SOCIOL M136
Eating Society: Science and Politics of Food from Individual to Planetary Health
Description: (Same as Food Studies M136 and Society and Genetics M136.) Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Questions of food and health are both individual and social. Students gain tools for understanding relationships between individual eaters, medicine, and social organization of food production and processing through set of research frameworks newly emergent in range of social and health sciences. Topics include individual and social ramifications of microbiome science; understanding how human gut microbes and health are shaped by pasteurization, processing, and food safety practices; One Health approaches that encompass human and animal health, discussing examples such as antibiotic resistance and emerging infectious disease as effects of large-scale agriculture; planetary health frameworks that link individual human metabolic health to issues of sustainable agriculture, for example how pesticides and fertilizers tie diets to environments; and resilience of cultural food systems in face of environmental pollution as issue of reproductive health. Letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2023 - Very reading heavy. If you don't usually do the readings for a class, then this isn't for you because the entire course is designed around the readings, with the midterms being "Reading Exams". That being said, this makes the class pretty manageable because as long as you do the readings, you should be successful. Lectures are helpful, but you don't need to attend them if you understand the readings well enough. There are "small writing assignments" that are 2-page essays, but they ask you to interact with a reading so as long as you do the readings, these should be easy and some of them are actually kind of fun, so if you're scared of writing essays this isn't bad at all.
Winter 2023 - Very reading heavy. If you don't usually do the readings for a class, then this isn't for you because the entire course is designed around the readings, with the midterms being "Reading Exams". That being said, this makes the class pretty manageable because as long as you do the readings, you should be successful. Lectures are helpful, but you don't need to attend them if you understand the readings well enough. There are "small writing assignments" that are 2-page essays, but they ask you to interact with a reading so as long as you do the readings, these should be easy and some of them are actually kind of fun, so if you're scared of writing essays this isn't bad at all.
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