Food, Culture, Ethics, and Religion

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the complex intersecting relationships between food, culture and ethnicity, ethics and religion, as well as society and globalization. It introduces students to the symbolic, socio-cultural, political and economic, as well as moral-ethical roles that food plays in shaping how peoples in different cultures and societies across history and geography have defined themselves through their foodways. It critically analyzes the multiple intersecting relationships between food, ethnicity and culture, ethics and morality, as well as the transnational forces of globalization in shaping contemporary food systems, food production and consumption in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic contemporary US society shaped by forces of ongoing transnational migration. It explores how food choices and preferences both influence, as well as influenced by intersecting socio-cultural, as well as moral-ethical forces arising from constructions of ethnicity, gender, class, nationality and national origin, as well as religion and human spiritualities. It will use historical and contemporary food practices as a lens through which we can understand the ongoing processes of globalization, intersecting dynamics of power, socio-economic class, ethnic identity, as well as the implications of colonialism, industrialization, and globalization on food in human cultures and societies. Offered as ETHS 246 and RLGN 246 . Counts as a Communication Intensive course. Counts as a Human Diversity & Commonality course. Counts as a Moral & Ethical Reasoning course. Prereq: Academic Inquiry Seminar (AIQS).