No justice… no food, or something. I have no idea what this woman is babbling about.
A new course at Cal State Fullerton aims to bring students’ attention to the “key social inequalities” involved in the production and consumption of food in the modern world.
“The Social Life of Food” is taught by sociology associate professor Dr. Dana Collins, whose primary areas of expertise include gender/sexualities/queer studies; critical globalizations, post-colonial theory and development, transnational feminist activism, and urban communities, according to her faculty bio.
In an email interview with The College Fix, Collins stated that the course’s objectives are three-fold: to help students “bring their sociological curiosity to food;” to allow them to “understand how all food has a social life, which includes its production within a global food system that rests upon and reproduces global social inequalities;” and to motivate them to “learn about, imagine, and act upon the possibilities of food justice!”
To that end, she said, students will “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.”
According to the syllabus, which was obtained by The College Fix, required texts include Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply and Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems in the Americas.
The final assignment asks students either to choose and analyze a “build strategy” from an apparently anti-Donald Trump website or to write an individual research paper on a particular food, “analyzing its history, transformation through global capitalist production, its environmental costs, and the racialized-gender work that is part of its production.” [Editor’s note: Anyone not completely confused by this simply doesn’t understand]
The anti-Donald Trump website, www.ungovernable2017.com, appears to be an online hub for “resistance” to Trump’s election and administration, and includes a pledge “to create a resistance movement that makes Trump unable to govern…We refuse to give hatred…a chance to roll back civil and human rights.”
In addition, the site asserts that “the United States has always been a problematic project,” and that three quarters of the state governments are controlled by “neo-Confederates” who are ushering in a “wanton reintroduction of white supremacy, right wing sic populism and fascism, and state sanctioned sic patriarchy.”