Bringing Humanities to the Table
A new food-focused minor at Virginia Tech teaches a holistic approach to food production and consumption, and their connections to history, society, culture, and identity
Food Matters club leaders help serve a spaghetti dinner with vegan lentil Bolognese and locally foraged mushrooms at a student cooking night.
Image courtesy of Anna Zeide
Food Matters club leaders help serve a spaghetti dinner with vegan lentil Bolognese and locally foraged mushrooms at a student cooking night.
Image courtesy of Anna Zeide
Virginia Tech’s minor in Food, Agriculture, and Society allows students to understand the age-old adage, “you are what you eat” from a variety of perspectives. The minor brings together an NEH-funded food studies initiative with an existing program in civic agriculture, helping situate food within interdisciplinary social and historical contexts. Through studying foodways and food systems, students learn to think critically about the structures and customs that influence how and what food ends up on their plates.
One of the minor’s organizers, Anna Zeide, an Associate Professor in the Department of History and director of the VT Food Studies Program, explains that food systems can be imagined as “a kind of chart of everything that your food passes through from seed to table or to disposal.” Food systems include producers, processors, the distribution networks that bring food to our tables, and consumers, making food systems a complex and multifaceted area of study. Foodways, Zeide explains, are intertwined with cultural norms, expectations, childhood tastes, and other factors that shape our ideas about what is edible. They are about “human values, connections, cultures, and ideas,” Zeide says.
Much of the work required to create new food studies courses would not have been possible without the NEH planning grant the project received, Zeide says. The funding not only allowed Zeide to bring together faculty from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to create a new set of interdisciplinary courses for the minor, it also gave the project a welcome boost. “That this external body had decided that [this project] was valuable gave us a sense of motivation,” Zeide says.
Students collaboratively prepare a Taco Tuesday meal as part of a student cooking night in the nutrition lab spaces at Virginia Tech.
Photo courtesy Anna Zeide
Students collaboratively prepare a Taco Tuesday meal as part of a student cooking night in the nutrition lab spaces at Virginia Tech.
Photo courtesy Anna Zeide
As a land-grant university, Virginia Tech already has a long history of study and teaching about agriculture and food—mostly concentrated in the university’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Building upon this strength by creating course offerings that approached these topics from a humanistic and social sciences perspective, Zeide felt, would give students a more comprehensive understanding of how food production and consumption are intricately linked to narratives and worldview, social structure and geography, policies and customs.
The curriculum planning process, which brought together faculty from departments ranging from History; Religion and Culture; Science, Technology, and Society; Sociology; Political Science ; Food Science and Technology; Agricultural Leadership and Community Education; and others – also turned out to benefit faculty and interdisciplinary research by uniting scholars who may otherwise not have worked together at such a large institution. The tendency for departments to specialize in specific areas, Zeide explains, “sometimes precludes conversations and community collaboration around common themes in work.” A humanities-centered exploration of food and foodways, Zeide says, “not only brings together the human elements of food, but also emphasizes the importance of community.”
This interdisciplinary group worked on creating a collaborative proposal for a new minor that incorporated a new Introduction to Food Studies course, a revised Sustainable Food Systems course, and a capstone course with an experiential learning component. And they created or modified a set of linked elective courses for the minor on topics such as U.S. Food History; Indigenous Foodways; Food Writing, Food Sovereignty; and Food Politics.
They also sought input from students by creating the Food Matters Registered Student Organization to recruit students with interests in activities and topics relating to food studies. Students in the group also served as “an ongoing focus group to market test some ideas around what interests students have and what kinds of activities they’d like to see reflected in the coursework and eventual minor,” Zeide explains.
Through the Food Matters group, students expressed interest in coursework that included hands-on engagement. Zeide and her team incorporated this feedback into the creation of nine new undergraduate courses at Virginia Tech, a majority of which are housed in humanities departments.
Students in the "Introduction to Food Studies" course present their research backboards and food samples, showcasing a variety of foods and dishes that have shaped global history and cultures.
Photo courtesy Anna Zeide
Students in the "Introduction to Food Studies" course present their research backboards and food samples, showcasing a variety of foods and dishes that have shaped global history and cultures.
Photo courtesy Anna Zeide
Many of these classes offer ample opportunity for students to see how their studies relate to their lives outside of the classroom.
In these courses, students conduct archival research and create exhibits about food history; cook in the campus’s kitchen labs; visit local farms and food production sites to witness the food system at work; and volunteer with local food pantries and community gardens.
The coursework designed for the Food, Agriculture, and Society minor allows students to “see their everyday interactions in a more complex light and think differently about what [they] eat, but also where everything around [them] comes from,” explains Zeide.
“We all eat. And whether we think that hard about the choices or not, we’re making choices several times a day about what to eat. I think bringing that kind of consciousness and awareness to that decision can make people realize all the ways that their own health and their connections to the environment and culture are shaped and reflected through what they eat.”
This fall Zeide will teach one of the minor’s required introductory courses, Food Studies, for the second time. Cross-listed in the departments of History, Religion and Culture, Political Science, and Sociology, the course introduces students to ideas and methods from anthropology, philosophy, folklore, history, rhetoric, and sociology. This networked view of food studies is what makes the Virginia Tech Food Studies Program so unique, Zeide explains, as it exposes students to perspectives and research methods from multiple fields of study within and beyond the humanities.
She also notes that the breadth of the Food, Agriculture, and Society minor at Virginia Tech prepares students for myriad careers, as the minor fosters interdisciplinary thinking and methods. The minor’s humanities courses prioritize writing, public speaking, and critical thinking skills, all of which prepare students for work in various career paths.
The Food, Agriculture, and Society minor at Virginia Tech officially begins in Fall of 2024 as a joint program between the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Learn more about the VT Food Studies program and student projects on the program website.
---By Hannah Ballowe