ESTD3980-01.Topics: Community Food Systms.F15.Cadieux,Kirsten

Goals: “Good food” claims appear everywhere, along with projects to improve or support food goodness. This course uses social science sustainability frameworks to explore the social, agricultural, and ecological systems that make food “good”—from personal, social, and environmental perspectives. Content: It is challenging to understand what people mean by their claims about what makes food “good.” Studies of society and environment provide frameworks for understanding how people interact with food in its social and environmental contexts. The emerging field of sustainability studies also provides insights for exploring the competing claims made about social and technological ways to make food good. Course activities build a series of field guides to food systems, designed to orient users to navigating confusion and conflicts over good food. Learning to document field work via field notes and building usable field guides will help students and collaborators explore and represent what it means to make food “good” and to rigorously justify claims to goodness. This process will also provide methods for translating the explorations of the class into useful tools for the communities working on food, society, and environment issues who will host class field trips