Reading & Composition

Reading & Composition

The World is Your Oyster: Writing about Food and Eating
Course Number: 
R1B.014
Course Catalog Number: 
31315
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Tara Phillips
Days: 
MWF
Time: 
1-2
Semester: 
Location: 
211 Dwinelle

Many of us take eating as merely a fact of life: something bodily, social, but certainly not intellectual. Others, like food bloggers and instagrammers consider it a hobby and marker of individual or cultural identity. Either way, there’s no doubt that eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures. In fact, many of our strongest memories are about certain foods. Whether it’s the ubiquitous turkey dinner at Thanksgiving, or in my case, my grandfather’s spaghetti sauce, food often links us nostalgically to a sense of place, home, and identity. Alternatively, unfamiliar or disliked foods can be an intense source of disgust, anxiety, or even alienation. While these reactions point to the intersection of bodily and affective responses to food, we might also ask: can food and eating have meaning? And more specifically, how does it signify in the context of the literary? What does it mean when characters eat in a novel? Or when an elaborate meal is described in a poem? What about farming and agriculture? Do they have any relation to writing? What’s the relationship between reading and eating, if any? Or how might the pleasure of eating and the pleasure of speech be connected?

In this course, we’ll explore representations of food and eating in texts that trace our historical and contemporary foodways in both their local and global dimensions. Beginning in our own backyard, we’ll tap into our rich local food/writing economy in the bay area. Next, we’ll expand outward and read texts that deal with food, eating, and writing in the broader U.S. context. And finally, we’ll move beyond our own borders to explore Latin American and Caribbean food texts in order to think through the intersection of global food and literary economies. We’ll look to how writers have made food and eating mean in a variety of ways—from pleasure to disgust to identity, value, and resistance. We’ll consider how foodways and eating practices have helped shape experience, identities, and communities in all the ways that food and eating make meaning.

Readings may draw from texts by Michael Pollan, Samin Nosrat, Alice Waters, Walt Whitman, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Virgilio Piñera, Fernando Ortiz, and others.