The World on our Plates: Culture, Politics, and Food Systems

The reflective project begins with the baking of bread. Bread is an illustrative example of the various topics we discuss on the course. It is simple, comprising 4 ingredients (flour, water, salt & yeast), but it allows us to open questions about provenance of ingredients, traceability, sustainability and food systems. In a practical way, this also means you will leave the course having learnt how to bake a loaf for yourself, and therefore have at least one way you can change what and how you consume, should you choose to do so. Before our penultimate class, you'll be provided with an online bread-making tutorial, and encouraged to bake your own loaf prior to coming to class. The tutorial will take you step-by-step through the process and is designed for beginners with no prior knowledge assumed. In addition to functioning as a real-world skill, this is a reflective, auto-ethnographic exercise. Having undertaken this project, in class we will reflect on the process of making bread from scratch and by hand - how it felt, what the loaf looks like, where the ingredients came from, etc. This exercise is self-reflexive in spirit and offers the chance for us to reflect on the various questions that have arisen in our previous weeks' discussions. Questions to think about might be (but not limited to) on nutrition (i.e., what goes into real bread as opposed to mass-produced, ultra-processed bread), labour (i.e., the physical work involved in making bread), and gender & capitalism (i.e., how this process is often made the responsibility of women in the household or outsourced into factories). The project is also an opportunity to extrapolate and reflect on food production more broadly. Food production is often obscured from view or glossed over in our lives - this project is thus a corrective that encourages us to consider what goes into making food in a conscious, intentional, and reflective way. You are welcome to retain your reflection in a personal journal or disseminate it in a format of your choice – be that an essay, illustrated zine, a video, podcast, or more. Some of the questions to reflect on might be (but not limited to): How does the tactile process of making bread connect us to our food, our bodies, as well as where the ingredients come from? What is the labour that goes behind making food? How has capitalism/industrialism stripped food from its purpose of nourishing the body? How does feminism affect the nature of domestic labour? How do migration and labour intersect with the food we consume?