Homework #4: If you can go to a cafeteria/buffet/restaurant, write down what people throw out and how much do they throw out. When you observe, pay attention to details: who are the people who waste food (can you generalize about their age, gender, social status?), how is the space structured (lots of big trash cans, etc.), etc. Spend at least 30 minutes there and take notes. Add your commentary, analysis, critical reflection, conclusions. Include class discussions and readings to analyze your observations. Have a detailed record of at least 10 people. What did you throw out if you ate? Observe yourself for a day and take notes what you through out. Reflect on it in your paper. Be ready to discuss it and answer why in class. Post a two page paper of your observation/reflection before class. Your grade will be based on how detailed, comprehensive, and insightful your paper is; it should be an analysis (compare, contrast, reflect, interpret, use class insights, etc.), not a description.
Another option: Follow yourself and your friend or a family member for a week taking notes what kind of food (anything that is or was edible or drinkable, also food packaging or drink cans or bottles) you throw out. As your friend or a family member after a week to comment on your notes (why she or he threw out certain foods). Reflect and analyze your observations and notes in your paper. Be ready to discuss it and answer questions in class. Post a two page paper of your observation/reflection before class. Your grade will be based on how detailed, comprehensive, and insightful your paper is; it should be an analysis (compare, contrast, reflect, interpret, use class insights, etc.), not a description.
About the course: Food, taste and desire
Course description
This course explores food consumption as a meaningful practice embedded in local, national, and global relations and in social, economic, and political contexts. It explores how consumption of food mediates fashioning of a self, community, nation and the state; how by consuming food people reproduce power, authority, hierarchy as well as values and meanings; and how food economies invest in shaping needs, tastes, and desires as well as peoples bodies; how emotions, moralities and aesthetics are reproduced at supermarkets and dinner tables. It embraces food historically as well as an object of political economy, post/structuralism and semiotic analysis. The course will incorporate some experiential exercises, such as chocolate tasting.
Class materials may be used:
1. film Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story.
2. Film Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas by Natasha Schull
3. Clark, D. (2004) The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine Ethnology 43(1): 19-31.
