GEOG 2500: Food, Place, People
Everybody must eat but have you thought about how what you eat connects you to people, places, and ecologies around the world? Using a geographical lens, students in this course critically examine the relationships among food, nature, and society to explore how food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed. Using the stories of common foods, students investigate changing local and global geographies of food and discover how food is embedded within foodscapes in Vancouver and other cities. Additionally, students consider how soil, climate, and terroir impact foods. Other topics include how race, class, ethnicity and gender influence people’s relationships to food production and consumption; Indigenous foodways; culinary cultural norms; labour; food security and food sovereignty; colonialism; and health.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to
- Describe features of diverse culinary cultures based in a variety of worldviews
- Describe the origins and evaluate the social, economic, ecological and political impacts of the contemporary global food system
- Outline connections among food, identity, place, and culture
- Apply geographical concepts, theories, and methodologies to conceptualize the spatial relationships among food, natural environments, and human societies
- Describe how physical geographical features impact food production
- Articulate key issues in food security and related challenges facing Canadian and global food systems
- Describe and analyse a food related commodity circuit
- Find, evaluate, paraphrase, and cite sources
- Use information from academic sources to support their ideas
Questions?
Contact the instructor, Dr. Jenny Francis (jfrancis@langara.ca)