Food Studies (FOOD-GE)

Introduction to academic and professional resources at New York University and to career opportunities in food studies and food management, nutrition and dietetics, or public health. Class meets three or four times during the first semester of study.

Advanced course addressing market needs,research methods, trend projections, feasibility, evaluation strategies, capital budgets, and financing for development of food service projects.

Development of new concepts in food business operations through planning, organization, implementation, and evaluation of independent and multiunit operations: concept development, initiation, financing, site selection, franchising and analysis and control of risk.

The goal of this course is to analyze the consumer side of food markers & related policy using tools of microeconomic analysis. In the first half of the course theoretical tools are developed, starting from individual choice & moving up to market demand. In the second part of the course, the focus shifts to applications of consumer economic theory in the food system, & how policies can alter consumer behavior.

The course provides students with an intermediate level understanding of the microeconomics of firm or business behavior, & to apply these tools to current policy issues in the food system. Students explore the effect of firm decision-making on size, scale, & scope, & apply the tools to firms in the food sector. A range of outcomes is explored: free market, firm self regulation, socially responsible firm behavior, shared value firm behavior, & government regulation. The course is designed for policy & food interested students with little as well as no background in economics, or for those who have completed an introductory course that used a text on par with Krugman & Wells.

Examination of food and diets from historical and international perspectives. Considers the origins of foods, the co-evolution of world cuisine and civilizations, the international exchange and spread of food technologies following the voyages of Columbus , and the effects of the emergent global economy on food production, diets, and health.

How food is used as a tool in social movements across cultures and time. Some of the themes of the course are food and revolutions, food as a form of social resistence and food as an apparatus for government policies. Students will learn that food's highly flexible meaning can be both a force for change as well as oppression.

Analysis of the economic and social causes and consequences of current trends in food production- marketing and product development.

Explores the conceptual underpinnings of the distributive networks through which food travels from farm to table. Examines the relationships between markets, states, and society in their historical and contemporary forms. Employs case studies of how commodities travel through the food system at the local, national and international levels. Topics include mass markets and niche markets; the culture of markets; reciprocity, exchange and redistribution; conventional and alternative supply chains.

Covers production, distribution & consumption of food in the context of social, cultural, technological & biological processes under conditions of globalization. Employing approaches from the humanities & the social sciences, this course prepares students to initiate the process of analyzing the current American food system, its global connections, & proposed local alternatives that is developed further in other courses. Through lectures, readings & research the students master established facts & concepts about contemporary urban food cultures & produce new knowledge of the same.

Interaction between current trends in food production, marketing, and service and traditional food consumption practices as observed in current cuisine through lectures, demonstrations, and field trips.

Examination of the cuisines of Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa and their influences on late 20th century North American foods, meals, and menus. Students will analyze these cuisine from perspective of geography, climate and culture, through readings, lectures, films, in-class tastiness, and restaurant field trips.

This course combines practical lessons in writing for a popular audience with a bird’s eye view of the tradition of food writing; an engagement with craft; and a contemporary understanding of food’s place in our culture and politics. We address social trends and movements including political upheaval, racial and economic justice, gender and identity, and intense social change through writing about food. Students learn the publishing and editing process.

Studying in Washington, DC, we undertake a deep study of sustainable and organic agriculture policy by examining research, advocacy and policymaking. Relying on the expertise of locally based scholars, researchers, and advocates, the course consists of lectures, panel discussions, Q&A sessions with experts, and site visits to better understand how these three key components interact.

In this course, students learn to assess the quality of food writing & multimedia content. The course provides students with the necessary foundation to use social media and web maintenance, as well as writing & self-editing skills for use in the online forum. Course includes practical experience writing for the web & curating social media content.

Basic principles & practical experience in development of beverage systems & menus. Considers pricing, equipment, legal, merchandising & personnel policies.

This course provides a practical introduction to urban agriculture. Students learn horticultural skills at the NYU Urban Farm Lab. Students learn about biological processes and how they fit together in a system. Through visits to other sites around the city, students are exposed to various strategies for practicing urban horticulture. Additionally, we engage with greater themes found within urban agriculture such as entrepreneurship, food justice, individual and group sustenance, cultural enactments of identity, community building, and education.

The core Food Systems course covers the US food system from an applied economic perspective, recognizing that the food system operates in a market. We begin by studying the mechanics of the different stages of the food system: farm, distribution, retailing and consumer. The course then turns to social and environmental costs of the food system. After covering the strengths and weakness of the food system, students explore topics such as sustainability, globalization, resiliency, consumer choice, and equity.

Examination of food service systems, with emphasis on site-specific and corporate functions and current trends in the industry.

