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Experiential learning in food and agricultural higher education takes many different forms. This paper highlights an immersive, comparative approach to a graduate food studies course in the dairy sector. It explores how students in this class experience a particular combination of field trips, culinary workshops, hands-on activities, and classroom discussions, and explores how the structure and combination of these course elements contributes to reflection, critical thought, and a more nuanced and complex understanding of food systems (or not). Results suggest that this intensive compare/contrast approach to field trips and applied experiences, accompanied by multiple venues for in-depth verbal and written reflection on these experiences, can help facilitate (1) self-reflection, critical thinking, and broader systems thinking, (2) an understanding of and empathy towards conflicting views on food systems issues, and (3) an acceptance of and ability to work across differences, within the contradictions and complications that characterize food systems work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Postscriptum Polonistyczne is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the past decade, the popularity of food scholarship has led to an expansion of online food studies courses and programs. This push for online course offerings has been escalated due to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. To date, much of the field has focused on examining the global concentration and integration of corporate food systems, often described as a "food from nowhere" regime. In contrast, the study of civil society organizations and social movements working toward more equitable and sustainable food systems points to the desire to (re)build a "food from somewhere" regime. How do these ideas of de-spatialization and re-spatialization apply to teaching online food studies courses? In this reflective essay, five scholars and postsecondary instructors share experiences with online teaching about food systems. Our collective reflection reveals a number of benefits for postsecondary institutions, instructors, students, and pedagogical approaches. We also share key concerns, such as engaging students and encouraging participation, constraints for developing personal connections and the additional time and energy required to prepare and deliver courses. Beyond these opportunities and tensions, we point to the need for instructors to consider the implications of teaching about "food from somewhere" from nowhere. We offer these reflections to begin a much-needed conversation about the current state and the future of online food studies education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reflection on two interrelated topics: the modification of eating habits in Spain, a key aspect of everyday life, through the presence of a substantial migration movement that started in the 1990s, and the intervention of migrant workers into the food economy, particularly in rural areas with heavy agriculture development such as seen in Lleida and its surrounding towns. It will provide a reading of two recent texts (a film and a book) that engage with issues of immigration and food. Both El próximo Oriente (2006) directed by Fernando Colomo, and La pell de la frontera (2014) authored by Francesc Serés offer evidence about contemporary Spain's transformation through food. In these texts food is a powerful weapon of social and physical control, and encapsulates some of the many adjustments that have occurred in Spanish society. The kitchen, at home or in a restaurant, as a private or as a public space, becomes a setting to display the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny, between a domestic (safe) and a hostile environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse the political aspects of food and their significance as an object of study. The first author of the article has studied Polish society as an insider, while the other author had previously conducted research in other countries, before three years ago starting to explore Poland and Polish gastronomy, and thus finding himself in the role of outsider. The two scholars have recently been working together. The power relations between the societies and the academic worlds from which they come turned out to be crucial to the research dynamics and became one of the paper's key interests. Two main topics provide the structure of the collaborative paper: 1) the question of the authors' positionality; 2) the legitimacy issues related to the study of food within academia and to scholars' engagement outside it. The authors agree that an inextricable connection of food and politics has not only an academic or theoretical dimension, but also impacts on the realities of people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins' novel Four Girls at Cottage City (1898), Malinda Russell's Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen (1866), and Erika Council's food blog Southern Soufflé (2012-present) are texts that differ in form, genre, purpose, and period. Read together, these works, all three of which have received relatively little critical attention, however, help piece together a historical and cultural framework for contemporary views of Black women, food and professionalized labor, a subject which itself has received less attention, critically, than white women and the professionalism of their domestic labors. The three exemplary works that are the focus of this essay all resist an embodied racial logic that would categorize and value various forms of women's domestic labor according to the bodies that perform it. Through their writing, Kelley-Hawkins, Russell, and Council engage questions of who consumes and who is consumed within the context of U.S. cultural history and its long-held, violently deployed misunderstanding of race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a two-part argument. First, food studies should