Professor
College of Agricultural and Life Sciences | Department of Horticulture
Hometown: Fond du Lac, Appleton
Irwin Goldman’s research focuses on three main fields of study: horticulture and human health, vegetable crop genetics, and vegetable breeding.
Irwin is unavailable for talks until 2025.
Talks:
Why Medicine Needs Agriculture
No talk details available.
Take Two Onions and Call Me in the Morning
No talk details available.
Plants and Human Well-Being
Plants provide not only the foundation of food, clothing, and shelter essential for human existence, but also some of the key raw materials for transcendence and abstraction through music, art, and spirituality. Since antiquity, we have co-evolved with plants and their derivative products, with each exerting a domesticating force on the other. It is, for example, impossible to think of our modern life without its plant-based accompaniments in the form of cotton, sugar, bread, coffee, and wood. Yet they are so ubiquitous we may forget they all derive from plants discovered, domesticated, bred, and farmed for millennia in a never-ending pursuit to improve our wellbeing. We will examine a few examples of intersection between plants and human wellbeing from a horticultural point of view, including an example of the medicinal properties of onion and garlic.