Food : a cultural culinary history
(DVD)

Title from DVD container cover.

36 lectures, 30 minutes per lecture.

Course guidebook contains outlines of each 30 minute lecture.

"Course no. 9180."

Accompanying course guidebook includes bibliographical references (pages 261-290).

Taught by: Professor Ken Albala, University of the Pacific.

"This course explores the history of how humans have produced, cooked, and consumed food - from the earliest hunting-and-gathering societies to the present. This course examines how civilizations and their foodways have been shaped by geography, native flora and fauna, and technological innovations. The scope of this course is global, covering civilizations of Asia, America, Africa, and Europe and how cultures in each of these continents domesticated unique staples that literally enabled these civilizations to expand and flourish. The course also covers marginalized and colonized cultures that were dominated largely to feed or entice the palates of the great. A major theme of the course is the process of globalization, imperialism, and the growth of capitalist enterprise at the cost of indigenous cultures and traditional farming practices and how these processes were shaped by trade in food. Beyond the larger economic and social issues, the course will also cover the culture of food, why humans made the food choices they have, and what their food practices tell us about them and their world. In other words, food practices will be used as a window for viewing culture as a whole. This course will examine in detail cookbooks, culinary literature, and dietary and religious texts - all of which reveal the preoccupations and predilections of the past. The course will also examine why different people make different food choices, why they sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to find rare or exotic items while refusing to eat foods that are cheap and plentiful, why individuals from certain social classes will avoid or esteem particular foods, and in general how food is the most important factor of self-definition. In other words, food helps define who the individual is ; where he or she fits in society ; and how the culture, nationality, or ethnicity he or she espouses expresses itself through food and cuisine. This course will help you see not only how and why other cultures shape what people eat, but also how your choices are ultimately determined by our culture and are often equally bizarre and arbitrary to outsiders, especially when it comes to food taboos. The entire course is also accompanied by hands-on activities so that you can not only read about food in the past in the lecture guides, but you can also have some fun in the kitchen exploring the past and even tasting it if you so desire. The activities are designed to bring the lectures alive - not only by having you experience the physical act of cooking as it was done in the past, but also by having you understand directly the taste preferences of our forebears. Some of these activities involve recipes that were taken directly from historic cookbooks. Reconstructions are given when recipes were not available or have never been translated. Others are simply culinary exercises or tastings. They are all designed to expand your palate, to explore the past - just as you might a new, exotic cuisine you have recently discovered. All recipes have either been adapted from the original or are direct translations from the original languages."--adapted from pages 1-3 of Course Guidebook.

DVD, NTSC, Region 1, stereo.