Eating and the Politics of Wellness

Catalog description

This course examines the construction of liberal humanism, gender, and transnational American empire by way of the stomach. Together we will analyze case studies of wellness foods and technologies to trace metaphors of eating, metabolics, and food-as-fuel through 20th century dietetics and industrial food production. Examining histories of diets and dieting, the foods created and circulated via U.S. militarism, and the impact of eugenics/Progressive era nutrition reform on our modern global food system, we will map the affective, material, and aesthetic afterlives of empire on the gut. Reading a collection of historical texts, visual media, and scientific journals, students are asked to think capaciously about the mundane act of eating and the benign concept of wellness.