Food advocacy uses sociological methods to question how & why social groups—families, institutions, governments--affect & are affected by systems of food production & consumption, how these systems affect the environment & human health, & how individuals & groups can influence & improve food systems. Today, interest in such issues is so widespread that efforts to improve food systems are considered by some to constitute a social movement. Food advocacy seeks to describe this movement, & to explore how individuals & groups can effect change in the food system.

Food facility design, layout, and equipment selection, specification, and organization.

Theoretical & applied aspects of research design, data analysis, & interpretation. Students teams conduct, analyze, & present an evaluative or applied research project in food studies. Should be taken in the last year of study in the master’s program.

This course examines the legal & regulatory frameworks that underlie domestic food policy. Specific areas of emphasis are the jurisdictions of federal & state agencies, the role of the legislative bodies in creating policy, & the role of the judicial system in enforcing policies & regulations.

Budget procedures and statistical methods for decision making through a review of accounting systems and food business methods for financial analysis

We examine broad issues that currently shape our food system and explore ways to mobilize legal and policy tools in order to strategically respond to these issues. Topics include legal and policy underpinnings of the United States’ and global food systems, economic and social conditions, inequities of access to adequate healthy food, and public health and environmental crises. Students gain an understanding of the legal and policy pathways and develop effective actions to address the many complex issues that characterize—and threaten—our food system.

Integration of principle management disciplines to develop successful business strategies in the food industry: human resources, organization design, labor relations, industrial engineering, marketing customer service, ethics.

This course introduces students to the concepts, frameworks & models to systematically build successful, socially-conscious businesses that are both sustainable & public health-driven. Topics will include how to 1) identify & analyze need-gaps, 2) develop a sustainable-food business concept, 3) identify a profitable niche in the global, social-justice oriented market, & 4) raise capital in innovative ways. The course will also provide access to domain-specific resources including key industry participants, industry experts & research partners.

Examination and analysis of politicos, procedures and methods needed to effective management of personnel in the food and food service industries.

Overview of legal issues affecting food and food service management: laws, contracts, taxes and relations with administrative and regulatory agencies both domestic and international.

This studio and seminar course explores the basic principles of food biochemistry, enzymology and food processing and how they relate to memory, the senses and the processing of information. Students will also learn basic principles of molecular gastronomy and modernist cuisine as framing devices for understanding how food also functions in the context of bodily health, environmental health as well as cultural and political narratives. Assignments for the class will be based on the incorporation of food science into design and technology projects. Workshops involve using liquid nitrogen + hydrocolloids as well as creating performative + deployable food objects and a Futurist meal.

Demonstrations of techniques for photographing foods for use in print and other media formats.

Advanced application of principles and techniques of food preparation to development and reformulation of food recipes and products for media, publication, food service, and consumer markets.

Introduction to foods from various nationality groups through lectures, demonstrations, and field trips.

Introduction to financial planning, control, fundraising, and investment in food and food service industries.

We identify the meaning and significance of food in different cultures by exploring the way that ethnicity, gender, race, socioeconomic status and religion influence our food choices and food preserves culture. We look critically at the following questions: how can food have different meanings and uses for individuals, groups, or societies? How does food function both to foster community feeling and drive wedges among people? What are some prevailing academic theories that help us identify and understand individual and collective identities?

The ways in which writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have used food as a theme or symbol for reasons of aesthetic, social, cultural, or political commentary.

The ways in which writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have used food as a theme or symbol for reasons of aesthetic, social, cultural, or political commentary.

Examination of theoretical literature commonly employed and debated in the field of food studies. Through the work of such established scholars as Freud, Elias, Foucault, de Certeau, Veblen and Barthes, understand their usefulness to recent scholarship in the developing field of food studies. Students focus on the practical task of developing useful tools, such as methods, techniques and concepts, for their own research agendas.

This course focuses on the role design plays in framing the food environment, from production to consumption and explores how designers influence and shape stakeholders in the food system. Students investigate the interaction of users with designed places, objects, sensorial experiences as well as ideas, services, and systems and learn to analyze the built/material work.

This course will explore food messaging and representation in moments of crisis, both historically and also in our current COVID-19 moment. Employing multiple lenses including ethical, political, communal, and individual, we’ll examine such topics as medieval religious aestheticism/asceticism, World War II propaganda, global notions of food waste, the ethos of food sharing and commensality, and media messaging in the contemporary COVID moment.

This course critically analyzes foods’ portrayal across media platforms. We unpack how the media influences taste, purchases, and food beliefs; how it develops characters by what they eat and drink; and how it creates trends and movements. We explore cooking as entertainment, food shopping as a personal statement, and how media intersects with class, gender and racial tropes. Beginning with theory and moving through print, television, film, and the internet, students have hands-on experience interacting with the messages that define American food culture.

Principles and practice of indentification, comparison, and evaluation of selected foods, ingredients, techniques, and equipment for recipe formulation, menu planning, or preparation with an emphasis on modifications to meet specific nutritional or other requirements.

