu of the numbers associated with food (and the culture of eating, IMHO) could do better. And, with a little practice, I'm willing to bet that we could show our work as they numbers added up to giving us lucious and filling first through courses, some of which should be offered as amuse bouches by those who appreciate the ROI to having us all at the table of change.