Just Food: Food Writing for Social Justice
Food is cultural. Food is political. Food is historical. Of course, food is also basic to human survival, and all humans have a fundamental right to adequate nourishment. Yet this basic right is often curtailed due to where people live; the amount of money they have to spend; assumptions that are attached to people’s eating habits based on their identities; and national attitudes about producing, purchasing, cooking, and consuming food. As such, the food stories that circulate through a culture can have a powerful influence—for, in the words of Allison Carruth, “the ways we cultivate and consume food are tied to the imagination.” As a result, people’s memories and identities as well as their beliefs about the meaning of food itself are shaped by the stories of agriculture and eating that communities both create and share.
In this course, students study and produce food writing that makes a difference: that helps readers understand and also act on critical food issues related to inequalities linked to gender, class, race, and ethnicity. And while “Just Food” students are asked to study a range of essays, poems, and pieces of fiction as models of forceful and fearless food writing, the ultimate aim of this seminar is for students to become cause-driven food writers in their own right. For food is at the heart of how we humans understand ourselves, and it is also how we understand—and marginalize—others.
Readings for this seminar include pieces by public intellectuals and activists such as Julie Guthman, Raj Patel, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, A. Breeze Harper, and Mark Winne; creative nonfiction essays by sustainable food and food justice writers, including Wendell Berry, Jonathan Safran Foer, Roxane Gay, Barbara Kingsolver, Psyche Williams-Forson, and Ellen Meloy (among others); political food poetry from the collections Books that Cook and The Hungry Ear as well as the journal Alimentum; and the food justice novels My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg, and Delicious Foods by James Hannaham. And yet as students read, they will also write—crafting their own “Just Food” writing, including personal Ethical Eating essays to polemical Food Justice pieces to fictions that push at the symbolic and mythic boundaries separating people along culinary lines.
Beyond what students read and write, “Just Food” is also a service-learning class.Thus, students venture outside of the classroom, applying what they’re learning about food justice to real-world experiences of both farm and table.The course asks students to learn about food politics “in the field,” both literally and figuratively, and also to host a Locavore Potluck as well as organize a Writers’ Harvest reading to raise money for Share Our Strength, a DC organization fighting against child hunger.Ultimately, students will take what they’ve learned about food equity and culinary storytelling and apply it to a final service-learning project that helps nourish and nurture citizens right here in Southern Maryland, including members of the hunger community.