Seminars on Food

Food is culture, passion, science, and industry. Food is a global need, concern, and closely tied to climate change. Because of its fundamental role in human existence, the topic and lens of ‘food’ can be incorporated in a wide range of academic study.

In honor of the launch of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, the Fiat Lux Seminar Program offered a special incentive for seminars related to the broad topic of food for winter and spring 2023. Due to the impressive response by UCLA faculty from winter and spring 2023, the Rothman Food Institute will continue offering the special incentive for seminars on food for the 2023-24 academic year.

Fiat Lux Themed Seminars

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Winter 2023 Spring 2023 Fall 2023

Isotopes as food detectives

Instructor: Ulrike Seibt

Subject Area: Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

Course Description: Isotopes from our food and the water we drink can tell scientists about what we eat where we live, and where we have traveled in the past. Isotope analysis has been used as a forensic tool to investigate food fraud and other crimes because isotope ratios vary depending on where and how a food was produced, like a fingerprint. Some examples of food fraud uncovered through isotopes include fake, blended, or adulterated olive oil, wine, coffee, honey, and fish. We will learn the fundamental science behind isotopes (of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen) and isotope analysis, land and marine foodwebs, and look at isotope data to discover how the science is applied to use isotopic fingerprints as food detectives.

“The Silence of the Lamb: The Human Consumption of Non-Human Animals in Literature, Law, and the Sciences"

Instructor: Arvind Thomas

Subject Area: English

Course Description: This course is about the centrality of consuming the “animal” to conceptualizing the “human,” and the resultant silence or silencing of the numerous non-human species signified by the former term. Whether as food carved at the table or as food processed in a factory; whether as symbol or referent, the non-human animal looms large though often silent to us but still shaping what it means to be human. In living amidst, researching, collaborating with, and, above all, consuming non-human animals, we construct who or what we are and how we differ from those we deem to be “other” than ourselves.
Our course is as much about consuming non-human animals as about conceptualizing the human-animal; as much about legal and philosophical writings on animal ethics as about scientific peer-reviewed studies on animal behavior, and, above all, about the ways in which talk invoking the non-human animal frequently muffles or muzzles both the non-human animal and human others.
Focusing on the consumption of non-human animals, we will explore non-human animal and human-animal interactions or intersections across diverse cultures (Christian, Islamic, Judaic, and atheistic), periods (classical antiquity, medieval, and modern), disciplines (law, philosophy and biology) and categories (gender and race). We will also read excerpts from the latest legal and scientific research on the so-called “human-animal” dichotomy or dualism that invites us to radically rethink concepts like “animal welfare” or “humane farming” and see non-human animals not just as food or flesh but as fellow-participants or even persons sharing the resources of the living planet.
To these ends, we will explore how non-human animal-centered organizations in countries like Uganda and the UK help us radically re-think the consumption of non-human animals from the perspective of human rights and environmental justice. Integral to the course will be a virtual visit to a grassroots school feeding program launched by a former chicken farmer, Dash, and another virtual visit to an alternative farm in the UK where its Director Jo Kidd will talk about raising food sustainably and compassionately in ways that redefine our relationship to non-human animals.

The role of animals in human brain health and ecology

Instructor: Aaron Blaisdell

Subject Area: Food Studies

Course Description: Animal sourced foods have played a central role in human evolution, especially brain evolution and development. This class will review the anthropological and nutritional literature on this topic. We will also touch on other aspects of human health, such as ecology and culture.

French Cuisine in Film

Instructor: Malina Stefanovska

Subject Area: Food Studies

Course Description: In 2010, the ‘gastronomic meal of the French’ was inscribed by UNESCO on its List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. French cuisine and gastronomy represent French culture but also its family, ethnic, and class tensions, and those of tradition versus innovation. A film about food and cooking is always a story of class, gender, interpersonal relations and conflicts, each of which will be elucidated in the five films selected: Vatel showcases the relationship between French Court culture and gastronomy; Delicious tells the birth of the restaurant in the age of the French Revolution. Babette’s feast is about exile and cooking as a search for identity; The secret of the grain and “The Hundred Foot Journey” are both stories of immigrants grappling with French gastronomy business, although from very different perspectives. In each, food is a topic of its own, but also a means of spinning different stories. Students will learn about gastronomy, but also become familiar with the way film is able to tell these compelling stories.

