Much of human evolution revolves around the foraging niche of our ancestors. Diet is linked to group size, social organization, ranging patterns, reproductive strategies, dental and cranio-facial morphology, digestive physiology, encephalization, tool use, and dispersal patterns. This course will provide a framework in which advanced students can link many issues/concepts in paleoanthropology and form a potentially more cohesive perspective of hominin evolution. This course aims to provide an introduction to biogeochemical case studies in anthropology and the challenges of designing, conducting, analyzing and writing up laboratory and field research in biological anthropology. It will include practical advice on how to develop feasible and interesting research objectives, select an appropriate research topic, and design protocols for collection of quantitative data. Each student will implement a pilot project and generate empirical data that will be analyzed and presented.

Porcelain from China, known as “white gold”, was so valuable that European rulers kidnapped and placed people on house arrest to be able to make it themselves. Ancient Egyptians buried their dead with not only food, but also miniature breweries and bakeries to enjoy in the afterlife. Drinking alcohol was such an integral part of Ottoman society that there is an entire genre of drinking party images. This seminar will discuss objects and images about food and feasting from around the globe from antiquity to the present. This seminar will discuss objects and images about food and feasting from around the globe from antiquity to the present. What did people eat? What do these food habits tell us about their social structures and anxieties? Rituals? Religions? How did the introduction of new foods change society’s approaches to consumption?

Does locally grown food have a smaller carbon footprint? Have portion sizes increased, and is that making people fat? What is the history of “natural food”? This seminar examines how researchers answer these questions and more. Students will learn to interpret and conduct research on food across the disciplines.

This course offers hands-on understanding and foundational skill-building in the principles and practices of ecological and organic farming. Based at the UM Campus Farm at Matthaei Botanical Gardens, students will meet weekly for farm walks (field-based lecture) exploring both the theory and practices associated with organic and ecological farming.

This course focuses on the study of nutrition and exercise-related health behaviors with a focus on the understanding of food, digestion, metabolism, and physical activity / exercise. Topics include nutrients, digestion and absorption of nutrients, food/supplements policy and regulation, bioenergetics, physical activity and exercise, ergogenic aids, body composition, and social and environmental factors influencing nutrition and physical activity.

Food is an essential part of the University of Michigan student experience. What did UM students eat in the past and where does the food served on campus today come from?  This seminar examines changes in the food system that has fed UM students in Ann Arbor over the past 150 years and the ways that food is helping the University be more sustainable. We explore all aspects of the food system from production to waste.

Experiential learning, including historical research with the Bentley Library student scrapbook collection, a visit to the Campus Farm, and a project with student-lead sustainable food organizations, is an essential part of this course. Students will have opportunities to learn directly from the people who are working to make the university food system more local, sustainable and accessible.

You’ve probably answered the question, “If you could invite 5 people from any time in history to a dinner party, who would they be?” Imagine instead that you could time travel to have meals throughout history. What would you eat at these feasts and what would people be celebrating? How did exchange among cultures change people’s tastes, cravings, utensils, and thoughts about certain ingredients? This class will discuss themes like the impact of caffeine and sugar, the consumption of street food, historical celebrity chefs (like James Hemings who introduced mac and cheese to the world), and setting the table across the globe and throughout history.  We will discuss fine art, architecture, advertisements, ceramics, metalware, and a variety of other media that relate to the consumption, storage, preparation, and public display of food and feasting.

In recent years it has become apparent that current energy and food sourcing is damaging the environment from global warming to pesticide runoff. This course treats the issues of energy, food, and the environment from a biological and sociopolitical point of view. It emphasizes the historical trajectories that generated current conditions and the scientific options for revamping our energy and food systems to make them more consistent with environmental sustainability.

This course will explore the social history of Middle Eastern (and North African) food and drink, examining records from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, medieval cookbooks and wine poetry from Baghdad, imperial art and account books of the Ottoman palace, to modern cookbook-memoirs. We will also have a direct experience of culinary practices in the Middle East and the diaspora. Food and social practices of eating and drinking provide a uniquely intimate version of the history of this region through lived experience that also shows the universal humanity of these cultures.

Not everyone has equal access to abundant, healthy, diverse and affordable food. What factors influence who eats, what we eat and why we eat it? A powerful set of political, economic, social, environmental, and cultural factors motivate this most fundamental of human actions, eating! This course is an in-depth exploration of the complex system that shapes food systems at all scales: from farm to table, from local to global. We explore the politics and economics underlying public policies surrounding the production, processing, transportation, marketing and consumption of food. We consider how policies affect the environment, human health and well-being, giving special attention to the ways in which food policy can exacerbate or mitigate inequality. The course has four parts: Fundamentals of Food Production and Consumption; Political Economy of Food; How Food Policy Uplifts and Oppresses; and Wicked Problems for Food Policy.

