GU4200: Global Food Worlds | R. Feinberg

Committee on Global Thought
Undergraduate and Graduate Seminar
Th 2:10-4PM

Food is a deeply global object, one that manifests the complex ties structuring the contemporary world. Once a topic relegated to agricultural science, food has become a focus of the social sciences, one that exceeds the boundaries of any single discipline or perspective. The study of contemporary foodways demonstrates both the global interconnectedness of our world and the importance of local contexts and knowledges. While any given individual, household, region, or nation may have a distinctive set of food practices, each is constructed by a constellation of relations and exchanges, both past and present. This course takes a cross-cultural approach to explore how and why food makes worlds. It begins with the micro: examining how individuals and communities craft themselves through food practices, and considering how food serves as a site for struggles over power, sovereignty, and belonging.

The course then scales upwards to explore international systems of agricultural trade, labor, and migration, with a focus on the lives and places caught up in it. It concludes with a critical look at contemporary food politics and activism to consider possible food futures for the world we share. Readings combine ethnographic examples with a robust collection of social science theory, including the work of sociologists, historians, political economists, and geographers. Each weekly theme examines foodways in a different frame, and each prompts a different set of questions about how food shapes the world as we know it. 

Link to Vergil
Note: only courses offered during the two previous semesters have active Vergil links.