ASIAN 135
Asian Foodways across Borders
Description: Lecture, two and one half hours. Examination of Asian foodways from 19th century to present, looking at how Asian and Western foods have impacted each other as they cross borders. Offers insight into how political, economic, and cultural forces of globalization manifest themselves in everyday life. Focus is on East Asian cuisines, but students are encouraged to incorporate additional information on South and Southeast Asian cuisines. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - For starters, I would say that this was probably the WORST and most UNENJOYABLE class I have taken at UCLA, even having taken a lot of STEM courses like biochem, physics, ochem, etc. all of which I somehow have had a (even if just slightly) better experience in. PLS ABSOLUTELY AVOID this class if you want an easy A !! This class was literally harder to get an A in than the behavioral neuroscience lab class I was taking at the same time because it’s one of those classes where the amount of effort you put into your papers doesn’t really translate well in terms of a fair grade, because grading felt so arbitrary and lectures didn’t prepare you at all for any of the assignments. I initially took this class as an upper div for my Asian Humanities minor because the idea of a course that critically analyzes and discusses foodways in terms of historical and cross-cultural context sounded really interesting to me. And I could not be more wrong. In terms of lecture content, it felt like the professor kind of just compiled a watered-down list of “fun facts” about Asian food and culture that sounded like out of a National Geographic Kids catalog, to which she would basically read them off the slides without really connecting it to anything and then ask the class how the information made us feel / if we had anything to add. But… I felt there wasn’t really anything to talk about. Participation is also MANDATORY, but I was just genuinely so confused on what more points we the students could possibly add to the class “discussion” when all the professor said was a list of the different types of rice. However, I did appreciate that the professor let us get participation points alternatively by posting on the class discussion forums on BruinLearn. But because of the way lectures were structured, class time became essentially a painfully cringey hour and a half of listening to the professor and classmates talk about their favorite sushi or Chinese food, I felt like I lost brain cells whenever I went to lecture. Which was every single class because attendance is MANDATORY, otherwise I would have skipped every one of them because they were pretty useless and completely unrelated to the assignments or assigned readings. At one point in time, I was really excited that we would be discussing some food-related films in class but during lecture, the professor just played extremely long clips of the movies and asked us what we noticed in the film with no further comment. Also, the professor forgot the ending to one of the films and needed to call on a student to recap the story ending for her in class. So, long story short, I feel like I didn’t learn anything all quarter. In terms of the graded assignments, we had a total of 3 essays, 1 personal reflection essay, 1 creative video project, and participation. The personal reflection and the creative video project were okay, since they were pretty straightforward to complete and graded pretty lightly. However, I personally felt that the prompts for the 3 essay assignments were extremely vague (one of them was literally “analyze a particular Asian food” and just left it at that). In addition, there was actually a high expectation of critical analysis in these 3 essay assignments, and I feel like it was really difficult to complete these assignments because the lectures were unrelated to these assignments and didn’t build up a foundation for students to think critically / succeed in these essay assignments. These assignments were also graded surprisingly harshly (the highest essay grade this professor ever gave to anyone during the whole quarter was a 94%) because the professor has this policy where only the “best in the class” receive full scores on (not the whole assignment grade itself!) the individual graded categories within the rubric for the essay. And when there are like 10 categories in the rubric and you get a 9/10 for each category like tone, argument, research, etc. because it wasn’t the “best in the class” for a 100-point essay, these grade points really cut into your overall final grade. Honestly, the grading felt so nitpicky that I feel like if the professor wrote her own essay assignment, turned it in, and graded it anonymously, she probably wouldn’t get full credit. Genuinely, the professor didn’t seem like a bad person, and she is understanding to her students when it comes to tardiness, absences due to sickness, and extensions. She also gave out two cans of Spam for students who haven’t tried it during the Spam unit, which I thought was a really nice gesture that you don’t really get to see in college classrooms. However, there was a lot about this class that left me disappointed, and I feel like maybe I could’ve enjoyed the course if it was structured differently in terms of the lecture style, depth of analysis and information, and cohesion between lecture and the essay assignments.