Students will: grapple with the complex etiology and consequences of food insecurity in the U.S., including the historical roots of current programming; interrogate current approaches to addressing it at the local, state, and federal levels; and synthesize the state of the science toward policy proposals for strategic programmatic refinements.

Benefitting from collaborative instruction that draws on the expertise of professors from three different departments, students will practice systems thinking and examine foundational aspects of food systems from local to global levels across agroecology/environmental, public health/nutrition, and urban planning/policy dimensions.

We will examine sustainable development and globalization through the struggles with food and water scarcity and energy justice. Using lectures, films, discussions, and assignments, this course aims to foster critical thinking about how societies are organized and to evaluate what we can contribute to the pursuit of a sustainable and just biosphere.

This course examines a critical environmental issue of the 21st century:  freshwater scarcity, an issue that intersects with other environmental, economic and political issues such as overpopulation, urbanization, pollution, food security, energy, corruption, technology, human rights, governance, and climate change, just to name a few.  Upon completion of this course, students will better understand: water challenges and opportunities throughout the globe, how governments and non-government organizations function in water management, and the differences and similarities of water issues between developing and developed nations. Students will also have honed their writing skills, skills essential to successful employment and graduate work in the field.

This course explores the mineral, energy and food resources of the ocean and environmental impacts that arise from the exploitation of these resources. We discuss conflicts in our competing uses of the ocean and its resources. We also examine both the popular and scientific literature surrounding these issues.

This course melds student research and hands-on action. Topics are focused on environmental sustainability concepts related to the world, personal lives, and the University of Michigan campus. Students will develop basic sustainability literacy and evaluate their own practices and decisions related to sustainability to understand and address sustainability issues with action. Students will work individually and as teams to tackle problems emerging on campus. Students will create team reports and action guides for continued sustainability work. 

This course offers an introduction to Food Studies, an interdisciplinary field that explores the social, cultural, historical, and political aspects of food and eating. We’ll read about and discuss questions like:

• What should we do about the “obesity epidemic”?
• What are the philosophical and practical implications of eating animals?
• Is it really better to eat “local”?
• Where did the association between African Americans and fried chicken come from?
• And many more.
• In addition, we’ll watch several recent documentaries and visit the Culinary Archive at the Clements.

By the end of the class, you will be better equipped to develop research questions, find and evaluate evidence, and articulate nuanced arguments — not only about food but about any subject.

Claire Saffitz is on a quest to make the best desserts on the planet. Binging With Babish has cracked the Krabby Patty formula. The Bear takes a surreal dive into Chicagoland kitchens. Food-related content is in a golden age, often being about more than cuisine. Does a loved one’s memory live on through a recipe? How do our families, friends, cultures, and languages celebrate nourishment? This section of Writing 160 will grant you opportunities to write and make digital works surrounding food—preparing it, eating it, and gathering around it. We’ll focus on multimodal composition, meaning we’ll study and express ourselves through a variety of different art forms. You can expect to watch YouTube videos about New York City bodegas, read poems about barbecue and essays about sustainability, or discuss comedy sketches where the customer is never right. We’ll break bread, crafting creative projects and arguments that will prepare us for the rest of college and outside of it.

This course focuses on resources from the ocean and how these are used by and influenced by humans. Three general subject areas are covered: minerals and energy from the oceans, food resources in the oceans, and humans’ influence on the oceans (warming, acidification, pollution). You will learn a bit about oceanography and the geology of the seafloor, and a lot about how humans utilize the ocean for resources and in doing so are changing the oceans.

In recent decades, our society has generated renewed interest in plants for our needs to have a balanced diet, a more natural approach to medicine, a clean environment, and an overall healthy lifestyle. Plants are integral components of formulas to meet these needs. In this course, students will learn basic botany, human use of plants as food and medicine, and the important relationship between environment and human health. Active participation by students in class discussion and on field trips is required after they read materials in a textbook, research articles, and investigate online sources outside the classroom. A self-designed course project stimulates independent and active thinking, and helps students learn in a relaxed environment at a self-controlled pace.

