This first-year seminar is an introduction to food history and food studies, two linked fields in which we ask how people have satisfied their appetites, and what their choices mean. This encompasses everything from the question of how agriculture began, to the question of what it meant to eat a Korean taco in Los Angeles in, say, 2014. Food history and food studies are vast fields, and in this seminar we will sample many versions of them. Because this seminar is designed for students just beginning college, it introduces a variety of academic approaches to food, from chronological analyses of how specific ingredients became important for specific populations, to the anthropological treatment of food and identity, to cultural histories informed by primary sources--that is, documents written by historical actors. We even read contemporary "food writing," including restaurant reviews, which are themselves historical documents of a sort. This course also has a strong chronological through-line, winding from the establishment of agriculture to the modernization and industrialization of global food ways. |