Anthropological approaches to agriculture, food and nutrition
- Course Code:
- 15PANH053
- Unit value:
- 0.5
- Year of study:
- Year 1 or Year 2
- Taught in:
- Term 2
In this course, we investigate the stark disparities in nutritional well-being around the world, and seek to understand in what ways agricultural systems of food production have played a role. Much of the food that we eat has undergone multiple transformations, travelled substantial distances, passed through different hands, and been subject to a host of laws, institutions and interventions. We shall investigate these links and the relationships between them. We will also consider in what ways agricultural systems have contributed both to hunger and to increasing rates of obesity and other diet-related diseases, while viewing these contemporary trends in the light of a much longer history of human biological change and adaptation dating back as far as the Palaeolithic period. Taking a critical perspective, we treat nutrition not only as the process by which bodies are nourished and sustained, but also as a set of ideas that influences how people think and behave, that is taken up and used by individuals, policy-makers and private industry to educate, to persuade, to sell products, or to influence behaviour.
Objectives and learning outcomes of the course
Upon completion of the course, students should recognize, understand, and/or appreciate the following:
- Nutrition both as a set of biological processes and as a culturally and historically specific body of knowledge
- Major dietary changes in human history, and the role of biological adaptation and social/cultural factors in influencing these changes
- Nutrition science as the subject of educational campaigns, and the outcomes of nutrition education
- Factors affecting food consumption and nutrition of small-holder farmers, including the shift from subsistence to commercial farming
- The influence of nutrition science on agricultural and health policy in the era of global public health
- Intersection of scientific knowledge and public policy in relation to issues of nutrition
- Contribution of agricultural production and the food industry to major contemporary trends of both hunger and over-consumption
Students should be aware of the principal actors and agents in the phenomena outlined above.
Students should know where to find information on the above topics, whether books, scholarly journals, popular media, or websites.
Students should be able to identify key debates on the above issues and express informed positions of their own.
Scope and syllabus
Week 1. History of nutrition:
This unit will address the historical development of nutrition concepts, and will consider what is meant by ‘nutrition’ and how this meaning has changed over time. The idea of nutrition as a cultural discourse is introduced.
Week 2. The “Mediterranean diet”:
Following an epidemiological study in 1970, the cuisine of certain populations of southern Europe was publicised for containing numerous items identified as beneficial against heart disease. Using this as a case study, we ask whether there is such a thing as an optimal diet and consider the factors that might support or challenge this idea.
Week 3. Human evolution and diet:
This week, we explore the evolution of human diet over a wide historical span beginning with the paleolithic period. Key questions: What were the earliest human beings eating, and how does this compare to modern diets? What, if anything, can we learn from the dietary behaviour of our ancestors?
Week 4. Biological adaptation and social change:
In this unit, we consider recent dietary transitions in relation to longer processes of historical change and adaptation. Key questions: How has human dietary behaviour adapted to external circumstances? How do we account for both adaptive and maladaptive responses to nutritional constraints or excess? How do biology and culture intersect over time?
Week 5. Agriculture, livelihoods and nutrition:
This week, we explore the various links between agriculture and nutrition, with a focus on small-scale farmers. We look in particular at whether commercialization of agriculture improves or reduces farmers’ access to nutritious foods, and assess the various factors that may influence this scenario, including intrahousehold distribution, diverse livelihoods, and changing food prices.
Week 6. Reading Week
Week 7. Changing anthropological approaches to agriculture and nutrition:
In this unit, we engage with Audrey Richards’ classic anthropological text on nutrition among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia) alongside a restudy of the same area published more than 50 years later. Key questions: How and why have anthropologists treated the relationship between agriculture and nutrition differently? How has anthropological knowledge about nutrition contributed to colonial agendas?
Week 8. Knowledge, authority and education:
Continuing the discussion from Week 5, this unit will address how the rise of “nutrition science” has created new conditions of authority and expert knowledge, and how this knowledge has been used to support government interventions or to influence public moral discourse in a variety of historical and geographical settings. We look at whether and when attempts to educate people about nutrition ‘work’, and examine the types of narratives they draw upon and intercept.
Week 9. Developments in national and global public health:
This week we explore the emergence of developmental paradigms in the twentieth century that make use of ideas about nutrition, for instance how late Victorian observations of hunger and social deprivation in Britain intersected with nutritional understandings of caloric intake to produce the ‘poverty line’, and how this was taken up by social progressives involved in the creation of the welfare state. We look at how understandings of nutrition became central to holistic visions of the body and of health care, contributing to the re-emergence of global calls for Community Health in the 1970s onwards.
Week 10. ‘The Great Protein Fiasco’.
Did science get it wrong? In this unit, we look at when and why particular nutrients have been privileged over others in global efforts to alleviate malnutrition. Using the ‘protein gap’ example, among others, we consider the interplay between scientific knowledge and dietary interventions in the era of global public health.
Week 11. Agricultural policy and the food industry:
This week, we ask whether under- and over- nutrition have been caused by the production of food, or by its distribution. We look at how production has been altered by agricultural policy and what its effect has been on nutrition. We explore the role of the food industry – including the advertising, marketing, and sale of foods and the dominance of particular sectors/corporations within the food industry – in influencing the desirability and availability of different foods, and the patterns of food distribution that result from this.
Method of assessment
30% of the course mark derives from weekly reading response papers and contributions to seminar discussions; the remaining 70% of the mark is based upon a 2-hour exam.
