Writing Food: Literacy on Farms and in Gardens
Course Description
This section of English 350 is a course on expository writing viewed through the lens on food, a topic that is often political and always human. We will look at food to understand how writing works in the world. Food growing, processing, and sharing involves literacies influenced by culture, gender, politics, and class. Together we will investigate how food shapes arguments, serves as cultural touchstone, troubles and supports economies, and creates puzzles in contemporary writing: What literacies facilitate the movement of food cultures across borders? How does bilingualism impact migrant labor on farms? How does writing preserve culinary heritage like recipes and gardening? More centrally, the course will move through the following conceptual questions:
- How is literacy social?
- How is food social?
- How do social conditions, practices, local/global events, routines, traditions, or values around food involve those same elements of literacy?
- How does changing what we see in food change what we understand about literacy?
Learning Goals
Our central goal is to broaden conceptions of literacy to include its cultural, economic, and political force. English 350 aims to combine theory and application, exploring theory that complicates commonplace assumptions about food and writing, applying such complications to local, lived settings, and helping us all develop a more nuanced understanding of literacy.
Texts
All essays, chapters, and articles will be posted and available on our course Moodle page.
Course Assignments
Social Literacies: Food Memoir (4-5 pages)
In this personal narrative, you will explore the social dynamics—politics, culture, gender, language—of a food memory. You can present memories rooted in your family, friends, or personal history however you understand it. The goal is to unearth the social components that shape both the food memory you describe and how writing or literacy show up in those scenes.
Literacy on Farms: Farm Profile (4-5 pages)
This profile will report on an informal interview you conduct with a farmworker, broadly conceived. You can speak with someone who works on a farm, who aspires or is training to farm, or who grew up on a farm, or who has worked in farming the past. As a genre, the profile is flexible and open to creative forms, but the goal of the paper is to show how the movement of food, across farms and farmworker lives, involves (demands?) important kinds of political, economic, and technological literacies.
Literacy in Gardens: Food Ethnography (8-10 pages)
This research paper is an opportunity to understand how the dynamics of a food issue (think food access, global food shortages and prices, genetically modified food, eating disorders, farm labor and migration) impact the people and settings around you, on or off campus. The notion of “gardens” here can be figurative—as a guiding metaphor to understand how food issues take root—or literal, as a public/private food place. The paper asks you to 1) choose a food issue to explore (perhaps one that has revealed itself by writing the previous paper), 2) observe a local setting impacted by the issue (restaurant, food bank, community garden, migration advocacy organization, farmers market), and 3) collect and analyze written materials that reflect the issue (posters, graffiti, flyers, white papers), compiling all of these to present an ethnographic take on how food and writing impact people’s lives.
Tentative Course Calendar
Please note that the calendar is “tentative” which means it is subject to change. It’s difficult to predict how any one class will go, so I will make changes if I think they will better facilitate your learning. All assignments listed on a given day should be completed for discussion on that day.
| Week 1 | T | 9/6 | Introduction to course and to one another | ||
| Th | 9/8 | Discuss social literacies: Brandt | |||
| Week 2 | T | 9/11 | Discuss social literacies: Gee, Scribner | ||
| Th | 9/13 | Discuss recipes: Reichl, Kothari, Yarbrough | |||
| Week 3 | T | 9/18 | Discuss menus: Dufresne, Baxter, Shteyngart
Watch City of Gold |
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| Th | 9/20 | Discuss cookbooks: Mastrangelo
Watch Master of None “Thanksgiving” |
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| Week 4 | T | 9/25 | In-class writing workshop
Due: Food Memoir Draft |
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| Th | 9/27 | No class: workshops with Rebecca | |||
| Week 5 | T | 10/2 | Discuss foodways/literacy-ways: Brandt and Clinton
Due: Final Food Memoir emailed by 5pm |
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| Th | 10/4 | Discuss food systems: Patel intro, Hueston and MacLeod | |||
| Week 6 | T | 10/9 | No class – Monday schedule | ||
| Th | 10/11 | Discuss farmers: Galbreath, Pollan, Royte;
Watch Asparagus: a stalkumentary |
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| Week 7 | T | 10/16 | Discuss farmworkers: Fitting, David | ||
| Th | 10/18 | Discuss farmworkers and literacy: Kalmar | |||
| Week 8 | T | 10/23 | Discuss farmworkers’ children and literacy: Purcell-Gates | ||
| Th | 10/25 | No class: workshops with Rebecca
Due: Farm Profile Draft |
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| Week 9 | T | 10/30 | In-class writing workshop | ||
| Th | 11/1 | Discuss own reading on food issue of choice
Listen: Trouble Coffee Due: Final Farm Profile emailed by 5pm |
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| Week 10 | T | 11/6 | Discuss and practice ethnographic fieldnotes | ||
| Th | 11/8 | Discuss food education: Dura et al. | |||
| Week 11 | T | 11/13 | Discuss restaurant labor: Mirabelli
Due: Food Ethnography observation notes |
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| Th | 11/15 | Discuss “organic”: Pollan
Due: Food Ethnography interview notes |
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| Thanksgiving Break | |||||
| Week 12 | T | 11/27 | Discuss food artifacts and visual analysis
Due: Food Ethnography map |
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| Th | 11/29 | Discuss food advocacy/art: Allatson
Due: Food Ethnography visual analysis |
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| Week 13 | T | 12/4 | Discuss ethnography outlines
Due: Food Ethnography interview and/or survey notes |
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| Th | 12/6 | In-class writing workshop
Due: Food Ethnography Draft |
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| Week 14 | T | 12/11 | Course wrap-up
Due: Final Food Ethnography emailed by 5pm |
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