ENV 230 - Food and the Environment

Credits: 3 Prerequisite: ENV-110, or instructor consent. Food is intimately connected with the environmental justice challenges of the Anthropocene - and to understand those connections fully, we need to examine how they developed in the past. This course explores how food has transformed societies and environments in the United States over centuries, and investigates how the legacies of those transformations continue to affect how we eat and drink today. We will use archaeology, history, anthropology, and other approaches from the environmental humanities to deepen our understanding of the (un)sustainability of modern U.S. food systems. We will study the potential lessons the past may hold for the future, and leverage this knowledge to evaluate the sustainability and environmental justice of our 21st century foodways. Fisher.