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France: Global Food Cultures

Graduate Study Abroad

This program is closed and no longer accepting applications. Visit the Graduate Study Abroad page to learn about alternative study abroad opportunities for graduate students. If you have any questions, please write to steinhardt.global@nyu.edu.

For more than a century, French culture has been adopted as the global standard of refined taste throughout the world. As French chefs from Carême to Escoffier and Bocuse (and the countless chefs who followed) codified the rules of their national cuisine, they remade the culinary world and developed an idea for food production and consumption that still reverberates throughout the Western World. To what extent is this performance of French identity simply a myth, a perception perpetuated through movies, songs, cookbooks, and restaurants, and to what extent is this performance a reality?

Global Food Cultures: Paris will explore the Performance of French Identity through the lens of food, juxtaposing the US and French ideals of identity to unpack how issues of gender, race, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity appear when everyday lived reality clashes with espoused national ideals such as the French “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” and the American “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Food—in its production, distribution, and consumption— allows an especially intimate means of exploring identity. 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 ideals.

Location:

Paris, France

Program Dates:

To be announced

Faculty:

To be announced

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