Introductory description

Eating is a deeply human activity. Language, and the human species itself, perhaps developed out of our desire to cook and share food. Yet the way we eat now may be destroying important aspects of human society and the environment itself. How did we get into this mess?

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Introduction: Food as a Total Social Fact
2. A Brief History of Agriculture
3. Colonialism, Improvement and Economic Botany
4. Famine, Entitlement and Inequality
5. Industrial Food and Imperialism
6. Reading Week (no lecture or seminar)
7. Vegetarianism
8. The Cookbook as Document
9. Authenticity, Tradition and Nationalism
10. Restaurants
11. Calories, Vitamins and Nutritional Science
12. Cooking at Home: Technologies
13. Developmentalism, Green Revolutions, and GMOs
14. Religion
15. Feeding Cities: Markets, Supermarkets, and Urban Gardens
16. Reading Week (no lecture or seminar)
17. Neoliberalism, Food Security and Food Sovereignty
18. Dieting, Discipline and Fat as a Feminist Issue
19. The Art of Food
20. Food and the Environment
21. Revision Session

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of historical and theoretical interpretations of the study of the global history of food.
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material for the study of the global history of food, including electronic resources.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

• Adams, Carol, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (London, 2015). • Belasco, Warren and Philip Scranton, eds., Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (London, 2002). • DiMeo, Michelle, and Sara Pennell, eds., Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550-1800 (Manchester, 2013). • Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster, eds., The Recipe Reader (London, 2004). • Gabaccia, Donna, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, 1998). • Harris, Marvin, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (1998). • Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann, Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (New York, 2009). • Khare, R.S., The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists, State University of New York (Albany, 1992). • Laudan, Rachael, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, University of California Press (Berkeley, 2013) • Malaguzzi, Silvia, Food and Feasting in Art (2008). • Neuhaus, Jessamyn, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore, 2003). • Orbach, Susie, Fat is a Feminist Issue, Paddington Press (New York, 1978) • Panayi, P., Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food (London, 2008). • Ranta, Ronald and Ichijo, Atsuko, eds., Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From the Everyday to the Global, Palgrave Macmillan (London, 2016). • Schanbacer, William, The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict between Food Security and Food Sovereignty (Santa Barbara, 2010). • Theophano, Janet, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York, 2002). • Vernon, James, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, 2007). • Walvin, James, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (Basingstoke, 1997).

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.