ANT 210: Recipe for Humanity: How Food, Alcohol, and Drugs Make Society

Consuming food is at once a biological necessity and a deeply socially charged event. Every calorie we consume is the result of our or someone else's labor. This fact means that what we choose to eat, whom we eat it with, how we eat it and the social contexts where we eat carry economic, political, social, or even religious significance. In this class we take an anthropological perspective on the consumption of food, alcohol and psychoactive substances to explore the ways that humanity has constituted itself through patterns of food consumption. We will explore the role of food in our biological evolution, in our historical trajectory and in our current lived experiences in a globally interconnected world.