How food is political and how it can be used as a key to understand societies? This seminar offers an overview of the rapidly expanding field of cultural and historical food studies. Using case studies and research on 20th century Europe, it shows how scholarly investigations into a seemingly banal topic - food, can deliver rich and profoundly substantial information on societies. Looking at the multitude of meanings, which people attribute to food and food-related practices, the reading material and discussions allow to consider the links of food to personal and group identities, to power, class, ideologies, state-making practices, social policies among others. The seminar helps students to develop their critical and analytical thinking, as well as skills in academic discussions and writing.
Evaluation
The evaluation is based on class participation and an assignment: an essay of 3500 words on a topic, related to the seminar discussions.
Structure of the seminar
- Introduction: How food is political?Â
- Sources in food history. How a historian reads a cookbook.
- Taste, habit and identity. What is “food psychology” and what are its political uses.
- “Banal” nationalism and food. The raise of national cuisines and what EU policies do to them.
- Culinary diplomacy versus gastrodiplomacy. Food as an instrument in international politics.
- Doing and undoing gender in the kitchen.
- Urban food production and modernity (Food in New Towns in the East and in the West)
- Class and dining out: restaurants, canteens and street food as class markers in 20th century Europe.
- Kursleiter/in: Albena Vladimirova Shkodrova-Desmet