Hox Zodiac: EAT or be EATEN

Instructor: Victoria Vesna

Subject Area: Food Studies

Course Description: Long-term Hox Zodiac collaboration between artist instructor and neuroscientist Siddharth Ramakrishnan engages participants in diversity of animal kingdom, which includes humans through hox gene. Students research animals on Chinese zodiac wheel based on their sign, and propose specific menus. Students forage campus to taste food. Discussion of complexity of animals in food chain and in laboratory experiments.

Feast and Famine: Food Cultures in Los Angeles, 1965-1992

Instructor: Eric Avila

Subject Area: History

Course Description: An exploration of LA’s changing food scene after 1965, when immigration from Asia and Latin America changed the city’s culture and society.

Sustainable Sustenance and the Business of Food

Instructor: Henry Friedman

Subject Area: Management

Course Description: We will examine the environmental and social impacts of companies crucial to getting your food from seed to table, including growers, distributors, supermarkets, and restaurants. To explore the impact of food, we will use sustainability reports from companies such as Dole, Albertsons, and Taco Bell.

The Psychology of Food and Eating

Instructor: Janet Tomiyama

Subject Area: Psychology

Course Description: Think about the last time you had a cookie. Why did you eat it? Were you stressed? Were people around you eating? Were you watching TV? Research from the psychology of eating shows that hunger – the most obvious reason that probably came to mind – is actually one of the least important influences on why we eat. This course is an introduction to key findings from the science of eating, pulling from multiple disciplines such as psychology, food studies, and public health.

Eat Your Words! Food for Thought on Food

Instructor: Gyanam Mahajan

Subject Area: South Asian

Course Description: This course will encourage students to experience the subtle citrus notes and bold earthy flavors in the language of food. We will explore metaphors and idioms in American English and contrast them with North Indic languages like Hindi-Urdu, Gujarati and Punjabi. We will discuss features of cultural Universalism versus Cultural Relativism in the context of food expressions, diets and value systems concerning food. An important part of the course will be to investigate the use of language related to food in media, especially in marketing and food shows. This will include analyzing the language used in menus. Students will investigate the concept of Manufacturing consent in media control with respect to food. Finally, the course will consider social justice issues in the language of food and comment on how hunger is defined, what is food insecurity, how are food nutrition guides written, and the language of politics of food. In the South Asian context, the course will look at the intersectionality of Caste and food norms.

Introduction to Matcha and Chado, the Way of Tea

Instructor: Michelle Liu Carriger

Subject Area: Theater

Course Description: Matcha, powdered green tea, has been making its way across trendy cafe menus and health fad announcements for the last few years– but where did this “miracle” food come from? What are its historical and cultural roots? How was this archaic form of tea production preserved during the centuries of steeped tea’s ascendance and what are the ramifications of its travels beyond East Asia to the rest of the world, with and without its cultural connotations?

This course is designed as a scholarly introduction to the history, aesthetics, and practice of the Japanese Way of Tea (chanoyu, chado, or “tea ceremony”), the traditional practice that preserved matcha as a form of tea ingestion. Through short readings and viewings and weekly presentations, students will learn about the Way of Tea through units on history, architecture, tea cultivation and preparation, associated food and drink practices, ceramics and other tea utensils, and Zen Buddhism. Students will also participate in a tea gathering and get to try sweets and tea, in compliance with all current health regulations for university activities.

Philippine Cuisines and Cultural Identities

Instructor: Stephen Acabado

Subject Area: Anthropology

Course Description: Anthropological studies of food suggest that food plays important role in shaping group and personal identities; cultural/ethnic affiliations in a globalized world; religious boundaries through rituals, taboos, and avoidances; and in strengthening cohesion of local and global communities. Study focused on regional cuisines of Philippines, and how these local flavors were brought and maintained by immigrant communities. For example, people from Bicol are known for their spicy food with coconut milk as base. Their signature Bicol express and laing (taro leaves) illustrate this; and even their adobo uses coconut milk. Discussion of Philippine history and identities through food. Students also sample select Philippine regional food to facilitate understanding of food preferences and cultural identities.

