Eating Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Food

Everyone eats, it's an essential and universal part of human existence. But food is not just about calories and nutrition - it is rich with meaning and memory. In this course, we take a broad view of the social meanings of food, cooking, and eating to think about how food choices create and are produced by individual and group identities. We explore different methods that anthropologists use to study food, from the archaeological to the single ingredient study, and we deconstruct ideas about "natural" and "good" ways of eating by placing them in historical and transnational contexts. Enrollment by instructor consent.