RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Eating

Most of us, if we are lucky, eat every day, several times a day. We eat when we are hungry, bored, depressed, and happy. We eat to commemorate marriages, birthdays, and deaths. And because we are constantly eating, therefore creating a never-ending demand for food, we are bombarded with advertisements for food every day, from celebrity chef-created menus at chain restaurants to infant formula. We worry about how much and what kinds of food will add inches to our waistlines and what we can eat to help remove those same offending inches. We feed our friends and families, and whether we order a pizza or fret over the details of a perfect formal dinner speaks volumes about our relationships with our guests.

How does what we put into our mouths to nourish our bodies and serve others to eat comment upon who we are? What does food have to tell us about our communities, our nations, and our world while simultaneously signaling our gender, race, and class identities? Eating has become a form of public discourse, and in this course, we will examine the messages about what, how, why, and with whom we should eat as they are presented in literature, films, advertisements, television shows, magazines, grocery stores and restaurant reviews in order to better understand the nuances of the argument that “we are what we eat.”