Identification and evaluation of food resources: sources, varieties, and qualities of the most commonly consumed food, beverages, and ingredients.

No Course Description Available

No Course Description Available

No Course Description Available

Focuses on the development of an industrialized agricultural system. Some of the topics that will be covered in class include: taming nature; industrializing the farm; applying science to the food problem; and the social cost of the system. Students will learn about the development of industrial farming practices, environmental issues surrounding industrial agriculture, the politics of food production, and the human cost of inexpensive food.

Explores various aspects of women's relationship to food. Some of the themes of the course are the gendering of food, women as food producers, motherhood, feeding women's bodies; kitchen lobar; racial constructions of cooks; and the feminized space of the cookbook. Students will learn that women have a highly complex and contested relationship to food and that prescribed social roles help shape this relationship.

Provides students with a sociological understanding of the food system and food behavior. Students examine the production, distribution and consumption of food to understand 'why we eat the way we do.'

Advanced Topics in Food Studies: Food and Fine Art will explore the use of food in Fine Arts and how Fine Arts can help to explain food's place in the societies where the art work was produced. Selected examples from history of art (the course is not a thorough survery of art history) will be used to explore the cultural context , the conventions of arts, and aesthetics.

This course will explore urban food waste management practice and policies through the lens of New York City. Students will examine how waste is generated across food supply chains and gain an understanding of the methods for reducing and managing waste. Topics will include a survey of NYC policies and programs, food waste auditing, strategies for reduction and recovery, diversion infrastructure development, and composting. Students will have an opportunity to apply these methods as they develop a food waste management plan for a NYC business or institution.

This course traces the history of food vendors as a way to understand their presence in & impact on urban & cultural milieus. Students will use this knowledge to map issues & trends, & will conceptually frame & physically design a 21st Century Mobile Food Vending Cart. Students will assess how to improve cart mobility in the context of the effectiveness of different materials, including newly developed materials, & forms of housing units. The cart’s environmental impact will be studied under multiple assumptions about energy & water usage, including solar power, water reclamation & water filtration.

Super storms, drought, abundant chemical and fertilizer overuse and misuse, ozone depletion, fossil fuel exploitation and a host of bad decisions have contributed the myriad causes of climate change and the shifting landscape of our food system. We have become accustomed to eating whatever we want whenever we want for more than 60 years; it’s been a very good culinary life for many. The bill for this reinforcing feedback loop of heavy dependency on petrochemical fertilizers, mono-cropping, shrinking land on which to farm, and the worldwide demand for cheap and abundant food has been proffered; and the truth is we have been writing checks our planet cannot cash and many of the foods we’re too fond of (coffee, chocolate, peanuts, almonds, berries) are becoming harder to grow and the predictions that these foods will either lose their flavor or disappear completely. This class will look at the future of food through the lenses of Design Thinking + Systems Thinking addressing these increasingly problematic issues in our food system and how we can dive and design more sustainable modes of operation, using sustainable materials and still have our food taste good. Students will work on small scale projects that tackles this concert at hat the local and global level.

This course explores how food traditions and heritage are identified, supported, and promoted at national and global levels, and examines their role and functions in Spaniards’ everyday life. Through visits to markets, bakeries, wholesale and retail outlets, tapas and wine bars, restaurants, and menu del día eateries we examine how tradition and heritage are brought into the 21st century in public spaces that are also symbolic for local and national identities. Food professionals and experts, designers and scholars help us understand the dynamics of this unique country.

This course explores the manner in which the French & Americans think about & interact with their foods. Students will examine the historical development of gastronomic discourse in France & nutrition discourse in the United States. Through analyses of the US media coverage of the war against obesity, fat activists’ websites or French artisanal chocolate window displays, we will consider how individuals negotiate these discourses, as well as the collective identities & ethical frames encoded in them. Students will also travel to the Jura region to better understand the notion of “terroir”, & the centrality of taste & place to this concept. Students will learn how taste ties together different actors, places & processes implicated in the terroir process.

Using food as a lens, this course examines the history, culture, and political economy of Berlin and Prague, focusing on how each has been shaped by socialist/post-socialist political economies and ideology. Topics will include food vis-a-vis the European Union; ostalgie; immigration; industrial & recent sustainable agriculture; & the emerging food culture. Employing contemporary & historical perspectives, the course will include lectures by established scholars, visits to museums, markets, restaurants, farms, & cooperatives, wholesale & retail outlets.

This course explores food systems and culture in the broader Southern California region, unpacking how issues of race, socioeconomic status, gender, and ethnicity intertwine with geography, politics, and economics to create the present-day global metropole facing a myriad of issues including climate change. Through guest lectures, student projects, and site visits to museums, markets, farms, cooperatives and restaurants, students gain a multi-faceted understanding and appreciation of this remarkable city and its people.

