FST 005 A-Z - Special Topics in Food StudiesSemester Hours: 1-3
This course explores innovative and timely topics in food studies, which may include the cultural history of different foods, food movements, and political and social issues surrounding food.
Current Special Topics
FST 005A: Food and Media
In today’s media-saturated world, media plays a critical role in our perception of food and its impact on our lives. Through the exploration of the relationship between food and media (print, radio, television, film and social media), this course encompasses both critical and creative opportunities for students to delve into the deconstruction, evaluation, and creation of food media messages.
FST 005B: Caffeine Culture: Literature and Food
Imagine tasting something that has the power not only to enthrall your senses but also to change your conceptualization of your own cultural identity. Writers who have sought to capture transformative experiences like these in their short stories, novels, and essays give expression in their work to broader cultural and historical shifts. As we read their work through an interdisciplinary lens in this course, the fictional worlds that they create take on new dimensions. Impressionable or curious children and young adults often play the central roles in these fictional worlds, as do three principal products–coffee, tea, and sugar—that represent contrasts between self-discipline and overindulgence, as well as between comfort and deprivation. In turn, familiar as coffee, tea, and sugar may seem to be, the stimulating effects produced by mixing caffeine and sugar became part of the cultural rituals practiced in the West only when the modern world took shape and global trading networks were established, giving rise to new spaces of social interaction such as coffeehouses. Other texts in our course track imported food products like these back to their places of origin, to give voice to those who labor to cultivate these products, or in support of movements advocating for political reform and social justice. Our reading list will be comprised of literary texts, such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and selected chapters from Stanley Mintz’s Sweetness and Power; Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses; and Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire.
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