This course offers students the opportunity to engage with a newly emerging field of historical scholarship: food history. Food, its production, marketing, preparation and consumption is the product of particular societies and cultural practices and, ultimately, food has a history. Drawing upon the recent international and national literature this class offers a social and cultural history of Canada through food. Employing the traditional analytical categories of social history (race, gender, class and nation/region) provides us with the tools to understand the expansion of food products and commercialization; the growth of fast food empires; immigration and "ethnic" cuisine, the gendered dynamics of the kitchen, the farmyard and the grocery store; food safety and social justice; and now, most recently, our fascination with sustainability, organic foods and so-called '100 mile diets.' Weekly hours: 1.5 Lecture hours and 1.5 Seminar/Discussion hoursPermission of the Department. Prerequisite(s): 3 credit Note:Students who took the earlier iteration of this class as a HIST 398.3 (2011 and 2012) may not take this course for credit.
This course offers students the opportunity to engage with a newly emerging field of historical scholarship: food history. Food, its production, marketing, preparation and consumption is the product of particular societies and cultural practices and, ultimately, food has a history. Drawing upon the recent international and national literature this class offers a social and cultural history of Canada through food. Employing the traditional analytical categories of social history (race, gender, class and nation/region) provides us with the tools to understand the expansion of food products and commercialization; the growth of fast food empires; immigration and "ethnic" cuisine, the gendered dynamics of the kitchen, the farmyard and the grocery store; food safety and social justice; and now, most recently, our fascination with sustainability, organic foods and so-called '100 mile diets.' Weekly hours: 1.5 Lecture hours and 1.5 Seminar/Discussion hoursPermission of the Department. Prerequisite(s): 3 credit Note:Students who took the earlier iteration of this class as a HIST 398.3 (2011 and 2012) may not take this course for credit.