This course will focus on the Filipino language, including vocabulary words and expressions used in food and foodways with cultural context. The students will also be able to acquire knowledge in Filipino food and its origin, history, ingredients, method of cooking as well as the similarity and differences in every region.

We live in a unique time. Cheap energy and technological innovation have transformed the way we live. We can travel vast distances in a few hours. Products of every shape and size fill our homes. Every food imaginable can be bought at any time we wish. While these advances have certainly enriched our lives in many ways they have also come at a cost. The consumption-based lifestyle that we have embraced is not only altering the climate and degrading ecosystems, but it is increasingly jeopardizing human health. Encouraging people to adopt more environmentally sustainable lifestyles, however, has proven to be challenging. If people believe this coming transition will involve sacrifice and a more difficult way of life they will be unlikely to get involved. Fortunately, an alternative perspective is possible. What if we could create an environmentally sustainable future that is better equipped to support human health and well-being than our current lifestyle? Would people be more willing to participate and try out new ways of doing things? The purpose of this course is to explore this idea by considering how the environment influences our health and well-being. In order to tackle this complex topic, we will begin by identifying the physical, psychological, and social dimensions of human health. We then explore how climate change could negatively impact human health and consider the ways in which our modern lifestyle makes it difficult for us to achieve and maintain good health. Finally, we will think about how the shift to a more sustainable lifestyle could positively impact our health and well-being.

This minicourse focuses on environmental issues in the Great Lakes. Topics include the formation and geology of the Great Lakes, hydrology and dynamics of water levels, effect of invasive species on food webs and fisheries, and pollution, particularly the role of nutrients in causing toxic algal blooms.

What is the story behind our food? This class explores this question from the perspective of the people who produce our food. You will learn about changes in food production over the last 10,000 years from archaeological and historical case studies, as well as the stories of contemporary farmers. Using an anthropological perspective, we explore contemporary issues of sustainability, food sovereignty, and the role of local food producers during times of crisis. You will also learn to conduct research on food using online sources.

Selected topics in Black World Studies which focus on introduction to Africa, to the Caribbean, to North America, and to South America. Specific focus is determined by the instructor and indicated in the current Schedule of Classes.

Many people want the things they consume made in just and sustainable ways but the market does not automatically meet this kind of consumer demand.  Often consumers, like workers, must organize and act collectively if they are to bend market dynamics toward their ethical concerns.  This course will examine historical and contemporary efforts to do just that, focusing on the apparel and food supply chains and the social movements that have tried to change dynamics in these sectors.  We’ll explore the strategies and actions of these consumer organizing efforts, what they were able to achieve, and what accounts for varying degrees of success.  Our overarching goal is to learn how to increase the effectiveness of such efforts by studying the food and apparel sectors, meeting with organizers and leaders from efforts in the aforementioned sectors, and exploring why the market often fails to meet ethical consumer demands if consumers act as unorganized individuals.

This course investigates the construction of ‘food’ within varied systems of biopolitical power. It explores how the term circulates both in the U.S and globally to create and manage modern connections between life and politics. Our notion of the political power of food is often expressed through the anxieties and fears of managing human life. Whether in exploring the convict leasing system, the violent dispossession and removal that undergirds our modern agricultural industry, or calls for sustainable farming practices as a form of labor equality, food is entangled in biopolitical forms of power that exploit the body’s potential to produce labor, death, and energy. The course centers institutionalized forms of biopolitical power especially those of agricultural and domestic sciences and the American embrace of terms like nutrition, standard of living, and home management as common sense links that order race, morality, and everyday space. This course draws on theories from Black feminisms, enfleshment and embodiment, critical food and nutrition studies, and fat studies. We will also draw from a range of texts including cookbooks, home management manuals, performance art, food memoir, and theories of food design.

This interdisciplinary course critically explores intersecting literature on agroecology, biodiversity, ecosystem services, diversified farming systems, agroforestry, and farmer’s livelihoods. The course will focus on 1)the application of ecological theory to the study of diverse farming systems 2)biodiversity, and 3)social issues in diverse farming systems, such as tree and land tenure, gender issues and the social rural movements that promote diverse farming systems and agroecology.

This course is designed to introduce students to eating disorders using a public health framework. Students will be exposed to key concepts and controversies in the eating disorders field.

