Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores a topic in Sociology not regularly offered by the department.

COURSE DETAILS:

Capitalism is full of commodities, but perhaps none as intimate as food. Whether we are aware of it or not, food puts us in contact with a multiplicity of people and institutions, each inserted in a variety of social relations to produce, process, distribute and consume food. Given the wealth of relations generated around food, steeped in social inequality, this is becoming a booming theme in sociology and other social-science disciplines. One of the paradoxes of the contemporary food system is that it generates both hunger and obesity at the same time. Hunger is often blamed on insufficient food production, but given that enough food is produced for everyone, the root cause is in fact inequitable food distribution. Emphasis in this course will be placed on social structures of inequality, both within and between countries in a globalized world. These structures are key determinants of not only whether people have access to food, but also its amount and quality. One of the key driving forces of hunger is, paradoxically, the very technology that was developed purportedly to increase food production. The so-called “Green Revolution,” launched in the 1970s as an alleged solution to Third World hunger, resulted in further social and regional disparities in food availability . . . and increased hunger. Since the 1990s, many have argued that the “Gene Revolution” or biotechnology, specifically the genetic engineering of crops, now holds the contemporary technological solution to global hunger. Can this be true given the social structures of inequality?

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Our general objective will be to gain a greater understanding of the “food system” and globalization though cooperation in this class. Besides our weekly seminar discussions, much of our effort will culminate in the last two sessions, when students will give presentations on their own specific findings. I have high hopes that these presentations will result in considerable teaching and learning effects. Three specific objectives are as follows: 

First, students will get an overview of the main sociological issues on food and globalization. Our major focus will be on how the main foods in the Western or Industrial diet – grains, milk, meat, fruit and vegetables – are produced and under what social conditions. We will explore the links between agricultural technologies, trade, and the reconfiguration of the global agrifood system. This course includes writings from a diversity of scholars – sociologists, a social historian, a journalist, and an anthropologist who is also a medical doctor – so it should be of interest to students from Arts and Social Sciences, Communications, Environment, and Health Sciences.

The second objective to give students a sense of how food production shapes the relations among states in the world economy. The main producers of agricultural inputs and crops, on one hand, and the main distributors and processors, on the other, are all based in advanced capitalist countries, namely in the United States. This fact places many developing countries in a relation of food-import dependency that makes them vulnerable to food insecurity. Within this objective, we will zoom into how fruits and vegetables are produced in the United States and Canada by a predominantly foreign labour force: immigrants from Mexico and Central America, mostly former peasants displaced from agriculture in their own countries.

Finally, our third main goal is to get students engaged in the practice of sociology through bibliographic research. The chief purpose of this research, which should result in a final term paper, is to integrate some of the required course readings with the analysis of a specific sociological food issue in Canada or some other country. Comparative papers on any two countries are also welcome with the instructor’s approval.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: