For one assignment in John Coupland’s class, students are asked to describe the best meal they’ve ever had: What they ate, why they enjoyed it, and who they ate with. “Quite a few are about a special meal with a special person—steak, fancy drinks, things like that,” says Coupland, a professor of food science whose Food Facts and Fads class examines the role of food in society through the ages and from historical and cultural perspectives. “Some are really moving, like a lovely story about a rower having a simple breakfast sandwich while sitting on a dock with her friends. It was such a beautiful story of being in your 20s, of being alive and your body being at its strongest.”
Coupland has been teaching FDSC 105 for close to 10 years. His background is in food chemistry, but he’s always enjoyed viewing food as a lens that “opens up all sorts of interesting ways of thinking about how human beings live in the world.”
FDSC 105 starts with food history and looking at the role of food in different societies beginning with the emergence and development of cooking. Students learn about the beginnings of food hierarchy in ancient Egypt and in the Roman Empire, and how those separations between socioeconomic classes have evolved over time. Coupland also talks about the migration of foods as important to the movement of people and cultures across the globe and through the ages. “We’ll use a pierogi, which is Polish, but also a Pennsylvanian food to talk about Polish immigration to the U.S.,” he says. “But we’ll also talk about how the pierogi came to Poland and examine the global migration of dumplings, which followed the expansion of the Mongol empire. We follow the movement of pilau rice from Persia to India, and the voyage of the Indian biriyani to the chilled food section of an English supermarket.”
In his class, Coupland also covers changes in food preparation and preservation techniques through time, as an illustration of how technological changes are connected to cultural and societal changes. “I use refrigeration to talk about disruption,” he says. “Like the kind of disruptions created by the modern tech barons, refrigeration of food profoundly changed the world.”
