Course Highlight: Food and American Identity
In a class called Food and American Identity, everyone can further explore their relationship to the intersection of what they eat and who they are. A big part of American culture is how each unique person eats, and this course lets us unpack it on a deeper level.
Through novels, pieces of media and cookbooks, this class uses “the theoretical lens of food studies to understand how writers use food as a cultural object to point to issues of identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability and systems of belief,” according to the course description.
This allows for students to relate their own identity to the work, and explore other American identities that they make not have been exposed to previously.
This course is taught by Dr. Carrie Tippen, whose scholarship works directly with Southern identity and cookbooks. Using cookbooks such as Cook Korean, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, and Let’s Eat Chinese. The class discovers and explores many identities like Asian-American, African-American and Middle Eastern-American. This class focuses on finding the major cues that food can tell us in the reading. Your favorite food might communicate something new in a character or an experience that you never considered before! I enjoyed exploring the power that food can hold within an English and literature context.
My biggest takeaway from this course has largely to do with the format which Dr. Tippen says “creates a shared authority in the room.”
Each week, different members of class participate in leading the discussion based on a text they are interested in, or when they feel most comfortable speaking. This allows for an equally distributed discussion each week. Everyone gets a turn to speak and share what they got from the text or media due.
For my one of my own discussions, I led a conversation about the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Taking moments from the story that may not have been directly about food, and using the food described to explain Angelou’s text further. There is so much to get from this course because food is so powerful in bringing people together. Many of the intersections explored come from a shared American experience, and how that experience shows up for each individual.
This course is a great option for those in the English department and those in the Food Studies program. It’s also simply a wonderful course for anyone looking to expand their understanding of food or engage with discussions on identity.
Food and American Identity will be offered next Spring 2024. You can find more courses in the English department here.
Lirit Gilmore is a Creative Writing and Food Studies student. Lirit’s academic focus is centered in food writing and how it intersects with social location and identity. She is from Washington, DC and the Midwest, and enjoys baking in her free time. See all her work on Pulse@ChathamU here.