ANTH 361 A: Anthropology of Food

Instructor: Ann Anagnost (anagnost@uw.edu)

Place and Time: GLD 435, T, Th, 3:30-5:20 pm

Office Hours: After class T and Th. We can also set up an individual meeting on Zoom.

COURSE SYLLABUS

Class Format:

Given that we live in a time of uncertainty with respect to COVID, the current plan is to meet in person. However, I acknowledge the possibility that I or my students may need to quarantine due to having symptoms or because we have been exposed to the virus. If you are not able to attend due to illness, it will be your responsibility to let me know at least an hour before class, so that I can set up a zoom link for remote access. In the (hopefully) unlikely event that I am unable to attend class, I will send a class email asap so students will know that the class will be on zoom.

Needless to say, we will be following University regulations regarding masking. I will continue to mask myself and using a voice projection microphone, if need be, to mitigate the muffling effect of speaking through a mask. Student feedback will be important to make sure this is working, so don't be afraid to speak out. 

Please do not attend in-person if you are experiencing symptoms. If you are aware you have been exposed please stay home and attend on zoom, even if you are not experiencing symptoms. The zoom link should ensure that you are not missing out on class presentations and discussions.

I have endeavored to make this website as simple as possible by making course resources one-click away. So this home page should be the place to go for access to the Discussion Boards, Powerpoints, Zoom links (when needed), readings, videos, and assignment drop boxes. I will be using the class email list to send updates and reminders for paper due dates, so please keep an eye out for those emails. If you find that a link does not work or if you have other feedback on how the home page is working for you, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Course Themes

At the beginning of remote learning in 2020, I added a new unit to this class called “Nurturing Life in a Time of Pandemic.” Even as we transition back to on-campus learning, we continue to face significant challenges in our food systems due to the pandemic. In the "after times" of COVID, much of the infrastructure of our every day lives has dramatically changed, in some instances these changes may be long lasting. I have therefore decided to retain this special focus on the lessons we can learn to help us in our present circumstances. The tricky balance I am trying to strike here is how to face the challenges of a society coping with a pandemic, economic uncertainty, and climate change without being overwhelmed. I don’t want to make the course too heavy, but rather to open up some hopeful spaces for thinking how things could be otherwise and hopefully to imagine a practical politics to achieve it.

In light of this, we will begin by looking at two current discussions in the humanities: (a) the politics of care and (b) broken worlds thinking to start us thinking about these issues in relation to our food systems.

Politics of Care: Never has a crisis more clearly revealed the dangers of a lack of universal healthcare for the public health. The COVID virus transcends all boundaries: race, class, nation, age, while also revealing the fragile infrastructure of our health care systems and a failure of an organized governmental response at the federal level that affects poor people more dramatically. What should be our desired model for care in this instance? And how do we endeavor in ways large and small to advocate for it? Our first reading “Radical Care for Uncertain Times” will address these questions. 

Broken Worlds Thinking: Our second reading will introduce us to a critical querying of the importance of maintenance and repair in a neoliberal economic culture focused, perhaps too insistently, on innovation and capital accumulation at the expense of sustainability and resilience. The pandemic has revealed the hidden truths of how the industrial food system relies on unsustainable structures of production and distribution that also lead to inequities to food access. What work-arounds and new directions emerge from a moment of crisis? 

Main Course: The third reading by Judith Farquhar on food and the good life will then lead us into the central focus of the course on food as an embodied aspect of culture. We will be exploring the intersection of anthropological writings about food culture and the senses, and other topics such as food and identity, food and memory, the power of food to make community, and food as a means to construct ethical selfhood. In other words, we will be exploring how food is always "more than just food" in the ways that it conveys meaning and expressions of care, and how it connects us to our social and natural worlds. The objective here is also to get us to consider what means to have a pattern of eating that is deeply culturally embedded. How has the industrialization of the food system disrupted that connection to the point where we constantly need to seek advice of the proper way of eating? In keeping with our opening focus on radical care and broken worlds, we will also direct our attention to how these explorations might be a resource for learning how to nurture ourselves and others in difficult times. What lessons can we learn to help us in our current situation?

Course Requirements.

Each set of readings will have its corresponding discussion board on Canvas where students can post a short reading response, at least 300 words, that will be submitted prior to class to generate class discussion. A prompt will be provided, although you need not necessarily be limited by the prompt question if there is another topic that moves you. These responses can be highly personal, but please be aware that you are publishing them to the class. The reading responses are low stakes assignments and are ungraded but they count for points indicating completion of the assignment. To be given full credit for this assignment, you must address some aspect of the reading by identifying a passage from the reading as the jumping off point for your comment. This is good practice for how to engage with the readings in the short essay assignments that are the graded portion of the course. There are altogether 16 reading sets for this course and each student is responsible for writing briefs for 10 of them, so you have some flexibility in choosing which readings to respond to. However, all students are expected to complete the readings for all sessions and be ready to discuss them in class.

