Assignments
Presentation and Blog Post
You will become an expert on a specific food product, tradition, cookbook, or practitioner, and you will share your research with the class in an informative ten-minute presentation. You may, if you choose, use multimedia technology to enhance your presentation. After the presentation, your classmates will offer their feedback on the presentation, and I will critique the presentation after class.
Seven days after the presentation, you will submit a one thousand word blog post on the same topic as your presentation. The blog post will explain the topic in an engaging and interesting way to a general audience, and it will provide references to additional sources on the topic.
Oral History
Mass production and culinary corporatization threaten many traditional southern foodways. You will work in groups to interview a prominent local foodways practitioner, and your research will be contributed to the Southern Foodways Alliance oral history program.
The actual interview should take about thirty minutes. Before the interviews, we will have a workshop on the techniques of oral history. You will be responsible for completing some paperwork before the interview, you will formulate appropriate questions, you will conduct the interview properly, you will take photographs, you will transcribe the interview correctly, you will write a thank-you letter to the interviewee, and you will each write a five-hundred word description of your contribution to the project. This will be an important and time-consuming activity, and you will each be graded both collectively and individually.
Critical Recipe
The critical recipe assignment requires that you research, transcribe, and analyze a regionally-identified food product. The actual recipe should be accompanied by a seven hundred word critique that explains the dish's social significance, when it would be served, by whom it would be prepared, your relationship to the dish, its historical origins, and its development in the recent past.
Service Learning
After working at the Pleasant Hill community garden, you will write a one thousand word critical reflection about your experience. The reflection should explain what you did, who you met, what you learned, and how you've changed as a result of the experience.