Readings with links below are Open Access, published through Digital Commons, or are available through Brooklyn College Library with your student login. Readings without links are available on Blackboard.

August 26: Course overview

• Cramer, Sarah E. 2020. “No Vegetarians in a Pandemic.” Gastronomica 20 (3): 12–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2020.20.3.12.
• Dungla, Alejandro. 2020. “Uncertainty and Broken Foodways.” Gastronomica 20 (3): 99–101. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2020.20.3.99.
• Colquhoun, Anna. 2019. “Making Good Meat: From Draft Animal to Local Speciality.” Gastronomica 19 (1): 94–95. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2019.19.1.94.

Introduction to anthropologies of food

September 2

• Farquhar, Judith. 2006. “Food, Eating, and the Good Life.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Y Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 145–60.
• Gottlieb, Dylan. 2015. “‘Dirty, Authentic…delicious’: Yelp, Mexican Restaurants, and the Appetites of Philadelphia’s New Middle Class.” Gastronomica 15 (2): 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2015.15.2.39.
• Skim this reading: Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. “Chicken.” In When Species Meet, 265–74. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

September 9

• Neuman, Nicklas. 2019. “On the Engagement with Social Theory in Food Studies: Cultural Symbols and Social Practices.” Food, Culture & Society 22 (1): 78–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2018.1547069.
• Sutton, David. 2008. “A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 75 (1): 157–80.

September 16

• Benson, Peter, and Edward F. Fischer. 2007. “Broccoli and Desire.” Antipode 39 (5): 800–820.
• Mintz, Sidney W. 2013. “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness.” In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 3rd ed., 91–103. New York: Routledge.

September 23

• Guest lecture on Food Sovereignty and Public Health http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/centers/wolfe/hess/2019-20.php with Sarah K. Khan and Winona LaDuke.
• Students should prepare questions for the speakers and post them to the Blackboard forum with this week’s date.
• UPDATE: the event organizers would like us to send our prepared questions by Friday, 9/18. Please try to post some questions before then.
• To prepare questions, review the following:
  • Sarah K. Khan’s short film Bowing to No One on Vimeo. Password to watch: btno
  •  This NPR piece about wild rice harvest, featuring Winona LaDuke. Also check out the several other recordings at the bottom of that page about the harvest and LaDuke. (Update: those files don’t play on the NPR site, so I put copies of them on the Resources page here.
  • There is also an interview with Winona LaDuke on Blackboard.
  • You can also check out Sarah K. Kahn’s other short films on migrant kitchens.

Making meaning, circulating value(s)

September 30

• Caplan, Pat. 2000. “‘Eating British Beef with Confidence’: A Consideration of Consumers’ Responses to BSE in Britain.” In Risk Revisited, edited by Pat Caplan, 184–203. Anthropology, Culture, and Society. London: Pluto Press.
• Weiss, Brad. 2011. “Making Pigs Local: Discerning the Sensory Character of Place.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (3): 438–61. https://works.bepress.com/brad-weiss/1/

October 7

• Foster, Robert J. 2008. “Qualifying Products: Trademarks, Brands, and Value Creation.” In Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea, 75–97. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Pratt, Jeff. 2007. “Food Values: The Local and the Authentic.” Critique of Anthropology 27 (3): 285–300. https://journals-sagepub-com.ez-proxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu/doi/abs/10.1177/0308275X07080357

October 14

• Meneley, Anne. 2007. “Like an Extra Virgin.” American Anthropologist 109 (4): 678–87. https://anthrosource-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ez-proxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.2007.109.4.678

Politics, territory, capital

October 21

• Poe, Tracey N. 2002. “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915–1947.” In Food in the USA: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, 91–108. New York: Routledge.
• Weiss, Brad. 2014. “In Tastes, Lost and Found: Remembering the Real Flavor of Fat Pork.” In Fat: Culture and Materiality, edited by Christopher E. Forth and Alison Leitch, 33–51. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://works.bepress.com/brad-weiss/24/

October 28

• Netz, Reviel. 2000. “Barbed Wire.” London Review of Books, July 20, 2000. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n14/reviel-netz/barbed-wire.
• Specht, Joshua. 2019. “Introduction.” In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America, 1–20. Histories of Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

November 4

• Gaudio, Rudolph P. 2003. “Coffeetalk: Starbucks^TM and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation.” Language in Society 32 (5): 659–91. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/09D20673E570D48BF79DAB49C231D2A3/S0047404503325035a.pdf/div-class-title-coffeetalk-starbucks-and-the-commercialization-of-casual-conversation-div.pdf
• Peekhaus, Wilhelm. 2011. “Primitive Accumulation and Enclosure of the Commons: Genetically Engineered Seeds and Canadian Jurisprudence.” Science & Society 75 (4): 529–54. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2011.75.4.529.

November 11

• Ficek, Rosa E. 2019. “Cattle, Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of the Anthropocene in and out of Human Projects.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S260–71. https://doi.org/10.1086/702788.
• Levy, Jonathan. 2012. “Trading the Future.” In Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, 231–63. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Food (in)justice

November 18

• Paxson, Heather. 2019. “‘Don’t Pack a Pest’: Parts, Wholes, and the Porosity of Food Borders.” Food, Culture & Society 22 (5): 657–73.
• Siskind, Janet. 2002. “The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality.” In Food in the USA: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, 41–58. New York: Routledge.

December 2

• Folch, Christine. 2008. “Fine Dining: Race in Prerevolution Cuban Cookbooks.” Latin American Research Review 43 (2): 205–23.
• Joassart-Marcelli, Pascale, and Fernando J. Bosco. 2014. “Alternative Food Projects, Localization and Neoliberal Urban Development: Farmers’ Markets in Southern California.” Métropoles, no. 15 (December). https://doi.org/10.4000/metropoles.4970.

December 9: Course wrap-up

• Annear, Christopher M. 2004. “‘GM or Death’: Food and Choice in Zambia.” Gastronomica 4 (2): 16–23. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2004.4.2.16.
• Jacob, Dianne. 2003. “The Fine Art of Feeding the Hungry.” Gastronomica 3 (4): 14–20. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2003.3.4.14.

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