May 17-21, 2010
at the University of Oklahoma

This class is now full

This course will use discursive and kinesthetic approaches in order to understand the complex, varied, and important ways culture makes food and food makes culture. Culture can be defined as the sum of our every day decisions, all the common sense beliefs and actions that shape how we eat, dress, pray, learn and more. Thus if we want to understand “culture,” we need to experience and participate in such every day activities. In this class, farming, cooking and eating will be our focus - universal enterprises yet unbelievably varied and complex in what happens around the globe.
For this intensive OSLEP course our focus will be the power of place as a mediator between food and culture. Some of the broad questions we will consider include the following: How does place defined as a natural environment inform foodways? How does affinity to a certain place get expressed in farming and cooking practices? How can we understand the importance of place to identity in a nation characterized by migration and cultural pluralism? How important is place (either as a defined geography or prescribed identity) for contemporary farming, cooking and eating? What is the future of food in place given our global food system? Click here for syllabus

The Class Reading List (These books and articles supplied by OSLEP)

• The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir by Amy Trubek
• Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
• Food Culture in France by Julia Abramson
• Reading packet

After college, Amy Trubek was an apprentice to a chef in a French restaurant and eventually went to Cordon Bleu Cooking School. She then went on to pursue graduate studies in Food & Culture, eventually earning a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1995. She is now an assistant professor in the Nutrition and Food Science department at the University of Vermont. She teaches courses in the contemporary food system, food and culture, and food history. Her research interests include the history of the culinary profession, globalization of the food supply, the relationship between taste and place, and cooking as a cultural practice.

She is involved in on-going research into the importance of the taste of place as a means of promoting and supporting place based foods and regional food systems. Her recent book, The Taste of Place, A Cultural Journey into Terroir, looks at the importance of terroir as a cultural category and explores how terroir is being used in the United States today to change our food culture. She is also involved in an interdisciplinary research project looking at the terroir of Vermont maple syrup. More recently, Trubek has launched an in-depth ethnographic project on cooking in contemporary American culture linking cooking practices to the food environment and individual health. Prior to starting at University of Vermont in the fall of 2005, Amy was the executive director of the Vermont Fresh Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting direct partnerships between farmers and chefs. Amy was a 2002-2004 Food and Society Policy Fellow, and before that she taught at New England Culinary Institute for eight years.