Exploring the Literature of Food: Current Trends in American Food Writing and Environmentalism

Catalog description

"Exploring the Literature of Food: Current Trends in American Food Writing and Environmentalism" begins by demonstrating the deep history of environmentally-minded agriculture in American thought. In the sample course, an understanding of the relationship between environmentalism and farming is developed through a consideration of thinking about food and food production in texts from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. These texts might touch on the importance of notions about the political importance of yeoman farmers, thoughts on the blending of cultivation and wildness, and late-nineteenth-century critiques of cruel and unsanitary industrial food production. The class might then turn to texts that argue for a return to sustainable agriculture in terms of Jeffersonian democracy and the ideal of the citizen-farmer. The topics raised in the first portion of the course include environmentalism, the role of labor in America, and the history of the industrialization of farming in the post-World War II era. From these origins, the course progresses into a consideration of the contemporary moment. It is clear that a great deal of change has occurred since mid-twentieth century critiques, and students are encouraged to trace the development of topics from the first portion of the syllabus in the later material. For example, the development of organic food standards by the FDA has resulted in a new system of organic industrial agriculture, which is compared to small scale agriculture by Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser updates muckraking investigations of labor and sanitation by turning to modern investigative journalism into the production of meat and the standards of uniformity set by fast food chains. The course ends with a consideration of the future of food as writers have imagined it. With a recommended experiential component, students are learning about the history of food production and writing about it while they encounter farmers who practice sustainable agriculture. Ideally, students learn from both the literature and from the farmer how something as practical as the production of food can be informed by philosophy and literature.