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Food has been a defining part of human experience since the dawn of humanity. The diverse plants and animals available to humans for domestication in distinct parts of the world have fundamentally shaped the cultures of each region. Foods and eating practices have also been intertwined with religious beliefs and have become integral to cultural systems and national identities. The cultivation of food crops and livestock, the marketing and processing of foods, and food and beverage consumption have linked households with regional, national, and global economies and with the natural environment in historically specific ways. Practices of food preparation and eating have often structured or illustrated gender and class relations. Simultaneously universal and historically conditioned, food thus offers an ideal vantage point for exploring relationships among culture, economy, environment, and society in world history. These subjects, all of which figure in the course, correspond to several of the university's General Education goals, including those connected to moral beliefs, the nature of the historical past and its connections with the present, the diversity of human experience, and the impact of technology. |