Whatever the real cause for this iconoclastic bravado, I was admittedly quite startled. I don't teach often, but when I do, I'm ready; yet I was not in the least prepared for this do-all-lives-really-matter positioning. Astonished, I tried to comprehend this performative anthroposupremacy while also wanting to determine how such a privileged and otherwise extremely perceptive group of students could somehow not look alarmed at the question. But the group stared at me, “the guest,” curiously. Could I convincingly defend the importance of biodiversity against such a pugnacious, irreverent challenge? The pluckiness of the provocation threatened to eclipse my efforts to convey the consequences of a biological catastrophe throttling on outside the seminar. What's the lesson plan for such a question?

Terroir
I continued my presentation, moving on to the topic of floral micropropagation, after somewhat dismissively promising that I'd come back to his concern regarding biodiversity. In all honesty, I just wanted to walk out of the classroom--what was the use of explaining ecosystemic dependencies to students daydreaming about becoming the next Rem or Bjarke? Instead, I recalled to the class that even The Guardian, only a few months before, stated that the biodiversity crisis was at least as dangerous for future life on Earth as climate change.² Do Americans now deny that crisis, too? Should I have explained that the story from The Guardian was based on an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report, written over three years by more than five hundred scientists? Would a more thorough understanding of this knowledge infrastructure change how the report is received or appreciated?

I didn't plead with the students about the importance of knowledge co-production though; instead I thought about grad school, food, and hunger. I thought about cheap meals made and missed before reviews and exams and chapter deadlines, and how I had struggled to make ends meet so that I could still eat something interesting once in a while as I was completing my PhD. Was taste anything other than an expression of wealth? Had I forgotten the discount supermarket, which also sustained among its crowded aisles a day care for the neighborhood children, that kept me fed at a price point I could afford, if not savor, during my time in graduate school? These questions initiated some good conversation with the students: Why does all our food taste the same? How can we really begin to understand the consequences of standardized and sanitized food products when they betray no sense of place, no flavor suggesting their origin? For a moment, we all wondered together: If we can't even taste biodiversity, at least as an approximation, how can we be expected to concern ourselves with the consequences of its loss? I retold what may be an apocryphal story about my paternal grandmother: Nana could tell, simply by the taste of the flesh, which local lake a walleye (Sander vitreus, although she never used the Latin name) had come from, and she thereby judged the efforts of her angling offspring and the palatability of their respective catch. The students admitted without protest that they knew little if anything about the origins of the "fish" served with French fries at various local diners, although they still believed they could judge those deep-fried morsels with some degree of discretion.