As we are reaching the end of the semester, I think now is as good a time as any to take look at my classes and see how they are similar. I realized there actually is a lot of cross over between Food Culture FIG classes. Agroecology and Food Studies both center around food, so naturally they have many things in common. There are also some common themes between Anthropology as well.
The most obvious form of cross over between Agroecology and Food Studies is when Professor Mike Bell came in as a guest for us during one of our Wednesday class meetings. Seeing him in a new setting came as a surprise to myself and many of my classmates as we are used to seeing him as one of the professors for the Agroecology class. I actually found it funny for some reason. He was exactly the same as he is in Agroecology with his very philosophical outlook on life.
Another thing that was a crossover between Food Studies and Agroecology was the urban agricultural student organization, F.H. King. I don’t remember the name of the guest that came in and talked to our class about F.H. King, but they explained to us what the student organization does on campus, including their Harvest Handouts that happen during the growing season, and how we can get involved. A sort of AHA moment occurred in Agroecology when another student in the class who is a member of F.H. King leadership gave a small presentation about the organization.
One thing I noticed pretty early on is the cross over of ideas in Food Studies and Anthropology, once we learned about it, was the idea of anthropological fieldwork in our textbook. The first article I had to read for class was the one about Mexican-American women and their culture in regard to food and gender roles (another cross over!). This article was written by an anthropologist that went into one of these places where the Hispanic people lived and interviewed them. The author first started out by gaining credibility and told how she went about doing ethical fieldwork. Essentially, this article was a small ethnography about this group of marginalized people.
A cross over between all three classes is the idea of knowing where your food is coming from. In Anthropology, our first fieldwork journal assignment was to look at a piece of food and do research about all the ingredients within that food to figure out where each individual ingredient had come from, who produced it and how they are treated by their employers, how the production of that ingredient affects the environment, etc. A lot of the articles we read in class had to do with putting faces to the food we were eating like the pizziaolis that made traditional pizza in Japan or the undocumented workers in the meat packing industry. Recently, we also had a lecture in Agroecology about identity in agriculture and who are the people that are growing food for the country, the majority of them being straight, white, men.
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