HIST160D1

Are we really what we eat? Why do certain foods appeal and others repel? How do foods move from their original homes into our own? How has our cuisine evolved? And how do food and consumption reflect status and power? Food & Power in Global History takes a world history approach to investigate these and other questions by considering the cultural, economic, and geopolitical discovery, evolution, and migration of food and drink from pre-modern times to the present. We explore the discovery, invention, and adaptation of new foods from early human history to our own post-Columbian era, when local foods have become truly global. Food and drink have transformed continents and trading networks, and made and broken empires. Food is a site of cultural exchange and interaction, and it is also an expression and marker of identities. Wars have been fought to control food access. Dining, retail, and industrialization have reshaped the way we look at food. We will trace the origins, migration, and reinvention of global foods to understand how it is that food choice, food waste, and famine are more abundant today than at any point in human history.