Food Geographies

Food is something none of us can live without. Food and eating help define who we are and cement our relationships across time and space. How do food and eating shape our social relationships and our understandings of environment and place? Where does our food come from, and what does it take to get it to us? These questions are fundamentally geographic. Exploring how food is produced, distributed, and consumed leads to a deeper understanding of societies and environments and their complex relationships. The understanding, interpretation and analysis of these relationships define the discipline of human geography. In this course we will take a critical approach to the study of food across multiple scales and through themes such as the geography of food in film, food waste, and labor in the food industry. We will explore the political, social, cultural and economic dimensions of food and eating in particular spaces, places, environments, contexts and regions, in order to provide both a rich survey of key themes in food geographies, and an advanced introduction to key concepts and modes of analysis in human geography. 3 hrs. lect.