The Culture of Food and Eating

AMS 295: Special Topics - The Culture of Food and Eating

Mon, Wed, Fri - 4:00-4:50
Room: Park 146 

Instructor: John M. Burdick
Email: burdick5@buffalo.edu
Office Hours: Mon & Wed 1:30-3:30
Office 1010E Clemens Hall

 “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are” –Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

This course takes “food” as its subject and explores the culture, history and politics of food and eating in the United States and abroad. Together we will explore the connections between what we eat and who we are – “we are what we eat” - through a critical examination of how personal identities and social groups are formed via food production, preparation, and consumption. In doing so, this course will critically examine the role of food and eating in the construction of race, class, gender and sexual identities. While this course focuses on food in the United States, it emphasizes a transnational approach. As such, students in this course will study the meaning and significance of food to different ethnic groups and diasporic communities by exploring the way that people transmit, preserve, and change culture through food. In doing so, we will study food as central to phenomena such as globalization, colonialism, immigration, transnational identities, and nation-state formation. In addition, we will seek to understand the relationship between food and power, and will delve into the role of food in the formation of political movements, subaltern identities, anti-colonialism, contemporary food justice projects and radical agrarian movements. Materials for this discussion-based course will include scholarly articles, personal essays, book excerpts, newspaper articles, cookbooks, films, and television, among others.