Anthropology 45860
Food and Culture
Spring 2015
Coached by Susan D. Blum
Food is material and symbolic, universally necessary in the animal kingdom yet culturally specific. Humans all have to eat, usually several times a day, but we infuse this basic act with complexity, meaning, danger, and sublimity. Our meanings are individual and shared, psychological and biological. The causes of our choices are momentary and epochal, and have consequences for social order as well as the fate of the planet as the Anthropocene plays out. In this course, we examine all the ways food touches human lives-- as many ways as we can squeeze into a single semester.
Food and Culture
Spring 2015
Coached by Susan D. Blum
Food is material and symbolic, universally necessary in the animal kingdom yet culturally specific. Humans all have to eat, usually several times a day, but we infuse this basic act with complexity, meaning, danger, and sublimity. Our meanings are individual and shared, psychological and biological. The causes of our choices are momentary and epochal, and have consequences for social order as well as the fate of the planet as the Anthropocene plays out. In this course, we examine all the ways food touches human lives-- as many ways as we can squeeze into a single semester.