FST 2201 - Food – A Global History

Credits: 4
Anthropologist Sidney Mintzre marked once “Food is such a powerful dimension of our consciousness as living things, to omit it from the study of human behavior would be egregious.” This course will explore the history of food from the prehistoric world and the earliest hunting and gathering societies to the present, as we consider examples from every corner of the world. It will focus on how and why civilizations have been shaped by geography, flora and fauna and technological developments that have enabled humans to exploit natural resources. Feeding people has always been the primary concern of our species and more than any other factor ,finding, growing or trading food products has been the prime catalyst in human history. The scope of this course will be global, covering civilizations of Africa, Asia, Europe and America. The course will also cover the marginalized and colonized cultures that were dominated largely to feed or entice the palates of the citizens of the colonizing powers. A major theme of the course will be the process of globalization, imperialism and the growth of capitalist enterprise at the cost of indigenous cultures and traditional farming practices and how these processes were shaped by trade in food.

 
McDaniel Plan: International Nonwestern