“This course will ask students to think seriously about food– How is it produced? How is it distributed? How is it cooked and shared? What symbolic meanings does it hold? How do communities build a shared vision of “the Good” around the things they eat? To explore these questions, we will focus on a variety of communities and their “foodways” – that is, their particular strategies for producing, regulating, cooking, and sharing food. We will explore general structures of the American food system and voices that seek to challenge and reform that system on ethical grounds. Finally, to fully engage with our subject matter, we will spend some of our class sessions on field trips to local food producers, and in the kitchen, putting our foodways theory into edible practice.”
