FYE 101 - Food for Thought: The Rituals of Dinner

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: THE CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND SUSTAINABILITY OF WHAT WE EAT: This FYE will center around the topic of food–specifically the building and execution of rituals with/around food, writing about food, examination how society influences the food that we eat, and how our food choices affect the environment. This FYE will be taught in four sections led respectively by a biologist, an English professor and poet, a sociologist, and a Religion professor and rabbi. Sometimes we will meet together, sometimes separately in sections.

THE RITUALS OF DINNER: Margaret Visser suggests in her book The Rituals of Dinner that table manners originated to curb our instincts to use our knives on our fellow diners rather than on our dinner. The rituals of dinner have become the symbolic means for representing, performing, and mediating conflicts - within cultures, between different cultures, and between humans and other than human beings in the natural world. We will analyze not only texts from the Bible and Plato’s Symposium which profoundly shaped Western ideas and practices of meals, but also food movies that represent more contemporary and multicultural perspectives on food and meals. We will make and perform food and rituals. The meal rituals we study, perform, and design are to integrate “book knowledge” and experiential knowledge. Rituals get us to know things not only in our minds, but also in our limbs and sense organs.

Credits 1

Compass Attributes
First Year Experience