ANT 3245 Anthropology of Food and Foodways

This course is a study of food and foodways from an anthropological perspective. Students explore the myriad of ways in which food-related behaviors influence human health with attention to the interplay between biology, culture, and power. Core principles for the course are food safety, security, sovereignty, sustainability, and sociality. Using those lenses, students consider foods as medicines or poisons, the relationship between differential access to resources and health, the importance of the power and representation in making changes to food systems to support community health, tensions between maintaining worker health and the food supply, and the ways in which relationships and identities are forged and maintained through ritual and shared cuisines.

Credits

4

Cross Listed Courses

none

Prerequisite

none

Corequisite

none

Course Types

major, minor

Offered

• Fall

Notes

elective

1. Students will be able to d efine key terms and concepts in anthropologists use to study food and foodways in local and global contexts, with attention to disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity
2. Students will be able to d iscuss food in terms of safety, security, sustainability, sovereignty, and sociality, with emphasis on how these aspects are related, and with reference to power, privilege, ethnocentrism and ethics
3. students will be able to d escribe the methodological and theoretical contributions of anthropological perspectives of food to in interdisciplinary contexts such as Food Studies, International and Global Studies, and Global and Public Health
4. Students will be able to d escribe their own experiences and those of people from selected local and global communities through anthropological lenses