Breaking Bread: “Authentic” Food Culture

Introduction

What is on an American hamburger? Where should one go for a "real" guacamole? How many different types of barbecue sauce are there? And what makes the beef "wagyu"? These are all questions that allegedly have answers, with various degrees of uniformity and agreement. These are the types of questions we will investigate as we look into the history of different food traditions and how they shape our ideas of food identity.

Essential Questions

• What factors determine the cultural identity of a given food?

• How does one determine the “authenticity” of a given food?

• Why should (or shouldn’t) we care about the identity/authenticity of food? 

• Who gets to decide what makes food “authentic?”

Learning Objectives

• Identify different dishes and methods of food preparation associated with different parts of the world

• Identify historical foods and methods of food preparation from the ancient world

• Argue what constitutes an “authentic” food identity

• Justify whether a certain food/food preparation is “authentic” or not to a given culture/community 

• Develop novel “authentic” foods/food preparations, and/or combine different foods into new expressions