We focus on sustainable food systems within their local communities in this experiential field trip-based course. Using Eastern Long Island, an area that has been successfully farmed for centuries as a case study, we explore issues surrounding sustainable agriculture. Includes visits to farms, wineries, scallop and oyster underwater farms, as well as lectures by pioneering land and sea preservationists, beekeepers, and others. We critically evaluate the meaning of sustainability as it applies to agriculture and aquaculture, and how it relates to the community.

Sustainability in the Urban Environment: Urban policy makers began have embraced local food systems as a solution to a myriad of urban problems, including lack of green space and a dearth of healthy food availability. As part of this shift in policy, cities and other jurisdictions have encouraged production in the urban environment. But at the local and state levels, such policies are often based on a vision of how food might be grown in a city, and do not consider the feasibility or viability of such ventures. Nor do the policies consider how much of a contribution urban farms might make to urban food supplies. This course studies, in an experiential context, questions such as: much food can urban farms supply? Do farms even have to produce food? What are the differences between urban farms that have claimed nonprofit status, acting more as educational facilities than as commercial farms.

The course will focus on New Orleans with its rich history, unique location and distinctive cultures as a prime location to study the intersection of food, identity and culture. New Orleans has both shaped and been shaped by an idiosyncratic set of food practices, rituals, and beliefs. Through a firsthand study of the city, its history, its people and its food ways, student will gain a thorough understanding of food and culture in New Orleans.

No Course Description Available

This course focuses on how drinking of beverages has shaped human history and expressed cultural values. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the relationship between beverages and power from the earliest evidence of intoxicants to the various ways that political, social, and religious institutions have controlled who gets to drink what and when. Students will explore the geographical and political factors that led to the creation of various beverages.

Survey of issues surrounding food production from a processing perspective. Students will gain an understanding of various forms of food processing and the issues that surround industrial food production.

This course explores organic agriculture from multiple angles, starting with a historical exploration of organic & finishing with policy approaches to organic. Specific aspects studied include the environmental benefits of organic production systems, the political economy of the US organic regulation, health benefits of organic, & organic consumption and marketing.

Course examines the process of agricultural globalization & its effects on the process of rural & agricultural development in the global south. Specifically, analyze the incorporation of agricultural producers & processors in developing countries into the supply chains of global food brands & retailers. The goal is to identify how globalization is shaping institutions that govern agricultural laborers in poor & middle income communities, who are the most vulnerable actors in the global economy

Course examines the role of planning in building sustainable food systems. The fact that more than 9 million people get fed every day in the city on New York without any apparent plan for how this happens is considered a miracle of free markets. Taking a closer look at this & examining shortcomings in an effort to understand what needs are nor being addresses & what can be done to address them. Recent case studies will be used to illustrate what non-profits and & local governments can do to build sustainable food systems. The culture of the course is part graduate seminar & part planners workshop, a mix of theoretical and practical.

Course explores the intersection of gender, identity, culture & food. Students will analyze the influences of sexual identity, human sexuality, sexual orientation & gender on real & perceived cultural views of food & consumption. Topics will address how society assigns gender to food by investigating historical & contemporary texts. Employing advertisements, menus, recipes, cookbooks, television programs, films & packaging, students will critically analyze gendering practices. Theoretical frameworks will include queer theory, early feminist theory, Whiteness theory & emerging male studies & transgender studies.

This course examines the role of U.S. food & agricultural policy in perpetuating racial & economic inequality. Topics include agriculture, class & race in the 19th century; farm size & inequality; farm labor; low-wage workers in the food chain; food insecurity; & environmental inequality. The class covers both historical & contemporary social movements that respond to inequities within the food system. By introducing students to historical documents, empirical research, & the academic literature on these & related topics, the course prepares students to effectively evaluate contemporary legal & policy responses to food systems inequality.

Agricultural policy and some food policy is regulated by The Farm Bill. This course covers the history of the farm bill, starting from its inception via the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, up to contemporary farm bills. The course will analyze current proposals for agricultural policy, given the contemporary political, economic and agricultural climate.

It should be noted that independent study requires a minimum of 45 hours of work per point. Independent study cannot be applied to the established professional education sequence in teaching curricula. Each departmental program has established its own maximum credit allowance for independent study. This information may be obtained from the student's department. Prior to registering for independent study, each student should obtain an Independent Study approval from the adviser.

The Food Studies Doctoral seminar is required for all Food Studies doctoral students from their first semester to their last. Food Studies doctoral students enroll each semester until the time of graduation (even for students conducting fieldwork outside of NYC). The doctoral students and faculty meet five times a semester for three hours. Students discuss their progress, read and discuss assigned readings, and give seminars on their research.