FST 510
Food Culture History
Spring 2011
This course explores the role of food in the shaping of modern societies. The
emphasis is on food and diet in historical and transnational perspectives, including
topics such as the development of agriculture, the causes of famine and hunger, the
disruptions of colonialism and global exchange, the creation of world cuisines, the
impact of industrialization, the consequences of class, gender, and race inequality,
the fusion of migration, and the response to commercial and economic dominance of
the food system. The course should provide students with an overview of how to
think about food in history and the role of culture in shaping production and
consumption. We will delve into some topics in greater depth, emphasizing health
and the environment as key factors in global food practices.
Learning Outcomes
Students in this course will:
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Articulate a historical context for the development of global cuisines and
cultural food practices
Conduct research on a specific food or foodway in history and trace its
development as a critical component of social or economic life.
Document the political and social conditions under which food insecurity and
hunger are likely to occur, including an analysis of successful and failed
policies.
Use theoretical and methodological tools of historical analysis to illustrate
how food is related to gender, class, and race, with a particular
understanding of domestic life, status inequality, and migration
Demonstrate the relationship between health, environment, and
globalization.
Books:
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas
(Harvard, 2001).
Crosby, Alfred, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of
1492, (Praeger, 2003, 1973).
Gray, Peter. The Irish Famine (Harry Abrams, 1995)
Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin,
1985).
Pilcher, Jeffrey. !Que Vivan Los Tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity
(New Mexico, 1998).
Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century
(Viking, 2004)
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Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age
of Migration
Carole Counihan and Penny Van Estrik Food and Culture: A Reader (2nd edition)
Course Requirements:
This course will focus heavily on reading, understanding historical sources, and
developing a framework for looking at culture and cuisine critically. Your required
work in this class includes:
 attendance and participation
 a weekly reading summary
 a 15 page research paper
 an in-class presentation on one topic.
 research and visual presentation on one historical dish
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Attendance and Participation:
You are expected to be in class, to have reading notes and/or questions pertaining to
that week’s topics, and to be an active contributor to class discussion. You are also
encouraged to post to our Moodle site.
Reading Summaries:
Posted to Moodle before class, everyone should have a one to two page summary of
the week’s readings. The summary can include one or two main points from each
reading, pages or topics that stood out, or problems and questions you encountered.
Research Paper and Presentation:
The culimination of class work is a research paper on a topic of your choice,
(roughly 15 pages in length) accompanied by an oral presentation (approx. 5-7
minutes) on one of the last days of class.
Topic :You may choose to pursue further a topic that we are exploring in class, or
examine an area of personal or academic interest. The following is a list of suggested
topics, though you are by no means limited to these. Historical perspectives on:
 a plant or animal used as food (mushroom, corn, poultry) –
 a prepared food or method of processing (bread, beer, polenta)
 -an important person (Heinz, Cadbury)
 -a food event (the medieval banquet, Italian sausage-making, the
Green Revolution)
 food issues in historical context (historical perspectives on famine
relief, gluttony, food and fascism in Italy)
For this project, you will:
1. Conduct a thorough search in the library (or elsewhere) for material on your
topic. Check with the reference librarian, explore the Internet, look through
encyclopedias, magazines, newspapers, archives, interview people, do an
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ethnographic analysis. Having "too much" information, if such a thing is possible, is
much less of a problem than too little. See me for ideas, visit the reference desk at
the library, talk to anyone who might be of help.
2. Create a bibliography which contains at least twenty (20) sources. These can be
drawn from a variety of places (books, scholarly journals, popular magazines,
newspapers, cookbooks, internet) but a substantial number (over half) must be
books and articles of a scholarly nature (peer-reviewed, footnotes, relatively
independent of advertising, usually plain-looking with few photographs). Be critical
and smart in your choices: a corporate website will tell the whole story about its
product(s), but it might provide you with information you can interpret or
compare.
Information on the research and presentation of food item/dish will be handed out
in class.
Tentative Schedule of Topics and Readings
(in addition to weekly chapters from Food and Culture: A Reader)
PRODUCTION
Hunters, Foragers, and Farmers
▪ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, 13-32, 85-175
▪ Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in Stone Age Economics
▪ Beardsworth and Keil “Chapter One: The Origins of the Modern Food System
“ Sociology on the Menu
▪ Article on women as foragers
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Understanding Famines
▪ Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (selections)
▪ Gray, The Irish Potato Famine (all)
▪ Sen, Amartya selection from Poverty and Famines
▪ William Shack, Hunger, Anxiety, and Ritual in Food and Culture: A Reader
Colonialism, and Changing Consumption Habits
Selections from:
▪ Crosby The Columbian Exchange
▪ Judith Carney Black Rice
▪ Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
▪ Coe and Coe, The True History of Chocolate
▪ John C. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth Century Spanish
America.
▪ Naomichi Ishige, The History and Culture of Japanese Food, 105-139
▪ Stephen Mennell, “On the Civilizing of Appetite in Food and Culture: A Reader
▪ Norbert Elias from The Civilizing Process
▪ Counihan, C. “Bread as World” in Food and Culture: A Reader
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Food, Industrialization, Cultural Production of Nations
▪ Jack Goody, “Industrial Food: Towards the Development of a World Cuisine,”
in Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, 154-172; also in Carole Counihan and Penny
van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader
▪ Francesca Bray, The Rice Societies, 1-61, 113-139, 199-227
▪ Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self, 3-43, 63-98
▪ John Perkins Geopolitics and the Green Revolution
▪ Upton Sinclair, selections from The Jungle
Cuisine, Manners, and Class
▪ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 1-13,
169-200, 382-3
▪ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 3-4, 52-57, 68-72,
106-113, 131-140
▪ Frederick W. Mote, “Yuan and Ming” in Food in Chinese Culture
▪ M. Visser from The Rituals of Dinner
Modernization: Kitchens and the Gendering of Food Preparation
▪ Ruth Cowan Schwarz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household
Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, 40-73
▪ Laura Shapiro, “Do Women Like to Cook?” Granta 52 (1995) and Perfection
Salad (first two chapters)
▪ Ann Allison, “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: the Lunchbox as Ideological
State Apparatus” in Food and Culture
Food in Discourses of Health/Food as Social Movement
▪ James Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 201-238 (“Muscular Vegetarianism”)
▪ C. Biltekoff selection from Hidden Hunger: Food, Health, and Citizenship
from the Late 19th Century to the Obesity Discourse
▪ David Arnold, “The Discovery of Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India,”
Indian Economic and Social History History Review 31:1 (1994)
▪ Belasco, W. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food
Industry
▪ A. Julier “The Fat Pay All: Towards a Political Economy of Obesity” in Food
and Culture: A Reader
Food in the Formation of National and Immigrant Identities
▪ Jeffrey Pilcher, Que Vivan los Tamales
▪ Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in
Contemporary India” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:1 (1988)
▪ Krishnendu Ray selection from Migrant Meals
▪ Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in
the Age of Migration
Fast Food, Slow Food, and Globalization
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Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Theodore Bestor, “How Sushi Went Global,” Global Policy Forum,
November/December 2000
Barndt, D. excerpts from Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain
Rachel Laudan, “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New,
Fast, Processed Food,” Gastronomica 1:1 (Winter, 2001)
Julie Guthman “How Michael Pollan et al Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos”
Gastronomica
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