Food, Memory Storytelling

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course proposes an exploration of the way writers and filmmakers engage with food as a metaphor and memory as organizing strategy for storytelling in different contexts and through different genres. Warren Belasco suggests that “memories [about food] become a way of preserving identities [...] perceived to be endangered by migration, mobility and suburban mass culture (31)”. Early on in Critical Food Studies, Arjun Appadurai signaled with the capacity of food and food related storytelling to mobilize strong emotions (494), leading to the definition of Gastro-politics as “conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food” (495). In a globalized world, food, recipes and culinary techniques are banned, exotified, appropriated and/or dismissed in order to negotiate cultural heritage and identity. Exploring these issues in fiction, non-fiction and film, this course seeks to answer How do food memories negotiate between the preservation of the past and the construction of new identities? To what extent does food offer a road map for understanding and expressing lived experience? How food, memory and storytelling provide a road map for coming to terms with the history, the experience and the consequences of displacement? Ultimately, by focusing on the stories around food the course opens up to notions of identity and belonging through texts that explore personal and emotional journeys. As a writing-intensive course, this class also aims to help students develop their academic writing skills and explore their creative non-fiction abilities. Meetings will be a combination of lecture, seminar format and hands-on creative production, depending on the topic and the purpose of each class.