Multimedia Projects by Food Studies Faculty Explore the Connections Between Food and Culture
Faculty from the Food Studies program at the Schools of Public Engagement (SPE) explore the many connections between food, identity, nationality, social policy, culture, and the environment from a social justice perspective. Faculty have been sharing their expertise on podcasts, featured talks, and film to inform and change the way people think about and understand their relationship to food access, food production, and the cuisines of various cultures.
Budding Taste, a podcast produced and hosted by Food Studies faculty member Fa-Tai Shieh (aka Kai Shay), examines the diet of everyday people from cultural, historical, and culinary perspectives. Growing out of the Food Studies course The Cultural History of Nutrition Professor Shieh teaches, the podcast features individuals from a variety of countries and cultures who discuss food traditions in their families and cultures and the way they relate to ideas about food in the United States.
Kristin Reynolds, Chair of Food Studies, was a featured speaker at Cities@Tufts a colloquium held at Tufts University that focuses on civic democracy, ethnographic research, urban and community health, food justice and security, urban politics and economics, and social inequality. Reynolds discussed recent developments in urban agriculture practice and policy, their implications for racial and economic equity, and her current efforts to promote socially just urban agriculture policy through her Food and Social Justice Action Research Lab.
The Colloquium is produced in collaboration with Shareable. Find the video and links to the podcast here.
Rhythms of the Land, a multimedia documentary by Food Studies faculty member Gail Myers, is a valentine to generations of Black farmers in the United States—from the enslavement period to the present—whose love of the land and dedication to community enabled them to survive against overwhelming odds. In 1920, there were more than 920,000 Black families farming in the United States (often sharecroppers and tenant farmers); those numbers have dwindled to just over 48,697 Black families because of systemic racial discrimination and social injustice. Recently, Myers spoke with the news organization Civil Eats about the making of the film, the incident that moved her to document these farmers’ stories, the history of sharecropping, and the power of seed saving for Black farmers.