Food Politics in Latin American History

Catalog description

This course uses food its production, marketing, cooking, consumption, and cultural and symbolic values as a window through which to study the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, from the Spanish conquest to the present. It connects everyday experiences of cooking and eating by nameless ordinary people to global economic, political, and ideological trends; in so doing, it politicizes the ordinary and grounds the global in the local. As an important site of struggle, food politics shed light on: relations of class, race, and gender; nation-building; modern agribusiness; labor and consumption in the global food chain; and Latino immigration to the U.S.