HIST 202 Food: A Global History
Humans share with all other living beings a fundamental need - nutrition in order to survive - but food has meaning that is uniquely part of the human experience. Societies have organized the production, distribution, and sharing of food and drink in many different ways and vested what and how they consume with a wide variety of meanings. Almost every major religious and philosophical tradition in the world has comprehended a particular understanding of food: prescriptive, moral, or scientific. Until very recently in history, most of human effort went toward simply feeding people, an almost incomprehensible gulf between the present day and the not so distant past. This course considers a range of historical societies from the Agricultural Revolution to the present, West and East; examines how biology, geography, climate, economics, and religion influence what people grow and eat, how food and eating have figured in global art and literature, and how encounters between different parts of the world have resulted in changes in the trade and consumption of consumable commodities; and analyzes the world's present-day relative food abundance as one aspect of modernity. This course counts as a foundational course in History or Political Theory within the liberal arts core requirements.