be more engaged in social theory. It is argued that a greater engagement with theoretical debates and developments, as well as clearer theoretical conflicts in the field, would increase both our empirical knowledge of food issues and the understanding of general social-theoretical problems. This will not reduce food to a simple means of "studying something else," but, on the contrary, will highlight the exceptionality of food issues. Second, such a commitment is exemplified in a particular theoretical direction. It is contended that food studies has been skewed toward research on the communicative aspects of food and eating (identity, cultural symbolism, social movement action, etc.), while increased engagements with contemporary theories of practice would provide the field with a broader diversity where the inconspicuous, ordinary, unreflective, mundane, and (more or less) unnoticed are given as much attention as the conspicuous, special, reflexive, extraordinary, and symbolically loaded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for, and reflects on, the introduction of social and mobile media into food studies pedagogies. Specifically, the paper describes the complications resulting from a pedagogical experiment addressing the rise and effects of "food porn" or "foodtography" alongside the tensions inherent in social network sites and higher education. Ultimately, such a review leads to the introduction of Georg Simmel and his use of boundaries as a lens through which to view the classroom discomfort expressed in food-related course projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether or not there is an identifiably Vietnamese national cuisine, one in which the ingredients, recipes, and/or dishes socially, culturally, and politically unite Vietnamese people. It contends that Vietnam, with its long history of foreign invaders, its own appropriation of the middle and southern regions, and its varied regional geographies, provides a critical example for Food Studies of the need to interrogate the idea of a national cuisine and to differentiate it from regional and local cuisines. The paper examines how cookbook authors and cooking schools have more generally sought to represent Vietnamese dishes as national, but that there is a strong argument against the claim of a Vietnamese national cuisine. We advocate a Food Studies methodology that creates an effective pedagogy that explores whether or not national populations are unified as single gastro-states or atomized by a plurality of regional cuisines. Through experiential assignments and student work we illustrate how Food Studies presents the pedagogical opportunity for students to study and learn at the intersection of national politics and the everyday lives of people, providing a framework for understanding connections of labor, gender, class, and, essentially, taste, among many other values. In the case of Vietnamese food, the critical details of ingredients, preparation, and consumption both reveal and conceal truths about the Vietnamese people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anti-globalization and anti-science rhetoric become central to right-wing agendas, the study of food allows social scientists and humanities-oriented scholars to rethink their posture towards both. After "question everything" becomes a fact-free, alt-right, call to arms, we are forced to learn new lessons in how radical doubt could be a socially dubious thing. We can no longer return to the metaphysical question of truth with certainty. Nevertheless, pure criticism feels inadequate at this precarious moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malaysian food cultures originate from various sources representing different regional types of gastronomy. They can be depicted as a type of local multiculturalism to exemplify a national smorgasbord composing heritage dishes unique to the country. Food choices are often made in line with ethnic, cultural and religious considerations. There are sometimes rules that instil strict observations of food choices, as in the case of Muslims following the norms of halal. But non-Muslims are not inadvertently excluded from participating in the markets of halal food. These complexities in food choice and gastronomic relations are, however, not a deterrent to large segments of the population ‘eating together-in-difference’. This form of commensality underscores the ideal of unity in diversity but lacks the portrayal of perceived differences in multicultural eating. It may be more appropriate to address the multiculturalism in Malaysian food cultures as a case of ‘eating apart together’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the complexities in differentiating gastronomy from food studies as an academic topic. We use the case of Auckland University of Technology’s development of a Master of Gastronomy to illustrate the importance of the distinction. The literature review discusses the similarities and differences between these two domains, and the case study explores the processes and problems encountered in establishing the degree as a background to addressing the challenges inherent in naming a qualification. The combination of these topics and their discussion is timely as the academy realizes an increased offering of gastronomy and food studies programs. This article therefore outlines local processes and key decisions to assist others with decision-making processes as they develop similar programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the representation of food in Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón’s film Half of Heaven (Spain, 1986) and Silvio Caiozzi’s The Moon in the Mirror (Chile, 1990) as it depicts the political transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain and Chile. While the Spanish transition was initiated with Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, and the Chilean transition with Augusto Pinochet supposedly stepping down in 1989, in both cases the dictatorial power