Pleasure, Pain and Bionic Brains

Instructor: Ausaf Bari

Subject Area: Neuroscience

Course Description: This seminar will explore how neurosurgeons utilize cutting-edge technology to understand and modify brain circuits involved in human emotion, reward and the production of movement. The seminar will highlight advances in brain surgery for implantation of novel devices to treat various neuropsychiatric conditions, how these devices are used to understand human reward and emotion and the ethics surrounding their use. The course heavily involves a deep dive into the neural circuitry of reward and emotion and the use of invasive brain devices that interface with these circuits. Food is central to reward and emotion.

Engineering food: the biotechnology behind emerging foods

Instructor: Irene Chen

Subject Area: Chemical Engineering

Course Description: Feeding the humans on the planet in a sustainable way requires rethinking foods. From engineering high nutritional content to adding meat-like flavor to vegetable dishes, biotechnology enables new foods to address global challenges. This course will introduce fundamental concepts in biotechnology and their application in emerging foods. Join us for class discussions led by faculty and students, a partnership with the UCLA MakerSpace at Olympic Hall, and an opportunity to create your own ‘new food’ concept.

The Taste and Sound of Cultures: Diverse Perspectives on Food and Music

Instructor: Lily Chen-Hafteck

Subject Area: Music

Course Description: Music psychology and education studies have shown that music has the capacity to promote empathy and cultural understanding and that learning the music from foreign cultures can result in students developing more positive racial attitude towards people from those cultures. Both food and music are essential components of a given culture. Many cultures around the world have their own special cuisines in addition to specific musical styles. There is a body of research literature that investigates the connections between food and music in cultures. It was found that people associate different music styles with food type and that ethnic congruence of music and food affects food selection.

In this course, students will explore the relationship between food and music in cultures, and discuss how it may enhance cultural understanding. Through research and sharing the music and food of each other’s cultures, students will discover the taste and sound of diverse cultures, and increase understanding of each other.

Food and the Everyday Lives of Middle-Class Families

Instructor: Linda Garro

Subject Area: Anthropology

Course Description: Food is essential to life and food offers a powerful lens for studying daily life. This class draws on anthropological and sociological research exploring the sociocultural life of food in the everyday lives of middle-class families with children. The focus is on the contemporary US, although some comparative research from Europe is considered. Special attention is given to an interdisciplinary ethnographically-oriented research project on middle-class family life in Los Angeles. Researchers examined how food is intertwined with matters of health and well-being and the work of raising a family using interviews with family members and extensive video recordings of everyday family life. Class topics include: food purchases and family routines; caring through food and gender roles; the dynamics of mealtime and other food-related interactions; social/cultural identity and food; food and perceived risks to health; food and family well-being. A closer look at individual families offers insight into the variable ways that food matters in everyday life contexts.

PHYSICS & ART = ENERGY

Instructor: Walter Gekelman and Victoria Vesna

Subject Area: Food Studies

Course Description: What does art have to do with science? What does plasma physics have to do with energy and food? Everything is about ENERGY-from the food we eat to all that we consume as a global society. All is interconnected and driven by some form of energy. Human civilization requires energy to function, which it gets from energy resources such as fossil fuels, nuclear fuel, or renewable energy. The Earth’s climate and ecosystems processes are driven by the energy the planet receives from the Sun which gives us life.

Impacts of Factory Farms on Community and Planetary Health

Instructor: Jennifer Jay

Subject Area: Civil & Environmental Engineering

Course Description: Food systems – what we eat, where and how we produce it- play a major role in determining our impact on the environment. Currently, factory farms are used to raise 98% of the 10 billion animals grown for food every year in the United States alone. Industrial food animal production has deleterious impacts on local communities through air and water pollution. In addition, the carbon, land use, nitrogen, phosphorus, and water footprints are much higher for animal products than they are for plant foods. In our exploration of the complex connections between food animal production and the environment, we will begin with a discussion of “Planetary Boundaries” as a guide for understanding the limits for human alterations of the biosphere. We will then discuss the impacts of food animal production on local environments as well as on climate change, water use, land use, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss, and antibiotic resistance.

