Writing
About Food & Culture
Dr. Michelle Hall Kells
“The
world begins at a kitchen table; no matter what, we must eat to live.” Joy
Harjo
Food as a cultural, social,
and rhetorical trope speaks to us across communities, place, and time. Good
food feeds the body and the soul. The purpose of this class is to create a
community of environmental thinkers and to cultivate opportunities for
considering our roles as citizens, activists, scholars (of place) through the
study of local and global food cultures. The rich literary and rhetorical
legacy of food culture and environmental discourse will be examined through
diverse textual artifacts (and genres) including the everyday rhetoric of menus
and recipes, film, poetry, speeches, essays, letters, creative nonfiction, food
reviews, and the multiple forms of food rhetoric in public culture.
This course will also focus
on literary and rhetorical texts representing the ecology of place with special
emphasis on New Mexico food cultures and food justice movements in relation to
land and water rights, food cultivation, natural resource loss, and biodiversity
depletion. Participation in field
exercises, guest lectures, and out-of-class learning environments will be
integral to this course. Our reading list will include environmental texts
within and beyond the Southwest region.
The study of food culture,
writing, and rhetoric calls attention to the means by which farmers, consumers,
environmental activists, scholars, and citizens represent and advance their
interests as individual agents and collective entities on behalf of diverse
communities. Food writing is social action; creative and symbolic; dynamic;
context-dependent; intrinsic to human communication; inherent to all forms of
social organization. These conceptual framing principles (as topoi) will inform
our analyses of place, citizenship, agency, and arguments about the multiple
uses of cultural/environmental resources—particularly the circulation of water
resources and the cultivation and distributions of food resources. Our class will be participating with UNM Lobo
Gardens and conducting field days in the Lobo Garden areas on campus for the
first eight weeks of the semester.
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