What the World Eats

Yesterday and today I've been attending the TYCA West conference, which, luckily, has been held at SLCC. During the last breakout session, I attended "Inviting Students to the Table: Using a Food Theme to Teach Composition," in which one of the SLCC professors, Charlotte Howe, used food as a theme to teach the English class that I teach (ENGL 1010 - Introduction to Writing). One of the books Howe uses is Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, which illustrates a week's worth of meals families around the world eat, which was used in tandem with an NPR podcast episode that featured an interview with the authors. (She also uses Food, which includes writings from Julia Child and Anthony Bourdain.)

As an example of one of the ways in which the discussion of what people around the world eat, in terms of the particulars of amounts of selection, Howe brought in the food that one family would have been allocated for a day, which included 15 ounces of a cooked version of millet - which she had prepared for the group.

We each got a small sample of the grain, which was interesting.

Her handouts included a syllabus, and she discussed how she had incorporated some of the assignments that, as a department, we are to include (such as the rhetorical analysis).