Fall 2026

For the Love of Food

Dates: October 06, 2026 – January 05, 2027
Day/Time: Tuesday 4:00 AM - 7:00 AM EDT
Level: 300-Level
Certificate: Global Humanities, Sustainability and Climate Solutions
Global Humanities certificate requirement: Global imagination (study of art and culture).
Sustainability and Climate Solutions certificate requirement: Elective.
Instructor: Fahmida Rahman, BRAC University

What is food and what purpose does it serve for self and society? We may think that food is just a matter of consumption, but what we consume, how we consume it, how we think about and plan the production process, how we distribute it across society tells us a great deal about values, practices, aesthetics, relationships and judgments that allow us acquire tastes and habits to live in societies and promote or impede societal flourishing. This course places food at the centre to explore questions of tastes, values and judgments and link them to structural matters such as production and distribution. We will use a range of case studies extracted from around the world providing two different perspectives on food: cultural & socio-political. The cultural questions around food ask us to assess why different cultures engage with food differently and how within different cultural systems lie notions of sustainability and the common good. As we explore how local foods become a global phenomenon, we enter the socio-political territory and discuss issues such as, diasporic food culture, and multiculturalism. As a part of the socio-political exploration, the course will additionally cover the following topics related to food: social media, gender and identity. In order to assess these, the course will draw from historical moments such as the great Bengal famine and the 1972 famine in Bangladesh and explore contemporary practices such as the use of GMOs, organic farming and sustainable food production.

Credits: 3 US / 6 ECTS