Schedule
- Session 1 (June 9 - 27, 2025)
- Synchronous time: Tuesday and Thursday, 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. ET
Description
Despite rising food stocks, a large chunk of the world’s population faces recurrent patterns of food insecurity every day. A situation that has only become grimmer following the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased production of food has transformed not just human lives but also our planet. According to the UN report on the Right to Food, global food production is the leading cause of climate disasters, metabolic disorders, and undernutrition. This course will provide students with tools and resources to understand the origins and persistence of such contradictions within our contemporary food systems. Drawing upon interdisciplinary scholarship in history, sociology, and anthropology, this course investigates why we eat what we eat, and how governance of food has been shaped by, but has also come to shape, our social, political, and economic worlds.
Students will learn the skills to ask and develop answers for the following questions:
- What are the origins of the world food economy, that is, the idea that the entire planet can be transformed into a food source for regions far-removed from each other?
- What role did the two world wars play in shaping technology, economics, and the geopolitics of food production? How does hunger become socially and politically unacceptable in the 20th century?
- How did various actors—economists, nutrition scientists, politicians, international agencies—across different political economic states, come to understand the problem of food scarcity and surplus and how did they set out to resolve it?
- And finally, what visions of food justice have emerged in the last century?
Expected learning outcomes
- Learn to analyze ethical, and critical debates over contemporary food systems
- Communicate complex ideas in written and oral form
- Develop college-level reading, writing, and argumentation skills
- Learn to find, use, and evaluate historical sources in a variety of mediums, and learn to craft arguments that effectively mobilize sources
- Learn to work individually and collectively
Program Director: Koyna Tomar
Koyna Tomar is a doctoral candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests include the 20th and 21st-century history of science, technology, and medicine, as it intersects with food, political economy, and the environment. At Penn, she has taught introductory and advanced undergraduate seminars.
