HU Credits: 2

Degree/Cycle: 1st degree (Bachelor)

Responsible Department: "Amirim" Honors Program

Semester: 2nd Semester

Teaching Languages: Hebrew

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Dr. Anat Helman

Coordinator Email: anathelman85@gmail.com

Coordinator Office Hours: Tuesdays 17:00-18:00 by appointment

Teaching Staff:
Dr. Anat Helman

Course/Module description:
The course views Western culture in 1500-1900 through a prism of food and drink. The course introduces central theories on food, and examines historical case studies, in which eating and drinking reflects and enhances religious, political and national agendas, concepts of class, gender and race.

Course/Module aims:
Tracing the roles that food and drink played in Western social systems in the modern era. After supplying some theoretical tools, it explores historic case studies, attempting to identify the manners in which eating and drinking structured religious, ideological, social, gender, imperial and national identities

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
Summarize influential theories in the field; criticize historical studies on the topic; explain the main features of food in modern Western societies and independently interpret specific patterns.

Attendance requirements(%):
100

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: The course is conducted as a round-table discussion, in which all students present their conclusions of the weekly reading. Three written assignments will be submitted during the course as well as a final paper.

Course/Module Content:
Food for thought
Food and the Civilizing Process
Luxury and social distinction
The Renaissance and the Reformation
Discovering America
Settling in America
Food and national identity
Consuming food in private and in public
Bread in the Ancien Régime
The triumphant cuisine
The American middle class
Famine history and historiography

Required Reading:
George Simmel, "Sociology of the Meal" in Simmel on Culture, David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds.), (London, 1997), 130-135.
Paul Rozin, "The Psychology of Food and Food Choice", The Cambridge World History of Food, Part 2, Kenneth F. Kiple and K.C. Ornelas (eds.), (Cambridge, 2000), 1476-1485.
Stephen Mennell, “On the Civilizing of Appetite”, Food and Culture: A Reader, Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (eds.), (New York and London, 1997), 315-337.
Marijke van der Veen, "When Is Food a Luxury?", World Archaeology, 34/3, (2003), 405-427
Valerie Taylor, "Banquet Plate and Renaissance Culture: A Day in the Life", Renaissance Studies, 19/5 (2005), 621-633.
Mack P. Holt, “Europe Divided: Wine, Beer, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Europe”, Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History, Mack P. Holt (ed.), (Oxford and New York, 2006), 25-40.
Beth Marie For*rest and April L. Najjaj, "Is Sipping Sin Breaking Fast? The Catholic Chocolate Controversy and the Changing World of Early Modern Spain", Food and Foodways, 15/1 (2007), 31-52
Robert Launay, "Tasting the World: Food in Early European Travel Narratives", Food and Foodways, 11/1 (2003), 27-47
Meta F. Janowitz, "Indian Corn and Dutch Pots: Seventeenth-Century Foodways in New Amsterdam/New York", Historical Archaeology, 27/2 (1993), pp. 6-24.
Lydia N. Garver, "Tea and Ethnicity in Southeastern Pennsylvania: A Transatlantic Perspective on German American Consumption", Historical Archaeology, 49/4 (2015), 30-53.
Annette Cozzi, "Composed Consumption", Food, Culture & Society, 16/4 (2013), 569-588
Melissa Calaresu, "Making and Eating Ice Cream in Naples: Rethinking Consumption and Sociability in the Eighteenth Century", Past & Present, 220 (2013), 35-78
Steven Laurence Kaplan, "Breadways", Food and Foodways, 7/1 (1997), 1-44.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “Inventing French Cuisine”, in Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago, 2004), 49-82.
Mark McWilliams "Good Women Bake Good Biscuits", Food, Culture & Society, 10/3 (2007), 388-406
Kelly Erby, "Dining on Dissolution: Restaurants, the Middle Class, and the Creation of the Family Dinner in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America", Food, Culture & Society, 20/4 (2017), 671-684
Henrik Mikael Forsberg, " 'If They do not Want to Work and Suffer, They Must Starve and Die': Irish and Finnish Famine Historiography Compared", Scandinavian Journal of History, 43/4 (2018), 484-514.
Ron van Deth & Walter Vandereycken, "The Striking Age‐old Minority of Fasting Males in the History of Anorexia Nervosa, Food and Foodways, 7/2 (1997), 119-130
Richard Wilk and Persephone Hintlian, "Cooking on Their Own: Cuisines of Manly Men", Food and Foodways, 13/1 (2005), 159-168.
Isak Dinesen, “Babette’s Feast”, in Anecdotes of Destiny (New York: Random House, 1958), 23-68.
Gabriel Axel (director), Babettes gæstebud (Denmark, 1987).

Additional Reading Material:
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986)
Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven and London, 2005)
Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant (Cambridge MA and London, 2000)
Food and Culture: A Reader, Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (eds.), (New York and London, 1997)
The Psychology of Food Choice, R. Shepherd and M. Raats (eds.), (Cambridge MA, 2006), 19-39.
Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal”, in Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology (London and New York, 1999), 231-251.
Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, Mary Douglas (ed.), (Cambridge, 1991)
Norbert Elias, "On Behavior at Table" in The Civilizing Process (Malden MA, 2000), 72-109.
Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, 2002).
Carole M. Counihan, "The Social Uses of Food", The Cambridge World History of Food, K. F. Kiple and K.C. Ornelas (eds.), (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 1513-1523
Ron van Deth & Walter Vandereycken, "The Striking Age‐old Minority of Fasting Males in the History of Anorexia Nervosa", Food and Foodways, 7/2 (1997), 119-130
Charlotte Sussman, “Colonialism and the Politics of Consumption”, in Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (Stanford, 2000), 22-48.
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Banquet Imagery in Rabelais”, in Rabelais and his World (Indiana, 1988), pp.278-302.
Jean-Louis Flandrin, "Distinction Through Taste", in A History of Private Life, Vol. III: Passions of the Renaissance, Roger Chartier (ed.), (Cambridge MA and London, 1989), 265-307.
Ken Albala, (2007) "The Use and Abuse of Chocolate in 17th Century Medical Theory", Food and Foodways, 15/1 (2007), 53-74.
Anna Suranyi, "Seventeenth-century English travel literature and the significance of foreign foodways", Food and Foodways, 14/3 (2006), 123-149.
Erika Rappaport, “Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party”, The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, Frank Trentmann (ed.), (Oxford and New York, 2006), 125-146.
Julie E. Fromer, A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England (Athens OH, 2008)
Kim Carpenter, " 'We demand good and healthy beer': the nutritional and social significance of beer for the lower classes in mid-nineteenth-century Munich", The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500, Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward (eds.), (Aldershot, 2006), 132-155.
John F. Kasson, “Table Manners and the Control of Appetites”, in Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990), 182-214
Alan Ward and Lydia Martens, Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption, and Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History, Mack P. Holt (ed.), (Oxford and New York, 2006).
Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, Warren Balesco and Philip Scranton (eds.), (New York and London, 2002)
Ben Fine, Michael Heasman and Judith Wright, Consumption in the Age of Affluence: The World of Food (London and New York, 1996)

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 0 %
Participation in Tutorials 0 %
Project work 0 %
Assignments 100 %
Reports 0 %
Research project 0 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 0 %

Additional information:
meetings during office hours by email appoinment only.