Fall 2023 - For starters, I would say that this was probably the WORST and most UNENJOYABLE class I have taken at UCLA, even having taken a lot of STEM courses like biochem, physics, ochem, etc. all of which I somehow have had a (even if just slightly) better experience in. PLS ABSOLUTELY AVOID this class if you want an easy A !! This class was literally harder to get an A in than the behavioral neuroscience lab class I was taking at the same time because it’s one of those classes where the amount of effort you put into your papers doesn’t really translate well in terms of a fair grade, because grading felt so arbitrary and lectures didn’t prepare you at all for any of the assignments. I initially took this class as an upper div for my Asian Humanities minor because the idea of a course that critically analyzes and discusses foodways in terms of historical and cross-cultural context sounded really interesting to me. And I could not be more wrong. In terms of lecture content, it felt like the professor kind of just compiled a watered-down list of “fun facts” about Asian food and culture that sounded like out of a National Geographic Kids catalog, to which she would basically read them off the slides without really connecting it to anything and then ask the class how the information made us feel / if we had anything to add. But… I felt there wasn’t really anything to talk about. Participation is also MANDATORY, but I was just genuinely so confused on what more points we the students could possibly add to the class “discussion” when all the professor said was a list of the different types of rice. However, I did appreciate that the professor let us get participation points alternatively by posting on the class discussion forums on BruinLearn. But because of the way lectures were structured, class time became essentially a painfully cringey hour and a half of listening to the professor and classmates talk about their favorite sushi or Chinese food, I felt like I lost brain cells whenever I went to lecture. Which was every single class because attendance is MANDATORY, otherwise I would have skipped every one of them because they were pretty useless and completely unrelated to the assignments or assigned readings. At one point in time, I was really excited that we would be discussing some food-related films in class but during lecture, the professor just played extremely long clips of the movies and asked us what we noticed in the film with no further comment. Also, the professor forgot the ending to one of the films and needed to call on a student to recap the story ending for her in class. So, long story short, I feel like I didn’t learn anything all quarter. In terms of the graded assignments, we had a total of 3 essays, 1 personal reflection essay, 1 creative video project, and participation. The personal reflection and the creative video project were okay, since they were pretty straightforward to complete and graded pretty lightly. However, I personally felt that the prompts for the 3 essay assignments were extremely vague (one of them was literally “analyze a particular Asian food” and just left it at that). In addition, there was actually a high expectation of critical analysis in these 3 essay assignments, and I feel like it was really difficult to complete these assignments because the lectures were unrelated to these assignments and didn’t build up a foundation for students to think critically / succeed in these essay assignments. These assignments were also graded surprisingly harshly (the highest essay grade this professor ever gave to anyone during the whole quarter was a 94%) because the professor has this policy where only the “best in the class” receive full scores on (not the whole assignment grade itself!) the individual graded categories within the rubric for the essay. And when there are like 10 categories in the rubric and you get a 9/10 for each category like tone, argument, research, etc. because it wasn’t the “best in the class” for a 100-point essay, these grade points really cut into your overall final grade. Honestly, the grading felt so nitpicky that I feel like if the professor wrote her own essay assignment, turned it in, and graded it anonymously, she probably wouldn’t get full credit. Genuinely, the professor didn’t seem like a bad person, and she is understanding to her students when it comes to tardiness, absences due to sickness, and extensions. She also gave out two cans of Spam for students who haven’t tried it during the Spam unit, which I thought was a really nice gesture that you don’t really get to see in college classrooms. However, there was a lot about this class that left me disappointed, and I feel like maybe I could’ve enjoyed the course if it was structured differently in terms of the lecture style, depth of analysis and information, and cohesion between lecture and the essay assignments.
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