The goal of this course is to understand the historical and current intersections of environmental justice as a philosophy, practice, and social movement praxis. The course will cover the origins of the environmental justice movement in the U.S., the meanings associated with the term “environmental justice” and the historical and current intersections to food justice and food sovereignty. The course will examine historical and current events and analyze the various resistance strategies employed by social movements to resist environmental injustices. An international lens will be explored to build an understanding of environmental justice and its food-based intersections on a global level. Students will develop a broad understanding of the historical and contemporary factors that shape the emergence of environmental justice movements around the world, including the mechanisms that give rise to class, gender, racial, and other types of disparities. Students will gain an overall understanding of the topic through analyzing policy, research, and community discourses as it relates to community self-determination and empowerment sought by environmental justice movements.

Dietary and cultural shifts/innovations (for example, cooking, domestication of plants and animals) during human origins may have been acted as evolutionary forces shaping the physiology and metabolism as well as the genome of early humans. Exposure to modern diets may result in a mismatch of old adaptations to a new environment, potentially leading to so-called “diseases of civilization” such as hypertension, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. In this course, we will discuss human nutrition from an evolutionary perspective. We will critically review scientific theories (e.g. thrifty gene hypothesis) explaining how mismatch between old adaptations and modern diets affect human health. This evolutionary analysis may shed new light on the epidemics of “diseases of civilization” and may help to inform public health interventions. Students are expected to be very active participants of class discussions.

 This course is a critical exploration of the health issues related to domestic food security, food policy, and food programs, with a focus on maternal and child health. We will examine the array of negative health outcomes associated with food insecurity, discuss potential mechanisms underlying these associations, how food policy is made, the intersection of food policy with public health nutrition, and the influence of federal food assistance programs on diet-related outcomes for children and families.

Benefitting from collaborative instruction that draws on the expertise of professors from three different departments, students will practice systems thinking and examine foundational aspects of food systems from local to global levels across agroecology/environmental, public health/nutrition, and urban planning/policy dimensions.

Indigenous peoples are among the major architects of environmental movements focusing on sustainability and environmental justice. But whereas many environmentalists focus on restoring or conserving historic ecosystems, Indigenous peoples inhabit landscapes largely altered by different formations of colonialism and racial capitalism. For Indigenous peoples, environmental justice, climate change resilience, food sovereignty, and ecological restoration take on different meanings than typically have been priorities in other environmental movements and sciences. This course seeks to understand, from Indigenous perspectives, how many Indigenous movements, Indigenous sciences and knowledge systems, and the projects of Indigenous organizations and governments seek to achieve sustainability and environmental justice, including the challenges they face and the lessons they have learned. The course covers topics within domains of Indigenous sciences and knowledge systems, Indigenous environmental activism and anti-colonial philosophies, Indigenous research approaches, Indigenous ecologies, Indigenous resilience, and Indigenous legal orders and strategies in law and policy.

How did food structure Roman life? How did it shape Romans’ social bonds, their cities and landscapes, and relationship with the gods? The food Romans ate connected their bodies to the environments they inhabited, to the machinery of empire, and the divine forces that organized their bodies and worlds. In this course, we will survey recent scholarly interventions in the history of Roman–and more generally, premodern–foodways to address broader historical themes, including: labor, the senses, identity and belonging, the body, status and distinction, and the environment. Material history will be a central framework, and we will draw on resources in the Kelsey and the university’s papyrology collection as part of that commitment.

While Roman culture is our case study, the course is designed for any graduate student with an interest in premodern foodways or material history. With this in mind, students’ ultimate object will be an oral, conference-style paper on a (thematically appropriate) topic of their choosing, which will be workshopped at different stages and should leave students ready to present their work at any major conference in their field.

An overview of the form and development of urban communities with respect to demographic structure and functional organization, viewing the city as a source of conflict, creativity and social change. Issues of urban social problems, urban planning and urban futures are all considered. 

How do politics affect our food at the global, national and urban/local scale? This course examines close historical relationships between politics and food; the politics of conventional agriculture and food policy; and alternative agriculture movements and food systems, with a particular emphasis on urban food policy and urban food systems.

Food is a central component of everyday life and locus of intense anthropological study. In this class we will focus on food primarily from the lens of biological anthropology, although we will definitely engage with some of the cultural dimensions of food. Some of the questions we will explore include:

• What are the essential nutrients in food?
• What nutrients do humans need?
• Do these needs change over the life cycle?
• How important is food to the growth and development process?
• What have we evolved to eat?
• Does the modern diet conflict with the bodies we’ve evolved over millennia?
• What do people eat in different cultures? Does this translate into different health outcomes?
• What are the health outcomes of over- and under-nutrition?
• How can we explore the political economy of food to help us understand some of the causes of over- and under-nutrition?