Teaching Food and Culture

Candice L. Swift is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Vassar College and a founding director of the college’s Multidisciplinary Learning-Living Community on Food. She has studied Russian language, history, and culture in the former Soviet Union, conducted research on nationalism in post-Soviet Central Asia, and currently focuses on cultural citizenship and diasporic identification on the Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius. She has been teaching courses on food, culture, and sustainability for several years, and has initiated a number of service-based learning opportunities around issues related to food.Richard Wilk is Provost’s Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University where he directs the Food Studies Program. His recent edited books are Time, Consumption, and Everyday Life (with Elizabeth Shove and Frank Trentmann, Berg Publishers, 2009), and Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places (with Livia Barbosa, Berg, 2011). He has been teaching courses on food and culture and food, sex and gender for more than a decade.

“As Food Studies courses multiply and growing numbers of students are eager to reflect critically on all things food, this book offers stimulating ideas for topics, readings, and assignments to instructors, both veterans and new to the field. The editors have gathered thoughtful contributions that reach out well beyond anthropology, providing useful pedagogical tools to all those who want to teach about contemporary society with and through food.”—Fabio Parasecoli, The New School“Teaching Food and Culture offers exciting, innovative pedagogical approaches to topics across the spectrum of the anthropology of food. Firmly grounded in the authors’ respective specialisms, collectively these chapters demonstrate the vital importance in the study of food of connecting multiple perspectives, theories and methods. The volume will be an indispensable resource for teachers in the anthropology of food and food studies.”—Jakob Klein, Department of Anthropology and Food Studies Centre, SOAS, University of London, co-founder of the SOAS master’s programme in the Anthropology of Food

• Part 1: Teaching Food Chapter 1: Introduction: Teaching With and Through Food, Candice Lowe Swift and Richard Wilk Chapter 2: Interview with Sidney Mintz, Candice Lowe Swift and Richard Wilk Part 2: Nutrition and Health Chapter 3: Teaching Obesity: Stigma, Structure, and Self, Alexandra Brewis, Amber Wutich and Deborah Williams Chapter 4: Are We What Our Ancestors Ate? Introducing Students to the Evolution of Human Diet, Jeanne Sept Chapter 5: Just Milk? Nutritional Anthropology and the Single Food Approach, Andrea S. Wiley Part 3: Food Ethics and the Public Chapter 6: Teaching the Experience and Ethics of Consumption and Food Supply, Peter Benson Chapter 7: Ethnography of Farmers Markets: Studying Culture, Place, and Food Democracy, Carole Counihan Chapter 8: Using Volunteer Service in Courses about Food, Janet Chrzan Part 4: Food, Identity, and Consumer Society Chapter 9: Teaching Restaurants, David Sutton and David Beriss Chapter 10: Developing Pedagogies for the Anthropology of Food, Brian Stross Chapter 11: Teaching Communication and Language with Food, Amber O’Connor Chapter 12: The Last Course: Relating Research to Teaching about Food, Penny van Esterik