Nutrition and Culture

Catalog description

Students will use an ecological foundation for understanding why people eat the foods that they do and characterize the origins of nutrition disparities rooted in social inequities. This course will foster an informed and reasoned openness to, and understanding of, difference. Students will increase awareness of the connection between health outcomes, diet and nutrition, social structure, historic patterns and events, and cultural beliefs and ideology. Students explore food ways, food scripts, nutrition health beliefs and practices, demographic characteristics, social determinants of health, nutrition health outcomes and disparities across diverse communities within the United States. The course also uses theories of cultural competence, cultural humility, competemility and cumulative disadvantage to understand patterns of oppression, agency, resistance, equitable transformation in the food and nutrition system. Students will employ a critical analysis of macro-structural inequalities, societal stresses, and cultural norms that alter access and availability to healthy foods and disparately undermine the nutritional health of populations that are vulnerable to discrimination.