Courses / Module

Whereas Dublin Bay prawns would be considered a tasteful addition to any menu in Ireland, communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, have traditionally regarded shrimp as too repulsive to eat. In contrast, Oaxacans delight in preparing toasted grasshoppers with garlic and lime as an appealing treat – but insects are antithetical to Irish ideas about what is appropriate for people to eat. What explains this difference? Although conventional wisdom claims that ‘there is no accounting for taste,’ anthropology as a discipline holds that just the opposite is true. Food preferences (‘tastes’) reveal the deep and profound way in which culture shapes people and the social worlds we inhabit. Thus, although food is a universal human necessity, it is also always a cultural phenomenon. This module explores the anthropology of food, a remarkably rich and complex area of inquiry, and one that is evermore urgent as we come to understand the linkages between eating habits, the political economy of food production, and climate crisis. Thus, this module touches on many of the most pressing problems in contemporary society: inequalities between rich and poor (and how both food and famine manifest them), the politics of identity (and their expression in symbolically distinctive forms of cuisine), the ethics of consumption (and debates about whether people should eat animals), and the possibilities for human societies to organize themselves without the rapacious hunger for natural resources that is consumer society’s most intractable sin. An anthropology of food must consider the cosmological, because food expresses the ultimate values embodied in religion, and the mundane, because food is also simply a fact of everyday life. We will discuss the economics, politics, conflict, rebellion, science, and social relations that make up the complex networks food creates. To make these broad issues concrete, the module explores specific cases such as new farming technologies, global food producing networks, and locavore movements. Focussing on the way in which foodways are always pervaded by culture, only the discipline of anthropology can explore food in this comprehensive way.