structures ensured that such a shift in political ideology did not come into effect overnight. As a result, well after Franco’s death and Pinochet’s defeat, the regimes’ institutions remained in place. With this political context in mind, food features prominently as a metaphorical representation of the complex power struggles and political shifts that were occurring in these two countries at this time. In this way, the relationship of food—presented as either good or bad, edible or contaminated—is conflated with character development in such a way that it establishes a new set of semantic networks among characters that illuminates sociocultural dynamics and political debates in transitional Spain and Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Productive new openings can be found in food studies through provincializing European and American conceptualizations of the aesthetics of good taste and the ethics of foodwork. The liberal arts can be reinvigorated for the twenty-first century by drawing on feminism and everyday Hinduism of care-work and devotion, in part by using the immigrant body not merely as an object of analysis but as a tool kit to open up the epistemological discussion on how we know what to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers committed to food justice often enter communities and nonprofits with a desire to help. They often think there is a scarcity, such as food, that they want to understand and help to increase. At the same time, research obligations may lead to extracting "findings" without advancing food justice. Such actions may unintentionally work against food justice, especially the goal of dismantling structural inequalities and advancing social equity. This commentary chronicles the ongoing and incomplete process by which I have carried out food justice research and worked toward food justice. In short, reciprocal research requires working with, not for, organizations and communities. This entails ongoing acts of solidarity. One way to express this is through flexibility with research goals in order to tailor all or parts of one's project to answer questions that increase understanding of how to challenge structural inequalities and advance social equity. Relatedly, openness to how food justice activists and organizations confront the food movement and society more broadly to address whiteness, privilege, racial inequality, and notions of diversity can enrich critical social science. Of equal importance is sweat equity. Most food justice activists and organizations have few resources and cannot serve the whims of researchers. Therefore, providing labor is an important allied act. This increases the researchers' empathy with activists, organizations, and communities, and creates opportunities to build trust and dissolve social boundaries. To enter into a situation that deepens our knowledge of the food justice movement and advances food justice requires solidarity and sweat equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of food as a core mode of exploring and explaining the world has expanded remarkably quickly in the past ten years, with food studies programming in particular gaining ground in institutional learning arrangements during the last three. Establishing a new field and creating relevant educational programming carries its associated struggles, practicalities and initial successes. To this end, this report highlights five of the most pressing themes to emerge from the 2013 "Future of Food Studies" interdisciplinary workshop, namely: (1) locating food studies in the institutional culture; (2) training undergraduate and graduate students within and beyond disciplinarity; (3) establishing food studies labs and pedagogy; (4) engaging the public beyond the campus; and (5) funding strategies for research and training. Participants agreed on the relevancy of food studies to future learning, teaching and research agendas and argued that food studies could not prosper without a commitment to transgressing conventional institutional and philosophical boundaries. At a time when the value of higher education is under intense scrutiny, we acknowledge the need to make food studies a paradigm capable of providing students with the necessary skills for post-graduate employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay centers on an encounter with an idea, one that has become central to teaching-and activism-around food and agriculture-explored through an ongoing conversation. Neither of us presunied to have a full understanding of the history and uses of the term "food systems." However, to understand its potential in teaching about food and agriculture, we considered how and when each of us-sociologists by training, but interdisciplinary by necessity-encountered and began using the term. According to Hewitt and Stokes (1975; see also Stokes and Hewitt 1976), a disclaimer is a way of protecting oneself in advance from negative comments or potentially stigmatizing identities. While neither of us disclaims our identity as sociologists whose projects span disciplinary boundaries, neither do we represent ourselves as having definitive knowledge about food systems. We therefore look forward to having others contest and embellish the definitions, theories and categorizations we discussed at conferences, over e-mail, and on a rainy morning in Ithaca. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it time to establish a food studies canon? In recent years, the field of food studies has come into its own as a means to investigate critical questions about production and consumption. This commentary explores the written sources of two academics' interest in food, and the books that have sparked the food studies movement and today's food revolution. As a topic for readers' consideration, it asks whether food studies has progressed to a stage of development at which it is now possible to identify a core list of books that can be considered to define the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]