Eating Culture: An Anthropology of Food

This course will address the deceptively simple question of why do we eat what we do? It will explore human food systems from our nutritional needs, through our classification of resources into edible and inedible, and how we acquire ingredients, cook them, and then share them through meals. Food reaches into everyone's existence, and as such it is offers us an opportunity to uncover and begin to understand our cultural similarities and differences expressed through our food habits. The course will draw upon ethnographic material from many cultures, and utilise current debates in the relatively new field of the anthropology of food.