ENGL 151-10, The Politics and Pleasure of Food, Spring 2008

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. The readings for this course range in topic from the pleasure of eating to the ethics of eating animals to the politics of fast food, slow food, and the global food chain. We will be attentive to the different disciplinary angles one can take on food (e.g. anthropological, economic, environmental . . .) as well as the different forms and genres writers use (e.g. restaurant reviews, memoirs, manifestoes . . .) The aim of this course is two-fold: to teach you how to produce college-level writing and to get you to think about food in a completely new way. Note: a certain amount of eating will be required for research purposes.