Tea and Japan: Art, Environment, and Material Culture

Instructor: Kristopher Kersey

Subject Area: Art History

Course Description: From its importation in the twelfth century to the Starbucks Matcha Latte, tea (Camellia sinensis) has had a major impact on numerous aspects of Japanese culture and history: religion, agriculture, architecture, ceramics, painting, incense, class structures, garden design, and even ethnography all intersect with the history of tea. As such, this seminar will introduce students to the long history of tea consumption in Japan. In addition to topics such as Zen and the “tea ceremony” (Chanoyu), we will also discuss more contemporary and critical lenses: “rebel tea” to overturn the elitism of tea culture, radiation contamination following 3/11, the “botany of desire,” tea in contemporary art, and the global turn in Japanese tea culture. In addition, we will revisit The Book of Tea, a highly influential book that attempted to use tea as a lens through which to read all of Japanese culture; therein students will practice reading a problematic historical document, learning to identify prejudiced reasoning. The seminar will be punctuated by tastings and site visits.

Global Catastrophic Risk: The Clash of Science, Ethics, and Politics

Instructor: Suzanne Lohmann

Subject Area: Political Science

Course Description: Global catastrophic risks pose a challenge to modern civilization because of their superhuman extension in space, time, and the knowledge realm. Human interests and outlooks are local, regional, and national as well as egoistical, particularistic, and tribal. Overlapping generations imply intergenerational conflicts among the living—young, middle-aged, and old—and between ancestors and descendants. Deeply and variably specialized experts struggle to communicate across scientific disciplines; across natural and human sciences; and across pure and applied sciences—only to hit a brick wall in their communications with the lay public, which is variously represented by elected politicians, appointed bureaucrats, organized interest groups, and fluid social movements. The ensuing clash of science, ethics, and politics is the subject of this course.

We shall study climate change, the paradigmatic global catastrophic risk, with a focus on the role of food, the food system, and food system crises.

Food, Culture, and Identity

Instructor: Monica Smith

Subject Area: Anthropology

Course Description: One hundred years ago, U.S. government’s food guide contained 12 food groups; now there are just four. How did this change come about? How do ideas about food differ from one era to next and from one culture to next? How does food serve as both integrative and divisive social category? As the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai wrote, “…food is a constant need but a perishable good.” People must eat multiple times per day, and often do so in settings that reinforce social perceptions of group and self. Through readings and discussion we will examine how food systems are created, how cultural ideas of food vary from one group to next, and how people use food to proclaim ethnic and cultural identities.

Climatic Medicine: Rethinking Health & Illness in the Anthropocene

Instructor: Bharat Venkat

Subject Area: Society and Genetics

Course Description: As our climate changes, our medicine must change with it. In this course, we’ll examine the long history of climatic medicine, from Hippocrates to our era of climate change. We’ll ask how medicine has reckoned with the effects of the environment on health, illness, nutrition, and healing. We’ll focus specifically on how contemporary biomedicine is grappling with the unequal effects of climate change in exacerbating illness. We’ll consider, for example, how heat is a mediating factor for various kinds of conditions, including those we might think of as “accidental”. We’ll talk about how air pollution can transform the properties of various crops, which can lead to nutritional deficiencies in humans. And we’ll consider how changing conditions have led to the spread of vector-borne illnesses, once endemic to the tropics, into new geographies across Europe. We’ll end our course by considering how medicine, through its institutions and practices, is in fact a major contributor to climate change—in other words, how medicine helps to create the problems it tries to solve.

Children, Food and Family

Instructor: Linda Garro

Subject Area: Anthropology

Course Description: Drawing primarily on anthropological and sociological research in the United States, this course offers an introduction to what can be learned about contemporary life and family life through a focus on children and food. What children eat is often seen as intertwined with matters of health and well-being. In addition, parental concerns about children’s food and their interventions in the realm of food shed light on broader cultural values and goals associated with childrearing (e.g., notions of care, autonomy, responsibility, and self-management). Debates around controversial foods in school settings are also informative in this regard. Comparative research provides a window for exploring culturally patterned differences across the United States, Italy, and France in how children are socialized into ways of feeling, acting, and thinking about food during family mealtime interactions. Finally, case studies from an ethnographically-oriented research project on middle-class families in Los Angeles showcase some of the variable ways that food matters in family life.

