Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session
Course Overview
This course will explore food in modern American history as a story of industrialization and globalization. Lectures, readings, and discussions will emphasize the historical dimensions of—and debates about—slave plantations and factory farm labor; industrial processing and technologies of food preservation; the political economy and ecology of global commodity chains; the vagaries of nutritional science; food restrictions and reform movements; food surpluses and famines; cooking traditions and innovations; the emergence of restaurants, supermarkets, fast food, and slow food. The core concern of the course will be to understand the increasingly pervasive influence of the American model of food production and consumption patterns.
Prerequisites
MIT students were required to obtain permission of the instructor.
Grading
| ACTIVITIES | PERCENTAGES |
|---|---|
| Class Participation | 20% |
| Sugar Six Ways paper | 20% |
| Research Paper Proposal and Bibliography | 10% |
| Final Paper | 50% |
Calendar
| SES # | TOPICS | KEY DATES |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | |
| 2 | Modern Ingredients | |
| 3 | Factories in the Fields | |
| 4 | Food Factories | Sugar Six Ways paper due |
| 5 | American Agriculture Visit from Prof. Deborah Fitzgerald | |
| 6 | What (Not) to Eat | |
| 7 | Abundance | Research Paper Proposal and Bibliography due 3 days after this session |
| 8 | Individual Meetings to Discuss Paper Proposal | |
| 9 | Hunger | |
| 10 | Supermarkets | |
| 11 | American Cuisine | |
| 12 | Nature | |
| 13 | Novelty and Tradition Visit from Prof. H. Paxson | |
| 14 | Potluck | Oral Presentations of Final Papers |