FOOD, SOCIETY AND POLITICS

Course Objectives: Food provides a lens through which we explore inequalities and hierarchies in society. Thinking through and with food we may understand societal relations of class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. We also explore the ways in which food is used in politics in the macro scale and has become a political instrument in everyday lives. Food is a means of communication, i.e., we communicate identity, power and politics through food. The aim of this course is to use food to think through/with to understand complex societal relations and politics.

Course Content: Food plays a central role in our daily lives not only as an everyday bodily activity, but also as a source of cultural politics. When turned into a cuisine, food becomes a privileged area for studying power relations in building and separating individual, communal, and national identities. This course offers a critical analysis of the relationship between food and people by focusing on the issues of culture, meaning, identity and power. Throughout the course we explore various topics, such as food and national politics; the political economy of food; food and globalization; food, body and culture; and food in the media.