ANTH 311 A: The Cultural Politics of Diet and Nutrition

Useful Links

Class Schedule

First Paper Assignment Prompt

Recipes

ANTH 489: Optional Service Learning: Garden Internships and CAGJ (2 credits)

489 Volunteer Sign Up Sheet: Please note that you are welcome to participate even if you are not registering for 489 credit.

Study Abroad Fall 2024: The Culture and Politics of Food in Italy (12-15 credits)

Class Time and Place: T, Th, 2:30-4:20 SMI 102

Instructor: Professor Ann Anagnost (anagnost@uw.edu)

Instructor Office Hours: T, Th (by appt after lectures or other times when mutually convenient on zoom)

Teaching Assistant: Shelby House (jshouse@uw.edu)

TA Office Hours: T, Th 1:15-2pm CMU 218C or on Zoom

Course Themes

This course investigates current debates within the United States about what dietary guidelines are optimal for maintaining human health and how shifting conceptions of individual responsibility, social welfare, and political life are framing these debates.

First, we will look at how science is used to investigate the relationship between diet and the incidence of chronic disease in the United States alongside the industrialization of our food system. We rely on science to inform us about the pros and cons of different dietary approaches, but science itself is a messy process, in which differing paradigms compete within the context of contending social, economic, and political forces. Therefore, we will take a "science and society" approach to the study of competing dietary models and develop an understanding of science as a complex social process.

Second, the course will explore the emergence of a new kind of health consumer who seeks to manage their exposure to disease risk factors through diet. The use of new technologies, such as blogs and other social media, will be explored as a means of disseminating dietary advice through the creation of online communities. These online communities put scientists, physicians, health professionals, and self-educating health consumers into dialogue with each other in ways that may be very new. In the search for wellness, health consumers are engaging in a form of science with themselves as singular experimental subjects. This creates an environment in which new actors, such as social media influencers in the domain of diet and lifestyle, parlay their success into a form of enterprise. We will be looking at how this form of "anecdotal" evidence is being weighed in relation to the more traditional forms of scientific research in discussions among members of these Internet communities.

Third, we will explore how social movements offer alternatives to the industrialized food system through farm-to-table sourcing, reclaiming home cooking, self-provisioning, school food reform, and efforts to build local and regional food systems. In particular, we will be looking at the issue of school food as an arena of social activism around food change to improve childhood nutrition.

Fourth, we will explore contemporary food ideologies and how these are expressed in the search for personal wellness, environmental sustainability, and social justice. How do people define their moral and ethical selves through food? What attracts them to a specific food philosophy? How does this affect their relations with others? How do they use the evidence of their bodies to weigh the pros and cons of different nutritional ideologies? What are the possible dangers of "obsessing about food too much?" How are we as individuals expected to take responsibility for our health and how can we redirect our gaze to explore the "commercial determinants of health" to gain a better understanding of how capitalism colonizes the body as a profitable enterprise.

Course Format and Requirements

The format of the class is lecture in the first hour and discussion based activities in the second hour. You will be expected to come to class having completed the reading for that day and be prepared to participate in discussion. 

Accessing Class Materials

The Class Schedule can be found here as well as in the useful links above. It is designed to make all of the assigned readings and films available to you one-click away. The shorter readings are linked as pdfs or hyperlinks to external resources. The reading assignment for the book listed below is linked to the UW Library Portal as an ebook.

• Janet Poppendieck, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. (Available as an ebook through the UW Library.)

I will be adding links for Powerpoints in pdf form in late morning before class so that students may download them if they wish to use them as a platform for note taking.

Writing Assignments

There are two essay assignments written in response to a prompt provided by the instructor. The essay topics are constructed to encourage engagement with the course material while also incorporating a personal dimension. It is a hybrid form that requires citation of the readings as a form of scholarly writing but combined with personal narrative (therefore the first person pronoun is allowed). The first paper will be a study of a social media platform focused on food, diet, and nutrition, using concepts introduced in the lectures and readings to do a critical analysis of the knowledge claims promoted through the site. The second essay is to narrate an ethical meal, more specifically, how you are expressing your ethical selfhood through the choices that you make in planning, sourcing and cooking your meal. This will require "hands on" activity on your part (i.e., shopping, cooking, and sharing a meal), so you may wish to familiarize yourself with the assignment early in the quarter to keep it in mind as you find opportunities to engage in meal preparation, for example a weekend visit home. If access to a kitchen is a problem, please let me know as soon as possible so that I might help you find a cooking buddy or other access to a kitchen facility on campus.

• An online research project on the "health blogosphere" (5 pages).
• Narrating an ethical meal (5 pages).

Discussion Groups

There are no sections for this class. The students will be divided into discussion groups of 10 or so students each for participation in the Discussion Boards. The membership of these groups will be constant throughout the quarter to help develop a learning community.

Each student is required to write a discussion post that is 2-3 paragraphs long for each of 10 (out of a possible 17)  discussion boards. The post may be in response to the prompt provided by the instructor, or on some other aspect of the reading/film that you would like to comment on.

In either case, it is important for you to include a quotation from the reading or a specific moment of a film that is required viewing to use as a jumping off point for your own commentary. In order to get full credit for these assignments, you must include a precise page number or time stamp (in the case of films) so that the instructors can find their way to your sources. The discussion post format is intended to document your engagement with the reading or film but also it is a good practice for the kind of engagement I am looking for in the two paper assignments. Each post is worth 3 points and should be approximately 250-300 words in length. 

