Courses

Advanced Foods

Principles and practice of indentification, comparison, and evaluation of selected foods, ingredients, techniques, and equipment for recipe formulation, menu planning, or preparation with an emphasis on modifications to meet specific nutritional or other requirements.

Advanced Topics in Food Studies

This course will explore urban food waste management practice and policies through the lens of New York City. Students will examine how waste is generated across food supply chains and gain an understanding of the methods for reducing and managing waste. Topics will include a survey of NYC policies and programs, food waste auditing, strategies for reduction and recovery, diversion infrastructure development, and composting. Students will have an opportunity to apply these methods as they develop a food waste management plan for a NYC business or institution.

Advanced Topics in Food Studies: Gender

Course explores the intersection of gender, identity, culture and food. Students will analyze the influences of sexual identity, human sexuality, sexual orientation and gender on real and perceived cultural views of food and consumption. Topics will address how society assigns gender to food by investigating historical and contemporary texts. Employing advertisements, menus, recipes, cookbooks, television programs, films and packaging, students will critically analyze gendering practices. Theoretical frameworks will include queer theory, early feminist theory, Whiteness theory and emerging male studies and transgender studies.

Advanced Topics in Food Systems: Agricultural Globalization

Course examines the process of agricultural globalization and its effects on the process of rural and agricultural development in the global south. Specifically, analyze the incorporation of agricultural producers and processors in developing countries into the supply chains of global food brands and retailers. The goal is to identify how globalization is shaping institutions that govern agricultural laborers in poor and middle income communities, who are the most vulnerable actors in the global economy

Advanced Topics in Food Systems: Agriculture, Food Policy, and the US Farm Bill

Agricultural policy and some food policy is regulated by The Farm Bill. This course covers the history of the farm bill, starting from its inception via the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, up to contemporary farm bills. The course will analyze current proposals for agricultural policy, given the contemporary political, economic and agricultural climate.

Advanced Topics in Food Systems: Food Futures

Super storms, drought, abundant chemical and fertilizer overuse and misuse, ozone depletion, fossil fuel exploitation and a host of bad decisions have contributed the myriad causes of climate change and the shifting landscape of our food system. We have become accustomed to eating whatever we want whenever we want for more than 60 years; it's been a very good culinary life for many. The bill for this reinforcing feedback loop of heavy dependency on petrochemical fertilizers, mono-cropping, shrinking land on which to farm, and the worldwide demand for cheap and abundant food has been proffered; and the truth is we have been writing checks our planet cannot cash and many of the foods we're too fond of (coffee, chocolate, peanuts, almonds, berries) are becoming harder to grow and the predictions that these foods will either lose their flavor or disappear completely. This class will look at the future of food through the lenses of Design Thinking + Systems Thinking addressing these increasingly problematic issues in our food system and how we can dive and design more sustainable modes of operation, using sustainable materials and still have our food taste good. Students will work on small scale projects that tackles this concert at hat the local and global level.

Advanced Topics in Food Systems: Inequality and Food Systems

This course examines the role of U.S. food and agricultural policy in perpetuating racial and economic inequality. Topics include agriculture, class and race in the 19th century; farm size and inequality; farm labor; low-wage workers in the food chain; food insecurity; and environmental inequality. The class covers both historical and contemporary social movements that respond to inequities within the food system. By introducing students to historical documents, empirical research, and the academic literature on these and related topics, the course prepares students to effectively evaluate contemporary legal and policy responses to food systems inequality.

Advanced Topics in Food Systems: Organic Food and Agriculture

This course explores organic agriculture from multiple angles, starting with a historical exploration of organic and finishing with policy approaches to organic. Specific aspects studied include the environmental benefits of organic production systems, the political economy of the US organic regulation, health benefits of organic, and organic consumption and marketing.

Advanced Topics in Food Systems: The Politics of Food Sovereignty

This course focuses on contemporary political struggles for control over agrifood systems. The course examines the relationship between the capitalist development of agrifood systems and national sovereignty and focusses on Latin America, a major U.S. agricultural trading partner. Students will review recent research on topics, such as trade integration, land grabbing, food systems financialization, states and contemporary agrarian policies, agroecology, and transnational peasant movements.

Contemporary Food Sociology

Covers production, distribution and consumption of food in the context of social, cultural, technological and biological processes under conditions of globalization. Employing approaches from the humanities and the social sciences, this course prepares students to initiate the process of analyzing the current American food system, its global connections, and proposed local alternatives that is developed further in other courses. Through lectures, readings and research the students master established facts and concepts about contemporary urban food cultures and produce new knowledge of the same.

Cuisine in Context: A Case Study

Examination of the cuisines of Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa and their influences on late 20th century North American foods, meals, and menus. Students will analyze these cuisine from perspective of geography, climate and culture, through readings, lectures, films, in-class tastiness, and restaurant field trips.

Culinary Physics

This studio and seminar course explores the basic principles of food biochemistry, enzymology and food processing and how they relate to memory, the senses and the processing of information. Students will also learn basic principles of molecular gastronomy and modernist cuisine as framing devices for understanding how food also functions in the context of bodily health, environmental health as well as cultural and political narratives. Assignments for the class will be based on the incorporation of food science into design and technology projects. Workshops involve using liquid nitrogen + hydrocolloids as well as creating performative + deployable food objects and a Futurist meal.

Current Research in Food Studies

Introduction to academic and professional resources at New York University and to career opportunities in food studies and food management, nutrition and dietetics, or public health. Class meets three or four times during the first semester of study.

Digital Skills in Food Media

In this hands-on communications course on food media, students learn how to use use social media, write for the web, analyze photography and video, and build and develop a website for an idea -- whether it be business, personal, or professional.

Fd Service Proj Devel

Advanced course addressing market needs, research methods, trend projections, feasibility, evaluation strategies, capital budgets, and financing for development of food service projects.

Field Trips in Food: Immigrant New York City

No Course Description Available.

Fieldtrips in Food: Food Manufacturing

No Course Description Available.

Food & Law in Action

We examine broad issues that currently shape our food system and explore ways to mobilize legal and policy tools in order to strategically respond to these issues. Topics include legal and policy underpinnings of the United States’ and global food systems, economic and social conditions, inequities of access to adequate healthy food, and public health and environmental crises. Students gain an understanding of the legal and policy pathways and develop effective actions to address the many complex issues that characterize—and threaten—our food system.

Food Advocacy

We explore a broad range of advocacy tools and techniques to address issues that currently shape and challenge our food system. Topics include the legal and policy underpinnings of current food systems, economic and social conditions, inequities of access to healthy food, and public health concerns. Students gain an understanding of the policy, social and legal underpinnings of the food system, and learn to creatively and collaboratively develop effective approaches to address the many complex issues that characterize and threaten it.

Food and Culture

We identify the meaning and significance of food in different cultures by exploring the way that ethnicity, gender, race, socioeconomic status and religion influence our food choices and food preserves culture. We look critically at the following questions: how can food have different meanings and uses for individuals, groups, or societies? How does food function both to foster community feeling and drive wedges among people? What are some prevailing academic theories that help us identify and understand individual and collective identities?