Courses in the FIG:
UGST 109 FIG Seminar
TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 1 Credit
Join us in exploring how we learn about and experience culture through food. Our primary focus will revolve around how Italian and Korean food has been impacted by years of history, the shifting of international powers, and colonialism. We will look at each of these cuisines through a lens of curiosity and learning. This seminar will be hands-on and may involve trips to specialty food markets in the Eugene area, discussion about culture, and making dishes from these cuisines ourselves. This course will be a great opportunity to reexamine the ways we look at food and cultures. It will push us to examine whether food adventuring makes us participants in cultural colonialism or whether food adventuring can be a way to build "authentic" communities.
PHIL 220 Food Ethics
Arts & Letters (>1)| TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 4 Credits
This is a class in ethics. It is not the role of ethical theory to give answers to particular problems, but to provide frameworks which challenge individuals to think critically and clearly about ethical issues and help them come to their own conclusions. Moral philosophy demands that one have reasons for moral decisions and explores possible principles one can apply in an attempt to arrive at a consistent and well thought out moral position. Most of the issues we face have no obvious or immediate answer, but much can be gained by struggling with what appears to be irresolvable. This particular class has a focus on ethical issues related to food. Who and what we eat reflects, and has consequences for, who we are as individuals and as a society. This course will examine some of the ethical concerns related to the conditions of human and other animal beings involved in the production of food and help students arrive at their own considered opinions regarding these issues. Animal welfare and environmental issues will be a central focus. Some specific issues will include: the environmental impacts of farming, livestock welfare, food waste, food safety, and food justice. Students in this class should bring their own questions and concerns about food to shape the reading and discussion. Some questions might include: Does it make sense to love dogs and eat pigs? If I am concerned about the environment, should I eat packaged food? Should I buy food from companies that don't pay a fair wage? How should we grow, harvest, transport, and prepare food? How much should we eat? Who is responsible for our food habits? Are choices about food simply personal choices, or are there ethical, social, and political implications we must take into account?
ANTH 220 Introduction to Nutritional Anthropology
Science (>3)| Global Perspectives (>GP) | TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 4 Credits
Anthropology 220 is an introduction to Nutritional Anthropology, which is a subfield of biological anthropology and it satisfies general education requirements for the science group. In this course, we study human nutrition through a biocultural lens. Thus, we focus on its scientific underpinnings and particularly on nutrition in relation to evolutionary adaptation, which means that we address ways in which culture both influences and is influenced by Homo sapiens’ relation to food. Beginning with the scientific method and the biocultural perspective, the course examines nutrition in relation to evolution, adaptation and subsistence strategies, drawing on contemporary issues. Subsequently, we expand on the discussion of adaptation to include the role of environment, disease, in hunger, starvation, malnutrition and infant nutrition with special emphasis on the evolutionary feedback between environment, culture and globalization. In the final part of the course, we will come full circle to relate some contemporary nutrition issues in the news to the themes of the course.