Courses

Using food as a lens, this course examines the history, culture, and political economy of Berlin and Prague, focusing on how each has been shaped by socialist/post-socialist political economies and ideology. Topics will include food vis-a-vis the European Union; ostalgie; immigration; industrial and recent sustainable agriculture; and the emerging food culture. Employing contemporary and historical perspectives, the course will include lectures by established scholars, visits to museums, markets, restaurants, farms, and cooperatives, wholesale and retail outlets.

This course is an interdisciplinary and intercultural examination of human communication through food in Ireland. Explores the social, economic, political, and cultural ramifications of food production and consumption. Students will have a unique opportunity to explore various local, regional and transnational, and food rituals.

This course explores how food traditions and heritage are identified, supported, and promoted at national and global levels, and examines their role and functions in Spaniards’ everyday life. Through visits to markets, bakeries, wholesale and retail outlets, tapas and wine bars, restaurants, and menu del día eateries we examine how tradition and heritage are brought into the 21st century in public spaces that are also symbolic for local and national identities. Food professionals and experts, designers and scholars help us understand the dynamics of this unique country.

This master's level course explores the food and foodways of the culturally and historically rich culinary landscape of Mexico. In the city of Puebla, which is considered to be the birthplace of modern Mexican cusine, students will be fully immersed in traditional Mexican culinary and nutritional practices though classroom instruction, guest, lectures, cooking classes, and a wide variety of field trips to markets, local farms, restaurants, and production sites.

We explore the performance of French identity through the lens of food to unpack how gender, race, socioeconomic status, and immigration clash with the espoused French national ideal of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”. Through visits to markets, restaurants, bakeries, wholesale and retail outlets, farms, and cooperatives, we explore the material culture that makes possible acquiescence and resistance to these ideas of identity and ultimately will discover the limits and possibilities implicit in our own personal ideals.

This course is an interdisciplinary and intercultural examination of human communication through food in Shanghai. Explores the social, economic, political, and cultural ramifications of food production and consumption. Students will have a unique opportunity to explore various local, regional and transnational, and food rituals.

It should be noted that independent study requires a minimum of 45 hours of work per point. Independent study cannot be applied to the established professional education sequence in teaching curricula. Each departmental program has established its own maximum credit allowance for independent study. This information may be obtained from the student's department. Prior to registering for independent study, each student should obtain an Independent Study approval from the adviser.

Of the 8 billion people on the planet today, only about 2 billion rely on supermarkets and grocery stores for their food. The remaining 6 billion rely on street vendors, formal and informal food markets that take place on sidewalks, street corners, alleys, and parking lots. This course examines the cultural aspects and processes related to food provisioning, in a global context.

New York State's 2021 passage of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act outlined a comprehensive regulatory structure to oversee the licensure, cultivation, production, distribution, sale, and taxation of medical, adult-use, and cannabinoid hemp. Drawing on the experience of other states, New York sought to establish a legal cannabis industry that promoted social justice, public health, and economic development for all New Yorkers. This course examines the implementation of the law, which has been slow and riddled with challenges, and market development.

This course examines the food landscape of New York City. In doing so, it explores the local landscape for buying food, the different paths food takes to reach city residents, and disparities in food access across the five boroughs. New York City's local food environment includes a mixture of supermarket chains, bodegas and corner stores, and many farmers markets. The city is surrounded by productive and fertile farmland in the Hudson Valley and New Jersey. The final defining part of the local food landscape is the wholesale market, Hunts Point.

This course provides a practical introduction to urban agriculture. Students learn horticultural skills at the NYU Urban Farm Lab. Students learn about biological processes and how they fit together in a system. Through visits to other sites around the city, students are exposed to various strategies for practicing urban horticulture. Additionally, we engage with greater themes found within urban agriculture such as entrepreneurship, food justice, individual and group sustenance, cultural enactments of identity, community building, and education.

Studying in Washington DC, we undertake a deep study of sustainable and organic agricultural policy, by examining research, advocacy and policymaking. Relying on the expertise of locally based scholars, researchers and advocates, the course will consist of lectures, panel discussions, QandA sessions with experts, and site visits to better understand how these three key components interact. The final part of the course is civic engagement, where students meet their elected officials to advocate their positions related to federal agricultural policy.

This course introduces students to the concepts, frameworks and models to systematically build successful, socially-conscious businesses that are both sustainable and public health-driven. Topics will include how to 1) identify and analyze need-gaps, 2) develop a sustainable-food business concept, 3) identify a profitable niche in the global, social-justice oriented market, and 4) raise capital in innovative ways. The course will also provide access to domain-specific resources including key industry participants, industry experts and research partners.

Sustainability in the Urban Environment: Urban policy makers began have embraced local food systems as a solution to a myriad of urban problems, including lack of green space and a dearth of healthy food availability. As part of this shift in policy, cities and other jurisdictions have encouraged production in the urban environment. But at the local and state levels, such policies are often based on a vision of how food might be grown in a city, and do not consider the feasibility or viability of such ventures. Nor do the policies consider how much of a contribution urban farms might make to urban food supplies. This course studies, in an experiential context, questions such as: much food can urban farms supply? Do farms even have to produce food? What are the differences between urban farms that have claimed nonprofit status, acting more as educational facilities than as commercial farms.

We focus on sustainable food systems within their local communities in this experiential field trip-based course. Using Eastern Long Island, an area that has been successfully farmed for centuries as a case study, we explore issues surrounding sustainable agriculture. Includes visits to farms, wineries, scallop and oyster underwater farms, as well as lectures by pioneering land and sea preservationists, beekeepers, and others. We critically evaluate the meaning of sustainability as it applies to agriculture and aquaculture, and how it relates to the community.

Introduction to foods from various nationality groups through lectures, demonstrations, and field trips.

This course focuses on how drinking of beverages has shaped human history and expressed cultural values. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the relationship between beverages and power from the earliest evidence of intoxicants to the various ways that political, social, and religious institutions have controlled who gets to drink what and when. Students will explore the geographical and political factors that led to the creation of various beverages.

How food is used as a tool in social movements across cultures and time. Some of the themes of the course are food and revolutions, food as a form of social resistence and food as an apparatus for government policies. Students will learn that food's highly flexible meaning can be both a force for change as well as oppression.

Examination of theoretical literature commonly employed and debated within the humanities and social sciences. Through the work of established social theorists and scholars, students explore on-going debates in traditional academic disciplines and understand their usefulness to recent scholarship in developing food studies.

Investigates the final stage of the food system- water and waste disposal- as it is manifested in the urban metropolis. This course also draws upon the historical underpinnings of the systems used to manage water and waste- but also the underlying issues of purity and contamination that these systems are also designed to address. Issues include water and waste in relation to changing landscapes and demographics- enmeshment in urban policymaking- and competing notions of environmentalism.