I’m currently in the process of designing an undergraduate course on food and agricultural issues, which I plan to teach in a year or so. I have to prepare a syllabus now, because it will be part of an application to create a new environmental studies major at the institute where I teach. I’m really excited about this course, which I’m tentatively titling “Food, Farms and Famine.” Because I need to demonstrate the relevance to environmental studies, I may change the title to “Debating the Future of Food” or perhaps something that sounds even more environmental in focus.
I have lots of ideas about readings and assignments, and I’ve found this collection of syllabi an invaluable resource. But this will be my first time teaching such a course, and I could really use your (yes, dear reader, your) suggestions. There are two main areas where I need help:
1) Selecting short readings that are appropriate for a fairly unsophisticated audience. My students are not sociology majors – they are mostly training to be engineers, have fairly conservative views, and don’t know a lot about recent political and environmental history. I need to choose readings that won’t immediately alienate and confuse them, while still challenging them to look critically at agri-food systems, hunger, consumption, and the environment. Do any articles, essays, book chapters, websites, etc. spring to mind? Any texts you just love and wish more people would read?
2) Selecting recent, semi-popular books for a “book review” assignment. I’ll ask students to choose a book from a list. I have many in mind (there’s certainly no shortage of food writing lately), but I’d like to hear what your favorites are.
I’ll be grateful for your input! And I’ll be happy to share my syllabus once it is complete.
Some of these are probably too obvious to be worth mentioning, but just in case:
Michael Pollan’s various books.
Barry Glassner’s “The Culture of Food”
I think Schwartz’s “The Paradox of Choice” would be interesting to read in a food context – one supposed benefit of the modern system is the incredible variety consumers have access to. Schwartz challenges some of the value of that variety.
“The Way We Eat” by Singer and Mason
“Blood, Sweat and Fear” is a nice report from the Human Rights Watch (by labor expert Lance Compa at Cornell) on workers in the meatpacking industry. A 2005 update of the Jungle. Bits might be overly technical, but it could be useful.
If you are looking for some more scholarly bits on the Fair Trade movement, I recommend April Linton’s articles, such as Levi and Linton 2003 “Fair Trade: A Cup at a Time”. Or another, perhaps better piece for this kind of course, here by Linton et al.
That’s all I can think of right now. Good luck with the course, and I look forward to seeing the final syllabus.
I have a TON of ideas, so will try to keep myself in line – I’m super excited to teach a food course myself next year. The ASFS syllabi collection is great, full of superstars and great ideas. Also, Michael Pollan’s website, http://michaelpollan.com/ has a very nicely organized list (in chronological order) of all of his NYTimes articles (under ‘Writing’). Some of those articles (e.g. the Life of A Steer) will grab anyone, engineers or sociologists.
I also encourage you to check out the food studies journals – Food, Culture & Society, Food and Foodways, and Gastronomica especially.
keep us posted!
Great suggestions, both of you! Thanks!
Foodgirl, I had my environmental soc students read Power Steer last semester and it totally BLEW THEIR MINDS. It was really exciting to see how they responded, and it was an excellent way to introduce commodity chain analysis.
I’m really hoping to find many more articles that will have a similar mind-blowing effect. If anybody has had great experiences in the classroom with particular readings, I’d be so grateful to hear about them.
ok, here’s a two more articles – the two that made me want to study food –
- NYTimes magazine – March 10, 1996 – How We Eat: An America Divided – 10 years old, but still powerful
- Harper’s magazine – also about 10 years ago, it’s Greg Critser’s article about fat and what turned into his book Fatland
this is also an awesome, more recent article:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/112.2/cullather.html
an article from Time about hot dogs (maybe to be talked about in conjunction with The Jungle?):
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906490,00.html
and here are some great websites:
- a comprehensive list of food books and films:
http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/booksfilms.html
- songs about food:
http://www.mixedup.com/foodsongs.htm
- a full house of 80’s commercials, a lot of which are about food items:
http://x-entertainment.com/downloads/
I’ve also heard (though I can’t find the link right now) of a class buying and bringing in fast food items, photographing them, and superimposing them next to their advertisement (to talk about the power and $ of advertising).
I can’t WAIT to teach my own class now!
I just read “Power Steer,” and while I guess I already knew about most of the things that happen, I’d never seen it laid out according to the cow’s entire life cycle — very powerful and interesting.
And of course, within five minutes of reading it, Brady says to me, “Do you want to have steaks for dinner tonight?”
Um, no. Not at all.