New Course Proposal
Anth 325 -- Food, Culture, and Society
Instructor: Deb Augsburger
Food is nurturance, necessity, luxury, pleasure, connection, abundance, hunger, morality, sin, and
intensely cultural. What we eat, how we eat, and what it all means to us, and for us, is a part of who we
are, as individuals and as members of communities, and as a species. This course combines
anthropological and sociological perspectives to better understand food and eating as culturally
grounded and socially significant. This course will ask students to critically observe and analyze food
discourse, practice, and experience, their own and that of others.
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The course will be a mix of lecture and discussion, with the weight on discussion.
There will be at least two eating events: one in a restaurant, and one potluck or group cooking
event.
I hope to organize one or more guest speakers (in person or Skype) on the issues of food justice
and local food movements.
Topics are below, exemplified by readings. In the actual course some might be trimmed,
omitted, or expanded.
Assignments:
1. Regular reading reflections (credit/no-credit)
2. Three paper/take-homes, spread across the topics.
3. A food experience paper. The following are some possibilities:
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Eating on a food stamp budget (approximately $1 per person per meal) for three days,
or attempting a locavore diet.
Interviewing someone from a different generation, ethnicity, or country, about food
habits and memories (and possibly cooking with them).
Involvement with a soup kitchen or food pantry (as volunteer or client).
4. A paper based on a food diary (one week), connected to class themes and materials.
Course objectives:
1/ To engage with the idea of food and eating as culturally and socially constructed; 2/ To explore the
dialectic between food consumption and identity formation; 3/ To understand food production,
distribution, and consumption as embedded in political, economic, social, and cultural contexts
Sections and Readings
FOOD AND CULTURE (INTRODUCTION)
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Marvin Harris’s “The Riddle of the Sacred Cow,” and “Small Things,” in Good to Eat. (Pgs. 47-66,
154-174)
Mary Douglas’s “Deciphering a Meal,” in Food and Culture. (Pg. 36-53)
Anna Meigs’ “Food as a Cultural Construction,” in Food and Culture. Pp. 95-106.
Jill Dubisch’s “You Are What You Eat: Religious Aspects of the Health Food Movement.”
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Counihan, Carole. “Food Rules in the United States: Individualism, Control, and Hierarchy.” In
The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power.
FOOD AND GENDER
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Carole Counihan’s “Food, Culture and Gender,” in The Anthropology of Food and Body. (pp. 624)
Emily Massara’s “Que Gordita,” in Food and Culture. (pp. 251-254)
Rebecca Popenoe’s “Ideal,” in Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession (pp. 9-28)
Fannie Ambjörnsson’s “Talk,” in Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession (pp. 109-120)
Susan Bordo’s “Anorexia Nervosa” in Food and Culture (Pgs. 226-244)
Caroline Bynum’s “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women,” in Food and Culture. (Pg. 138-151)
FOOD AND IDENTITIES
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Heldke, Lisa. "’Let’s Eat Chinese!” Reflections on Cultural Food Colonialism" Gastronomica: The
Journal of Food and Culture 1, no. 2 (2001): 76–9.
Narayan, Uma. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food.” Social Identities 1,
no. 1 (1995): 63–86.
Wilk, Richard. “’Real Belizean Food’: Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean.”
American Anthropologist 101, no. 2 (1999): 244–55.
Pilcher, Jeffrey. (Section on Que Vivan los Tamales: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity)
Clark, Dylan. “The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine” Ethnology 43:1 (2004), 19-31.
Presentation on manoomin and fry bread?
Contrasting Chinese dinners?
LEARNING TO EAT
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Anne Allison’s Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus. In
Nutritional Anthropology, pp. 145-156.
Mary J. Weismantel’s “The Children Cry for Bread: Hegemony and the Transformation of
Consumption” In Nutritional Anthropology, pp. 136-144.
Eriberto Lozada’s “Globalized Childhood? Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing,” in The Cultural
Politics of Food and Eating. (pp. 163-179)
Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Habitus and the Space of Lifestyles,” (pp. 201) in Distinction.
Elinor Ochs, Clotilde Pontecorvo & Alessandra Fasulo’s “Socializing Taste.” Ethnos 61(1-2), 1996.
Pp. 7-46)
Amy Paugh & Carolina Izquierdo’s “Why is This a Battle Every Night?: Negotiating Food in
American Dinnertime Interaction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 19 (2): pp. 185-204.
Poppendieck, Janet. Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (California Studies in Food and
Culture). University of California Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780520243705.
THE POLITICS OF FOOD & EATING
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Theodor Bestor’s “How Sushi Went Global,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating. (pp. 1320)
Steven Shapin’s “Hedonistic Fruit Bombs.” London Review of Books 27, no. 3 (2005): 30–2.
Susan J. Terrio’s “Crafting Grand Cru Chocolates in Contemporary France.” American
Anthropologist 98, no. 1 (1996): 67–79.
William Roseberry’s “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United
States,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating. (pp. 122-143)
Warren Belasco’s “Food and the Counterculture: A Story of Bread and Politics.” In The Cultural
Politics of Food and Eating. (pp. 217-234)
Melissa L. Caldwell’s “Domesticating the French Fry: McDonald’s and Consumerism in Moscow,”
in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating. (pp. 180-192)
Eric Schlosser’s “Why the Fries Taste Good,” in Fast Food Nation. (pp. 111- 131)
INEQUALITY, ACTIVISM, AND FOOD MOVEMENTS
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Mark Winne’s, “Growing Obese and Diabetic, Going Local and Organic” and “Income Disparities,
Poverty, and the Food Gap.” In Winne, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of
Plenty.
Janet M. Fitchen’s “Hunger, Malnutrition, and Poverty in the Contemporary United States: Some
Observations on Their Social and Cultural Context,” In Nutritional Anthropology, pp. 335-346.
Jessica Luhning’s “Foodsheds,” Edible Madison, Summer 2011.
http://ediblemadison.com/articles/view/foodsheds-part-1-restoring-our-sense-of-place
Jack Kloppenburg, Jr., John Hendrickson, and G.W. Stevenson’s “Coming in to the Foodshed.”
Agriculture and Human Values 13:3 (Summer), 1996, pp. 33-42.
Striffler, Steve. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food. Yale
University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780300095296.
Pollan, Michael. "Voting with Your Fork," The New York Times, May 7, 2006. (or something else)
Nestle, Marion. "The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate." In What to Eat. North Point Press, 2006,
pp. 17–24. ISBN: 9780865477049.
Possible Films:
Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas (30 minutes)
Taboo: Food
The Meaning of Food (PBS), 2005
Food Stamped, 2011