Introducing: The Story Chefs

Students connect theory to practice, and get their hands dirty planting spring seedlings at Hilltop Garden, during our “Soil” class, where we learned all the information contained in a pile of dirt.

Throughout the semester, students in Food and the Body spent time reading, reflecting and discussing the many factors that transform eating from subsistence into political act.

How did colonialism impact indigenous foodways and restructure relationships to body and land? In what ways do we see this colonial legacy shaping our perceptions of “good” bodies or “healthy” bodies? What do we lose when we limit our perceptions of health to those defined by the U.S. healthcare industry? Why does what we eat matter? How can food be used to reveal structures of inequality? How can food be a site of impactful social change?

Students absorbed a mix of academic articles, podcasts, blogs, guest lectures and creative writing from global indigenous scholars and community activists, to broaden their understandings of the many different ways that food narratives have been co-opted throughout history, and then reclaimed, and reconstituted to address community healing.

A key component of the class was learning to listen to stories — all kinds of stories, from all kinds of knowledge holders, in order to fully represent the complex diversity of relationships to food and body.

A final class period was dedicated to visually processing the stories collected during ethnographic interviews.

Students tap into creative thinking through art, to help identify salient themes in their interviews.

Through semester-long training in ethnographic methods, students were asked to immerse themselves in a chosen community food issue, producing a final piece that highlights a particular story of embodied food inequality, and the work being done to combat it. The goals of this project were for students to draw on their own skillsets and experiences, and link class themes and readings to a topic of personal importance. Additionally, in alignment with class practices of decolonial research design, students were encouraged to challenge the researcher:subject hierarchy and think about ways in which the storytellers could become co-creators of this final project. Through art, music, and cooking together, students developed novel approaches to ethnography, with stunning results.

I hope you enjoy the insightful and impactful stories assembled by the students of Food and the Body, Spring 2021.

Students share herbal teas and reflection during our class on “Plants as Medicine”.