Once you have submitted your post, you will then be able to read and comment on a post submitted by one of the other students in your group. Each student is responsible for commenting on 10 (out of 17) discussion boards on a post written by another student. The comment needs to be a substantive paragraph in that it cannot simply be a thumbs up but needs to develop a discussion to get full credit.  Each response is worth 2 points.

All discussion posts and responses for the week will be due by class time (2:30) on the day of the assignment. This is to ensure that you are keeping up with the assignments and will be ready for class discussion on the day they are assigned.

Credit Structure

• 25%     Health Blogosphere Research Project
• 25%     Ethical Meal Project
• 30%     Discussion posts (for 10 out of 17), 3 points each
• 20%     Responses to other student posts (for 10 out of 18), 2 points each
• 100%   Total 

Final grades will be calculated as follows: The total number of points will be 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.

Expectations
Success in this course will require keeping up with the readings and discussion posts.  Written work will be evaluated on the basis of demonstrating engagement with the course materials, which includes citing the readings and relevant quotes to develop your argument. The assignments are constructed to encourage critical thinking through making connections among the different components of the course: the lecture content (especially the critical concepts introduced in class), the readings and films, the class discussions (the discussion boards and in-class discussion activities), and on your personal experience of your interactions with diet culture. 

Class Email List: I will use the email list to communicate with you about changes in assignments, scheduling, and any other general classroom issues.   

Plagiarism Policy
Students are expected to do their own work. Plagiarism will not be tolerated and will result in zero credit for the assignment and possible further consequences in accordance with university policy and regulations. Information obtained from Internet sources must be acknowledged by citing the url (web address) and date of access, even if individual authors are not indicated.

For further information on how plagiarism is defined by the university and university policies regarding plagiarism, see the following website: http://www.washington.edu/uaa/gateway/advising/help/academichonesty.php (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Instructor Policy on the use of AI 

Artificial Intelligence tools are inappropriate for use in this course. An important outcome of this course is to strengthen your own abilities as a thinker and communicator. We will not be using AI tools to screen student work for AI input. Instead we will be attentive in our grading to the known deficiencies of AI generated texts that would be flagged as poor writing in any case.  

Writing is a form of thinking. It allows us to put things together in ways that we might not otherwise be able to do. While it involves struggle to put things together, there is tremendous satisfaction when suddenly things click into place. Don't deprive yourself of this opportunity to develop your powers of critical thinking and intellectual growth.

Students may be attracted to the use of AI as an efficiency, especially under the pressure of time in a busy 10-week quarter. But you will want to be critical of what AI has to offer:

(1) AI is not a search engine to find the right answer. It is a language machine. This means that what it spits out will have an air of authoritative plausability. Unlike a search engine, you are not given the opportunity to vet your sources and choose among different possibilities. You will need to see how well the "facts" of AI generated text line up with other forms of evidence (i.e., the materials offered in this course). 

(2) AI will synthesize answers from diverse sources with a high likelihood of incorporating false information ("hallucinations") and inherent biases and exclusions. It is not transparent in how it sources information and in fact "sources" are often misreported or attributions that are not even real. You will need to be meticulous in citing sources for evidence used in your argument.

(3) There is no "mind" in AI, it is merely creating a language chain based on statistical probability. Any meaning making of what AI spits out is in the mind of the reader. It is important to be critical of what AI cobbles together.

(4) There are important privacy protection issues. You might want to be wary of sharing your personal information in your interactions with this new technology because you will not be able to control how it may be used in the future.

(5) There are also sustainability issues involved with the use of AI. It requires vast amount of resources. A central concern of the content for this course will be to explore how we can use the world's resources in a more sustainable way to ensure our own health and the health of the planet. The use of AI to generate assignments for this course would be counterproductive to the aims of this course and also for the future that we may collectively wish to nurture.

(6) The assignments for this course are structured to encourage you to put things together in a creative way. There is no one right answer. Each student will make their own unique set of connections among the critical concepts presented in lectures, the readings and films, and their own unique investigations, experience, and reflection. AI generated text will tend to be anodyne (bland and neutral) and will likely lack that sense of creative spark or point of view. If I receive an essay that is a typical product of AI, it is unlikely to receive full marks for that reason.

(7) I can't prevent you from using AI in doing your assignments nor is it desirable or possible for me to use AI to detect the student use of AI. And believe me I am being heavily marketed at by products with the unlikely promise to do just that! Nor do I want to create a climate of suspicion and surveillance in the learning environment. I urge you to not give in to the temptation to use it to complete the assignments for this course.

COVID Policy Update:

The instructor may wear a mask if infection rates start to rise. Students are encouraged to let the course instructors know if a microphone is needed.

Here are the guidelines issued by the UW as of 9/28/2023:

Trigger Warning:

This class will include material that critiques moral judgments about body size. The objective of the course is to redirect our gaze away from individual responsibility and toward the toxic food environment of industrial food as a causal factor in the obesity epidemic. However, if you have struggles with eating disorders now or in the past, you might want to discuss your plan to take this course with your health care support team to make sure that this will not hinder your progress towards well-being.