Courses

Food and Culture: New Orleans

The course will focus on New Orleans with its rich history, unique location and distinctive cultures as a prime location to study the intersection of food, identity and culture. New Orleans has both shaped and been shaped by an idiosyncratic set of food practices, rituals, and beliefs. Through a firsthand study of the city, its history, its people and its food ways, student will gain a thorough understanding of food and culture in New Orleans.

Food Economics: Consumer Behavior

The goal of this course is to analyze the consumer side of food markers and related policy using tools of microeconomic analysis. In the first half of the course theoretical tools are developed, starting from individual choice and moving up to market demand. In the second part of the course, the focus shifts to applications of consumer economic theory in the food system, and how policies can alter consumer behavior.

Food Economics: Firm Strategic Behavior

The course provides students with an intermediate level understanding of the microeconomics of firm or business behavior, and to apply these tools to current policy issues in the food system. Students explore the effect of firm decision-making on size, scale, and scope, and apply the tools to firms in the food sector. A range of outcomes is explored: free market, firm self regulation, socially responsible firm behavior, shared value firm behavior, and government regulation. The course is designed for policy and food interested students with little as well as no background in economics, or for those who have completed an introductory course that used a text on par with Krugman and Wells.

Food Entrepreneurship

Development of new concepts in food business operations through planning, organization, implementation, and evaluation of independent and multiunit operations: concept development, initiation, financing, site selection, franchising and analysis and control of risk.

Food History

Examination of food and diets from historical and international perspectives. Considers the origins of foods- the co-evolution of world cuisines and civilizations- the international exchange and spread of food technologies following the voyages of Columbus - and the effects of the emergent global economy on food production- diets- and health.

Food in the Arts

The ways in which writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have used food as a theme or symbol for reasons of aesthetic, social, cultural, or political commentary.

Food in the Arts: Design

This course focuses on the role design plays in framing the food environment, from production to consumption and explores how designers influence and shape stakeholders in the food system. Students investigate the interaction of users with designed places, objects, sensorial experiences as well as ideas, services, and systems and learn to analyze the built/material work.

Food in the Arts: Food Performance

The ways in which writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have used food as a theme or symbol for reasons of aesthetic, social, cultural, or political commentary.

Food in the Arts: Framing Information in Times of Crisis

This course will explore food messaging and representation in moments of crisis, both historically and also in our current COVID-19 moment. Employing multiple lenses including ethical, political, communal, and individual, we"ll examine such topics as medieval religious aestheticism/asceticism, World War II propaganda, global notions of food waste, the ethos of food sharing and commensality, and media messaging in the contemporary COVID moment.

Food in the Arts: Media

This course critically analyzes foods" portrayal across media platforms. We unpack how the media influences taste, purchases, and food beliefs; how it develops characters by what they eat and drink; and how it creates trends and movements. We explore cooking as entertainment, food shopping as a personal statement, and how media intersects with class, gender and racial tropes. Beginning with theory and moving through print, television, film, and the internet, students have hands-on experience interacting with the messages that define American food culture.

Food Legislation, Regulation & Enforcement

This course examines the legal and regulatory frameworks that underlie domestic food policy. Specific areas of emphasis are the jurisdictions of federal and state agencies, the role of the legislative bodies in creating policy, and the role of the judicial system in enforcing policies and regulations.

Food Markets:Concepts and Cases

Explores the conceptual underpinnings of the distributive networks through which food travels from farm to table. Examines the relationships between markets, states, and society in their historical and contemporary forms. Employs case studies of how commodities travel through the food system at the local, national and international levels. Topics include mass markets and niche markets; the culture of markets; reciprocity, exchange and redistribution; conventional and alternative supply chains.

Food Photography

Demonstrations of techniques for photographing foods for use in print and other media formats.

Food Policy

Analysis of the economic and social causes and consequences of current trends in food production- marketing and product development.

Food Service Systems

Examination of food service systems, with emphasis on site-specific and corporate functions and current trends in the industry.

Food Studies Capstone Seminar

Theoretical and applied aspects of research design, data analysis, and interpretation. Students teams conduct, analyze, and present an evaluative or applied research project in food studies. Should be taken in the last year of study in the master’s program.

Food Studies Doctoral Seminar

The Food Studies Doctoral seminar is required for all Food Studies doctoral students from their first semester to their last. Food Studies doctoral students enroll each semester until the time of graduation (even for students conducting fieldwork outside of NYC). The doctoral students and faculty meet five times a semester for three hours. Students discuss their progress, read and discuss assigned readings, and give seminars on their research.

Food Systems

The core Food Systems course covers the US food system from an applied economic perspective, recognizing that the food system operates in a market. We begin by studying the mechanics of the different stages of the food system: farm, distribution, retailing and consumer. The course then turns to social and environmental costs of the food system. After covering the strengths and weakness of the food system, students explore topics such as sustainability, globalization, resiliency, consumer choice, and equity.

Food Writing

This course combines practical lessons in writing for a popular audience with a bird’s eye view of the tradition of food writing; an engagement with craft; and a contemporary understanding of food’s place in our culture and politics. We address social trends and movements including political upheaval, racial and economic justice, gender and identity, and intense social change through writing about food. Students learn the publishing and editing process.

Foods in the Arts: Food and Fine Art

Not Available.