360°: Taste
What are the stories behind the flavors that we taste? How much of taste is individual, and how much is social? Why do some flavors taste good to us, while others don't? Why do different people sometimes have very different reactions to the same foods? How do taste preferences change across space and over time?
What are the stories behind the flavors that we taste? How much of taste is individual, and how much is social? Why do some flavors taste good to us, while others don't? Why do different people sometimes have very different reactions to the same foods? How do taste preferences change across space and over time?
What are the stories behind the flavors that we taste? How much of taste is individual, and how much is social? Why do some flavors taste good to us, while others don't? Why do different people sometimes have very different reactions to the same foods? How do taste preferences change across space and over time? This course cluster invites students to explore the histories, cultural meanings, and politics surrounding taste. We will examine how our tastes are influenced by factors like nationality, cultural group, socioeconomic class, and public discourse. We will also consider how we use our own tastes to understand, and even transform, the world around us. Ultimately, this focus on taste will allow us to investigate fundamental questions of universality and difference in the human experience.
Through both curated taste experiences and independent exploring, including a four-day field experience in New York City, we will learn to pay attention in new ways to what tastes we perceive as good or bad, familiar or strange. Instead of taking taste perceptions for granted as natural, we will consider through specific examples how these tastes are historically and socially constructed. We will also challenge ourselves to try new tastes, and to think critically about how our own experiences of new tastes are culturally and politically situated.
Courses
Food is part of the universal human experience. But everyday experiences of food also reveal much about human difference. What we eat is intimately connected with who we are, where we belong, and how we see the world. In this course, taught by Susanna Fioratta, we will use a socio-cultural perspective to explore how food helps us form connections and find belonging in families, national and religious communities, and other groups. We will investigate how food may become intertwined with notions of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in different contexts. We will also consider how food may become a source of inequality, a political symbol, and a subject of social discord. Examining both practical and ideological meanings of food and taste, this course will address issues of identity, social difference, and cultural experience.
This course, taught by Shiamin Kwa, will explore the connections between what we eat and how we define ourselves in the context of Chinese diasporic foodways. We will proceed from the assumption that food is an object of culture, and that our contemplation of its transformations and translations in production, preparation, consumption, and distribution has informed personal and group identity. This course takes the Chinese American dish “chop suey” as a case study and organizing principle, examining what is meant when we use the term “Chinese food.” We consider how ingredients and recipes move from host country to diasporic communities all over the world, and the different linguistic, political, and cultural shifts that accompany those movements. In our discussions we will focus on theories of narrative, place, translation, time, and adaptation as we read narratives about food in Chinese/America. Students will create their own food narratives to complement their critical and theoretical analysis.