COMM1914: Food, Media, and Culture

Food is intimately linked to media: meanings attached to what we eat are produced, distributed, and consumed via cookbooks, reality TV, restaurant reviews, social media, film, and advertisements. This seminar attempts to make visible what stories our culture tells itself about food. Therefore, as critical media theorists have argued, food media (and the rituals surrounding it) raise important questions in relation to power, identity, and ethics. Accordingly, food media are situated at the intersecting categories of race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, and the environment. This course provides an introduction to the food and media nexus by drawing particular attention to the ways in which the political economy of the media, content analysis, ethnography, and audiences can lend unique insight into what we eat. Students will critically analyze food media across a wide-range of platforms and embark on field trips to restaurants and food-related sites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

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