Political Ecology of Food

In essence, food is a way of fulfilling a biological need—nutrition—within an ecologically and culturally defined context.  At the same time, it is a medium for expressing one’s sense of self in relation to a changing world of ideas and institutions.  Concerns about authenticity and identity, taste and distinction, health and safety converge when food is at issue, as feelings like comfort, pleasure, craving and deprivation.  This course explores the political ecology of food from the farm to the plate, looking at the connections between the well-being of land-based resources and human and non-human living beings.  It provides an understanding of changing agrarian systems and how access to food intersects with existing structures of social inequality.