ENGL 151-05, First Year Writing Seminar: The Politics and Poetics of Food, Spring 2012

Abstract

This is a course in critical thinking and writing that focuses on the topic of food. While food is a basic requirement for life, it is also an area of pleasure, recreation, and social and cultural meaning. People signal who they are and where they are from through what they choose to eat and what they refuse. The choice of what to eat, furthermore, has political, ethical, economic, social, physiological, and environmental implications. Topics of course readings and research will include the following: food, taste and pleasure; food and identity, the politics of hunger; food and the environment.