This course may be used to satisfy one of four electives required within the Communication major. This course explores the complex relationships between rhetorics, representations, and constructions of consumption and production within the capitalist political economy. In this course, we use our relationship to food as the main vehicle to explore different aspects of the US environmental history: from the pre-contact period to colonialism to the conservation movement, to urbanization, suburbanization, to the effects of the most recent COVID pandemic on food systems, and how food, as well as our relationship to it, has changed over time. We explore how food travels and has traveled from a seed in a farm to our fridges to a meal on our tables in our homes, in our dining halls, and in our food pantries over different periods of time. Examining the effects of settler colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, climate change, imperialism, and capitalism on food production and consumption, this course traces the how as well as the why of what we eat today. This includes not only the various social forces that shaped our food production and consumption habits but also the rhetorics and representations of food over this period of time. Additionally, the course delves into various examples of alternative food systems that have existed and still exist in the U.S. and encourages students to think critically about not only the consumption of the food they eat, but also its production, representation, and rhetoric. As such, we take a comprehensive as well as a critical look at the complex web of relationships between political-economic structures and symbolic systems that sustain or challenge it.
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