Cal State Fullerton is offering a new course on “social inequalities” of food, The College Fix reports.
Sociology professor Dana Collins promises to bring students along for a journey exploring the “possibilities of food justice” with “The Social Life of Food.” In an extensive email, Collins told The College Fix that the course has three goals: to apply “sociological curiosity to food,” to understand “the social life” of food and to understand “food justice.”
Collins aims to convince students that if they consume food produced by “inequitable” capitalists or something called “environmental racism,” then they become part of “food injustice.”
Along the way, according to Collins, students are invited to “watch exciting food documentaries, learn from people actively engaged with food justice in the L.A. region, and complete exciting assignments like observing farmer’s markets and food production businesses, interviewing food workers, and writing a recipe that is decolonized,” the last word apparently referring to food preparation that doesn’t trod upon anyone’s social justice.
Of course there is some mandatory reading, including such highly-regarded treatises from the food justice genre as “Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply” and “Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems in the Americas.”
It all builds up to a final assignment that encourages students to browse some of the many anti-Trump websites extant to find a “build strategy” worth analyzing or write to write their own build strategy research paper on the social inequalities of just one food choice, “analyzing its history, transformation through global capitalist production, its environmental costs, and the racialized-gender work that is part of its production.”
A “build strategy” refers to a phrase apparently common among anti-Trump websites that refers to a “build and fight; fight and build” resistance program, rallying the creation of Marxist-like workers’ cooperatives, people’s assemblies and community energy networks.
Attempting to encapsulate what exactly her course is designed to convey to students, Collins offers the following: “people’s access to food is always mitigated through political and economic relations that create the conditions of inequitable distributions and unhealthy foods.”
Collins says she “aims to change those inequitable relations of food production and exchange by challenging conditions of environmental racism … [and] redistributing the power around food production and exchange.”
The course has hit its maximum enrollment ceiling at 47 students for its spring semester and Collins is busy working on making her social justice for food course a regular part of university’s curriculum.
