Food and Asia

Catalog description

Can we identify a distinctive Asian food and food culture? Challenging attempts to define heterogenous gastronomic practices as authentic reflections of a static Asian identity, this course discusses how food, diet, and cuisine have been integral to shaping boundaries of culture, identity, and nation across geographical and temporal divisions in Asia. We will examine how people use daily and visceral food experiences to imagine themselves as members of a given community, be it a nation, ethnicity, class, gender, or religion, while also examining how food practices constantly challenge that fixation and redraw these categories. Through examining a wide range of materials in diverse disciplines, ranging from reading historical and anthropological studies to watching ?food porn? and TV cooking shows, we will discuss topics related to cookery and the media, colonialism and culinary modernity, food production and consumption, gender and cooking, food and (trans)nationalism, diaspora and globalization of food as well as eating and inequality. (ASIAN-SC)