Jeff Miller and Jonathan Deutsch’s Introduction to Food Studies serves as a perfect first read for the class, as it explains the concept of food studies and provides several different examples of the various methodologies that make up the food studies field. Prior to reading this article, I did not have a full understanding of what food studies actually was, however after reading the article I realize that food studies is not solely centered around food, but around the relationship between food and human day-to-day life all around the globe. After defining food studies, Miller and Deutsch claim that food studies is made up of four main methodologies: ethnographic, historical, cultural/media based, and quantitative. This shows that the field of food studies can be studied in many fundamentally different ways and is inherently diverse. Furthermore, food studies includes a vast amount of experts and authors from a wide range of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, social psychology, amongst others. This shows how broad of a range of topics and disciplines food studies covers, and how much food is ingrained in the systems and processes of our world, which I find extremely fascinating.
Intro to Food Studies Blog Post