The graded assignments will take the form of three mini-essays (each three pages in length, 800-1000 words) written in response to a prompt. These mini essays will be graded on how well the writing responds to the prompt and demonstrates thoughtful processing in terms of making connections with the readings and other course materials.

The mini-essays will take the form of a writing genre called the “familiar essay.” These essays can be highly personal in connecting to your own experience but they must open up to larger questions that we are developing in this class. This means that they should demonstrate active engagement with the readings and other materials. In other words, the mode of writing is a hybrid between personal (allowing the use of the personal pronoun) and more formal academic writing with in-text citation of the readings. I will be assigning examples of creative food writing to inspire you to do your best writing. 

W Credit Option:

For students wishing to receive optional Writing Credit for this course, you should revise two of the three papers in response to feedback from  the Writing Center at Odegaard (Links to an external site.), or from a peer review partner.

The peer review process will take place on our "paper workshop" days. This is an opportunity for you ask questions about the assignment and/or exchange papers with a peer review partner in class. There will be no reading assignments for those days to give you more time to work on your papers.

Both the first draft and final copy should be uploaded on Canvas. The final copy may be uploaded as an attachment to the first document. Please identify "first draft" and "second draft" as part of the document name.

You will need to prompt me at the end of the quarter that you are requesting the W credit option. I will be sending out an email to remind you near the end of quarter. 

Hands-on Activities with Food

Originally this class included four group cooking activities in the Husky Den Kitchen. These activities were closely tied to the course readings and discussions for the class. We cooked a meal together that reflected the "food views" of four of the food cultures we read about. Much to my regret, this will not be possible this quarter due to restrictions imposed by university COVID policies. But the menu plans are included in the course schedule in hopes that some of you would be interested in trying them out at home.  I welcome your including commentaries on your cooking activities as supplementary material to your responses to the discussion prompts and mini-essays. Recipes and photos are also welcome as add-on elements to your written work.

Point Breakdown

Total: 100 points

How Grades Will Be Calculated: Grades will NOT be calculated according to the Canvas Grade Sheet, but as follows: total number of points multiplied by 4 and divided by 100 to convert to the 4.0 scale. If there is a decimal remainder of .5 or higher, it will be rounded up.

Course Materials:
All of the shorter readings are available as hyperlinks on the class schedule below. You will also find a link to the discussion board for that day on the schedule. The Powerpoints will be added as we go. I usually post them in late morning before class in case you wish to use them as a platform for note taking. 

The assigned books are all available as e-books) through the UW Library Portal and a link is provided for each on the class schedule. We will be reading significant portions of the four books listed below and the library has a license for unlimited users, so online access should not be a problem. The pandemic has presented us with an economic shock as well as a public health challenge, so I have endeavored to make costs for this course as minimal as possible. 

Books:

• David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory.
• Carol Counihan, Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence.
• Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China.
• Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing.

ANTH 489 Service Learning Opportunity:

If you are interested in getting out of the classroom and getting your hands dirty you are welcome to sign up for 2 additional credit hours of service learning in Anth 489: Anthropology Practicum.  I am a gardener at the Picardo Farm Community Garden (located on 25th Ave NE about two miles north of campus near to Dahl Playing Field and on the 372 bus route) and I have arranged with Alexandria Soleil, our volunteer coordinator, to set up opportunities for student volunteering. Most of the activities for fall will be harvesting, gleaning, making compost, and preparing the gardens for winter. A particular focus this fall will be building a raised bed area to expand access to gardeners with disabilities. It would be best to put your hours in earlier rather than later, as the garden tasks will be fewer as we get into colder weather. October is a lovely time to be working in the garden.

Practicing the COVID guidelines is obligatory (social distancing, masking, hand washing, remaining out of doors, sitting out if you have been exposed to someone with COVID or are feeling symptoms).

Students would need to commit to 15 hours of volunteer work for 2 credits and turn in a short essay (3-5 pages) documenting their learning at the end of the quarter. I will be holding regular work parties every Saturday 10-1 until early November. I will also be posting updates to the student volunteers about work parties organized on other days by Picardo Farm. I live close by and can also help direct student volunteers according to a schedule that works for everyone. So if you are not available during the work parties, I may be able to meet you at the garden and get you started on a task.

To register for this option, please send me an email so I can give you an add code. 

Here is the link for a Google doc that will show you the intern opportunities and where you can sign up. It will be helpful to know how many students to expect ahead of time. I will be adding further opportunities as I hear of them. Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18FVFws72D3Pf9kh2BVflPH0J1OoGPDVQWQ5kQtG-JUg/edit