Stanford Class Combines Cooking with Politics

We're always on the lookout for ways in which other institutions are trying integrative approaches to education. There's an awful lot of schools that have done nice interdisciplinary work in this area, but what's rarer is to see courses embrace the other aims of integrative education -- namely to help students make explicit connections between academic work and both their community life and their personal life.

Food, because it is a part of our daily experience, is a really neat place to start discussions on how academic issues relate to personal choices and values. If you can look at an issue through the prism of food (ugh, not the image I was going for there...), you've not only tied that issue to their personal life, but you've tied it to their daily experience.

Here's a course at Stanford which combines experiential and integrative learning in a way that I think is pretty neat:



I'm actually not a foodee myself, or a slow-food believer, but I love the way the course ties ethics and politics to daily life:

"Eating is a political and ethical act," Reich said. "It's also incredibly personal. It's the daily thing which nourishes us, but we know so little about the path that ingredients take from where they were produced to the point where they get into our mouths."

Reich wants his students to unravel some of that mystery by having them take turns planning lunches and dinners, shopping for groceries and cooking the ingredients. Considering what to buy and how to prepare it forces them to reckon with their food, he says.

I'm talking this afternoon to someone running a food-themed course here at Keene State, I hope to report later this week some of the stuff we are doing in this area.