ANTH 361 A: Anthropology of Food

Instructor: Ann Anagnost (anagnost@uw.edu)

Place and Time: DEN 259, T, Th, 3:30-5:20 pm

Credit Hours: 5

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

Important Links:

ANTH 489: Anthropology Praticum (Garden Internship at Picardo Farm) Optional 2 credits for ANTH 361 students.

ANTH 411: The Culture and Politics of Food in Italy (Study Abroad Spring 2026)

COURSE SYLLABUS

Website Format:

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 after we have transitioned 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 appear to be long lasting. More recently, we find ourselves in the midst of massive changes to how we are being governed. Many of us are worried about the erosion of civil liberties and uncertain access to health care and social security. How can we think creatively about how to build community resilience in the face of these challenges. I have therefore decided to retain this special focus on the lessons we can learn to help us in our present circumstances. This aspect of the course will also be a core learning framework for the Garden Internship Practicum linked above which will be focused on how neighbors can mobilize and support vulnerable populations through food sharing.

Therefore, 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: Covid clearly revealed the dangers of a lack of universal healthcare for the public health. The virus transcended 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? In our present moment, we see the further dismantling of the structures that underlie social resilience in the interests of capital accumulation by the very few. What resources can we work with to build community and a vibrant civil society? Are there things we can be actively doing instead of endlessly doom scrolling?

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 circumstances?

A further topic I am adding for the first time is to delve deeper into the biology of sense perception and thinking about food as "information" between our body and its environment.

Course Requirements

Discussion Boards

Each set of readings will have its corresponding discussion board on Canvas where students can post a short discussion post, approximately 250-400 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 17 reading sets for this course and each student is responsible for discussion posts for 15 of them. However, students are expected to complete the readings for all sessions and be ready to discuss them in class.

Mini-Essays

The graded assignments will take the form of three mini-essays (each 5 pages in length, about 1250 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 writing (allowing the use of the personal pronoun) and more formal academic writing with in-text citation of the readings. 

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, or from a peer review partner. I encourage you to recruit a peer review partner as you get to know fellow students in the interactive classroom activities. 

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. 

Instructor Policy on Use of AI and Chat GPT (click link to learn more)

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 new policies on kitchen access. 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.

Those of you participating in the Garden Internship are welcome to participate in the our cooking activities for the Maple Leaf Lutheran Church Nightly Shelter. We will be drawing on menus created for this course in the meals we will be cooking and sharing with the Shelter population. 

I welcome you to include commentaries on these or your other 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.

Participation Grade:

Ten points will be assigned based on participation in interactive learning activities in class. The in-class activities are intended to create an interactive learning community to share and develop your thinking on the course materials. This is an important part of the learning process. We be doing small-group discussions with reports back to the class as a way of developing large group discussions.

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. 

All of the assigned books are available as e-books through the UW Library Portal and a link is provided for each on the class schedule. The book by Michael Twitty is also available as an audiobook through the library. It is also available as an ebook and audio book through the Seattle Public Library. The audio book is read by the author and it is absolutely delightful.

Books:

• Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. 
• 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.