Impacts of Factory Farms on Community and Planetary Health

Instructor: Jennifer Jay

Subject Area: Civil and Electrical Engineering

The Silence of the Lamb: Human Consumption of Non-Human Animals

Instructor: Arvind Thomas

Subject Area: English

Food and Performance: Studying Highly Productive Consumption

Instructor: Sharon Traweek

Subject Area: Food Studies

Course Description: This Fiat Lux course examines food and its consumption in high stress settings, both in the US and abroad, such as international sports, dance and theater, and education. To better understand this topic, the class will cover food and eating cultures, products, food accessibility, and nutritional expectations in those settings, along with expert guest lecturers. We will learn from Olympic and Paralympic coaches and athletes how nutrition affects performance in different sports, such as triathlon and wheelchair basketball, and in response to the pandemic. Similarly, we will learn how food and consumption are integral to dance training and performance. The course will also focus on food cultures in educational spaces like physics and biology research labs in the US and Japan, and school lunch benefits for K-12 student academic performance. The course materials will draw from scientific journal articles, popular media, and newspaper articles. The course will also engage students in learning qualitative interview methods to deploy with guest lecturers.

The Flavor of Difference

Instructor: Eric Avila

Subject Area: History

Course Description: The Immigration Act of 1965 radically changed the contours of urban life in the United States. One of the cities most impacted by this law was Los Angeles. With its stature on the Pacific Rim, Los Angeles underwent profound social, demographic and cultural changes, as immigrants from Asia, Mexico and Central America poured into Southern California, creating a far-flung patchwork of communities fractured along familiar lines of race and class. This Fiat Lux seminar invites students to explore this process through the landscape of food–food consumption and food production–to understand one aspect of the cultural transformation of Los Angeles in the decades following the 1965 Immigration Act. Long an understudied aspect of Los Angeles history, food consumption and production is the recent focus of a new generation of scholars interested in the possibilities of a “cuisine-driven multiculturalism.” In this seminar, we will explore this new body of scholarship and the significance of food within the emergence of ‘Global Los Angeles’ during the 1970s and 1980s.

Wine and Music Through the Ages

Instructor: David S. Lefkowitz

Subject Area: Music

Course Description: A ten-week Fiat Lux course on the close relationship between wine and music. The course will cover some of the following topics: In the face of death-late Medieval songs about wine; Wine and academia- drinking songs; wine and the pleasures of life; wine and dissolution; wine and loneliness; wine and friendship; wine and popular music; instrumental music; and wine in world poetry: Omar Khayyam, Li Bai (Li Po), William Shakespeare. The seminar will include presentations of student projects.

International Food Politics

Instructor: Leslie Johns

Subject Area: Political Science

Course Description: In this seminar, students will discuss contemporary issues in international politics related to food. The course will be organized into three units. Unit 1 will focus on “Food and the Environment” with individual weeks devoted to: illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing; the impact of agriculture on deforestation; and climate change. Unit 2 will focus on “Food and International Security” with individual weeks devoted to the impacts of international crime, embargos/sanctions, and war on food. Unit 3 will focus on “Food and Human Rights” with individual weeks focused on: global treaty rights; treaty rights in Europe and the Americas; and treaty rights in Africa. [Proposed as a Themed Seminar for UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies]

Proteins and Society: New Foods and Materials Toward a Bio-Economy

Instructor: Hannah Landecker

Subject Area: Sociology

Course Description: Conventional agriculture and industrial animal farming depend heavily on fossil fuels and generate emissions. This course examines efforts to use biotechnology to generate animal-free sustainable platforms for protein production in the food, cosmetics, and textiles sectors. Students will explore the views of both proponents and critics of these “alternative proteins” in order to understand the cultural, political and economic dimensions of these technologies.