Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Aided by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, in spring 2018 I taught an experimental course: “Sustainable Foods in Latin American Literature.” In this literature course, we read novels and poetry focusing on the subject of food and culture: the work of Laura Esquivel and Pablo Neruda, for example. The primary project of the course was for students to form groups and prepare film clips—three to five minutes long—of themselves cooking specific Latin American dishes. I feel this multi-modal assignment allowed my students to more fully integrated with global cultures and their foods—specifically with Latin American nations and cultures. Cooking clips are popular on the internet and in social media. I am translating this familiar mode of presentation into another cultural context. My class studied the authenticity of their chosen dishes—including issues of sustainability, researched their ability to purchase needed ingredients locally or adapt them—a process that involved their producing a grocery store ethnography, learned enough about media production to create a clean film clip, and analyzed the process in terms of their appreciation of another culture through their food in a final essay. I propose a pedagogical presentation on this assignment to discuss what we learned in terms of global cultural competencies. I will present samples of the student films, as well as samples of their response papers.