Course Description:

Given their sensory and embodied nature, food writing suggests a relationship between author and audience beyond mere reading. When one person writes down a recipe for someone else, a moment of cultural work occurs. The recipe writer imparts a history of family, self, and landscape, whereas the receiver re-enacts this complex history in cooking and consuming the dish.

In this seminar, we’ll discuss such cultural work by exploring literary genres that embed recipes. By “literary,” I mean the kind of writing we in English call “literary genres,” such as essays, memoirs, short stories, novels, and films. Yet we’ll also widen our discussions to include more broadly the private and public stories that food helps tell in such places as cookbooks, online, or around a dinner table. In each case, we’ll ask why it is that the foods we cook, eat, share, hoard, desire, reject, and adore come to shape our individual, familial, and communal memories and identities. Additionally, we’ll consider how stories of eating impact every aspect of our lives—from our bodies to our beliefs to our tastes. For what we say about food has a direct effect on our own, lived experience as well as on our collective identities. And because food is, and has been, gendered across numerous cultures and time periods, we will often discuss how food and foodways represent gendered ideas and how those ideas intersect with race, class, ethnicity, ability, and sexuality.

Yet food isn’t merely fuel or the stuff of story. It’s also political. Eating is an act of civil engagement, for the simple fact is this: if you eat, you’re participating directly in the industries and economies that produced your food. If you buy organic produce, you’re political. If you ate school lunch growing up, you’re political. If you choose to omit meat from your diet or mostly consume fast food, you’re political. Even more importantly, having access to food—fresh, healthy, and abundant—is a basic human right, and rights are always politicized.

Thus, to focus our discussions even further—and to make them more relevant and timely—our seminar will also consider ideas of sustainability within the literatures of food, including local and seasonal eating practices, organic vs. industrial farming methods, food access and food insecurity, and how identity markers affect these issues. To further underscore the fact that our eating practices can either sustain or poison our bodies, our souls, and our planet, in addition to engaging readings and writings that speak to issues of sustainability, we’ll also take part in service-learning and experiential activities, applying what we’re learning about food and environmental stewardship to real-world experiences at both farm and table.

These real-world experiences will include collaborations with Professor Barry Muchnick and the Kate Chandler Campus Community Farm, including a cookbook writing project on behalf of the Kate Farm and a Writer’s Harvest Fundraiser to support efforts to assuage food insecurity. We’ll also go on a few Epicurious Excursions, which will be opportunities for you to experience even more about the literatures of food “out in the field.” This fall, these Excursions will include time spent digging in the dirt at the Kate Farm; an opportunity to “read” a grocery story; a class visit and lecture with Prof. Wendy Wall from Northwestern University, an expert on early modern recipes and the Renaissance “makers” who created them; and a Sustainable Table meal with local chef Lisa Kelley out at her Real Food Studio: an experiment in producing honest, nourishing food for Southern Maryland.

Finally, you’ll also participate in a bit of cooking and eating alongside what you read, write, think, and dream—which constitutes our in-class “food lab.” But don’t fret! You do not need to have any sophisticated knowledge of food preparation, or fancy kitchen gadgets, to engage in our collective cookery.