Abby Goode
Welcome to the first edition of the Critical Cookbook for “Eating American Literature,” an experimental, collaborative, and interdisciplinary course on the literatures of food, eating, and agriculture. As part of this class, students examined the cultural politics, narratives, and images associated with eating in American literature. Taking into account contemporary environmental debates about food politics, organic farming, and locavorism, they explored the American literary history of food and eating. Analyzing novels, dietary treatises, nature writing, poetry, and memoirs from the nineteenth century onward, they used literature and popular culture as a tool for assessing cultures of consumption past and present. They analyzed diverse representations of ingestion and edibility—from foraging memoirs to “Slow Food” manifestos to cookbooks—on local and global scales. In addition to examining the role of food in gendered, racialized, and nationalist cultural formations, they looked at how American literature shapes representations of food in popular culture and our own community. Inspired by the recent scholarship of Kyla Tompkins, Kathryn Cornell Dolan, and Allison Carruth, the course moved through a series of themes: industrial agriculture and agri-expansion, local consumptions, global appetites, and finally, kitchen insurrections. Activities include debates, group journalism, and an interactive class banquet. Material included works by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ruth Ozeki, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Herman Melville, among others.
For one of their assignments, students contributed to this Critical Cookbook. They chose a dish and examined the stories behind it, the cultural practices associated with it, its politics, agricultural history, environmental impact, and other aspects ripe for critical analysis. Their task was to analyze the food like a literary and cultural text, examining its complex history and cultural impact. Interested in the colonial history of guacamole? The importance of a plant-based diet? Or the local, Old World roots of pizza? This cookbook provides you with a range of cultural politics, narratives, and images associated with food, eating, and agriculture. Enjoy!