Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Food is a powerful and frequently underutilized pedagogical resource. However, this resource, which is readily available, is often viewed as inappropriate in spaces of learning. We currently greatly undervalue the importance of food & nourishment for the minds, bodies, and souls of young people during this time of massive underfunding, miseducation, & displacement. We explore the potential of food as a classroom text in order to challenge neoliberal educational reforms and standardized curricula that seek to homogenize and assimilate students. This paper explores the way that food can be used to disrupt the ongoing miseducation of Filipinx students in multiple contexts. We have developed our own Filipinx pedagogies of food that are informed by complex diasporic histories and that aim to challenge the status quo. We examine the implementation of our pedagogies in multiple university contexts–specifically analyzing the potential of food as text in order to transform the classroom into a space of reckoning, mourning, healing, and radical imagining. We examine the way that food–in both its positive and negative associations–can be utilized in the classroom to both eradicate the logics of domination and also to help students envision radical transformations. We aim to further the conversation as well as provide concrete examples of the application of food pedagogy to create spaces of reckoning, mourning, and healing from multiple traumas in both secondary and post-secondary educational contexts.