Food, Language and Identity

Catalog description

Like language, food is a culturally loaded commodity tightly linked to cultural identity and used and needed by all human communities. Peoples and cultures develop their gastronomies using staple ingredients autochthonous to their regions. Food items move, travel, are shared, traded or exchanged, and enter in contact with foreign cultures that integrate and acculturate them to their own gastronomy and cuisine thus creating new cultural hybrids. Globalization imposes and facilitates this particular cultural exchange more intensely and faster than ever. This course explores the intrinsic relationship between food, language and identity: how food, like linguistic practices constitutes one of the most powerful vehicles of cultural identity. This course will be taught in English. Topics may vary. May be repeated for credit if content differs.