Culinary Cultural Studies - Einzelansicht

Please follow the "comment" link above for more information on comments, course readings, course requirements and grading.

Food is a basic need for human survival, but its presence in our quotidian lives is intriguingly complex. We cut, cook, and serve; we revere, refuse, and throw away; we enjoy, revolt, and tolerate. Our expectations are (inevitably?) formed through culture: The borders of what is, what could be, and what can’t be food, intersect with practices of consumption and identity.

 This seminar will look at a variety of texts to trace various meanings of food, including cooking shows, recipes, restaurant menus, film, fiction, advertisement, life writing and critical essays. We will potentially broach issues as disparate as waste, gender, ethnicity, ethics, habitus, religion, authenticity, hybridity, globalisation, environmentalism, precarity, nation, and a host of others. This seminar will be project-based, and all members (including the lecturer!) will be developing, researching, presenting and revising their work throughout the semester.

Students are required to come to class with an expectation of lively and yet respectful discussion, and prepared to participate in discussion themselves. A reader will be developed in the first weeks of the semester pending the specific interests of the seminar members and then made accessible to the group.