Course Catalog: Food for Thought — Literally

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In this episode

Food shapes our daily lives in profound ways, yet it’s often taken for granted or misunderstood. In the course “Sociology of Food” at Texas Christian University, students learn how food functions as sustenance, commodity, and a sociocultural force. The course covers food from its starting point to its end — tracing its path as an agricultural product and a commodity to be traded, marketed, shopped for, prepared, and finally consumed. Edgar Jesus Campos, assistant professor of sociology at TCU, says some of his students enroll in the course to better understand their own bodies and consumption patterns. While they gain that knowledge, they also leave with a deeper understanding of how global economic and political forces play into their personal diets.

Guest

Edgar Jesus Campos, assistant professor of sociology at Texas Christian University

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Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling: Hey everyone, Jack Stripling here. Today you’ll hear the next episode in our summer series on intriguing and popular college courses. Here’s our producer, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Maybe you’ve heard the saying, some people live to eat and others eat to live. In Edgar Jesus Campos’ course, Sociology of Food, his students come to understand both sides of that aphorism. Campos is an assistant. Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University. He’s been teaching a version of this course since 2020 when he was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. The course, like our food supply, has evolved to meet the moment. This summer, students in Campos’ class will learn about tariffs, trade wars, and even how to buy groceries without going broke. Edgar Campos, welcome to College Matters.

Edgar Campos: Hello, Fernanda. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: So let’s start with the basics. What is the sociology of food?

Edgar Campos: Yeah, so the sociology of food is essentially understanding how food shapes our understanding of our lived and social realities, and how we can understand our social realities through our relationship with food through a multitude of levels, either at the personal or at the global level.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: How do you touch on that in the course?

Edgar Campos: I usually start off with the most simplest unit. For most people, they. They understand food through the relationship and how it shapes them. Right? So your class background, how much food did you have growing up? What could you afford? Where could you go shop? Your culture, what’s your cultural background?

What would you eat on holidays? Your race or your ethnicity or your gender, right? Many. My female students love to give the example of on a first date, I avoid finger foods like the plague because it’s seen as not very feminine to eat, uh, buffalo wings on a first date, while most of the men in my class are like, oh, I never thought about that. I’ll just order half pound burger. Right? And so we start off with a unit like that where people can understand, okay, how do, how does food shape us in the most direct and indirect ways? And then we eventually move into the big picture. So the global food system, right? For many students in the United States, um, their relationship with food is very different than the rest of the world.

We don’t grow the majority of our food here, like other parts of the world. We don’t eat in season, like in other parts of the world. Um, many of the local foods that naturally grow here, we don’t eat. Um, here in Texas, gourd is the type of squash that grows like weed out here. It just like weeds. It just, it just sprouts everywhere. None of my students here at Texas Christian University have ever seen a gourd before, right? And we talk about those type of issues and then eventually we expand to how does our food system, the way that we get our food, affect our environment, affect disease and health. And then we end with solutions. As many of my students are around the age where they begin to think bigger pictures, right? They’re, they’re young adults and they want to find solutions and that’s kind of how the course is shaped. Take them on this long trajectory of ways that they can relate, ways that they kind of think about food, but not really. And then how that changes over time.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Right. So similar to the process of agriculture, you start with a seed and then it germinates and it goes on.

Edgar Campos: Correct.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: So who are your students and what are some of their majors?

Edgar Campos: Yeah, so I get a wide range of students. I do teach this in the sociology department, so I do get a lot of like sociology or anthropology majors. I also get a lot of health science majors, biology majors, people in sustainability studies that are very interested in understanding food as much more than just a commodity, but as a basic human need. And how do we get the food to the people that need to get it? And for my health majors it’s very [much about] understanding health from a more holistic point of view. In Native American epistemology about food, something that we learned at the very end of the semester. Native Americans think about food as medicine. And many of my health majors are very interested in understanding that. What is the food that we’re putting in our body? How does it affect us on the day to day and in the long term?

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: What do you think your students want to get out of this class?

Edgar Campos: Half of them try to use it as more like a self discovery of trying to understand their own bodies and how food reacts to them. I have many students that come in thinking that they’re gluten intolerant or lactose intolerant, just to come to find out that it’s no they can actually eat these foods, but it’s the amount of pesticides and preservatives that we put in the food that they’re actually allergic to, not the food itself. While other students especially my much more international students, are much more interested in the global food system.

Because when they come here, a lot of them talk about food here is done in a completely different manner than where they come from. For my sociology or social science students, many of them want to go into public health graduate school or do some type of government role eventually. So for them, it’s really using this course as a way of understanding how to improve their local communities and things of that nature.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: So you’re covering a range of topics in the course, like international supply chains, agriculture, international relations. This kind of sounds like it could be an economics course. How is your approach maybe different from that?

Edgar Campos: Well, it’s funny you say that. So one of my areas of expertise is in political economy, and I do teach some of those aspects in the course. But it’s much more different because economics is oftentimes taught as its own independent thing that, oh, it’s a live market, and the market will reset itself. But the market is controlled by people and institutions and institutions are run by people. And understanding those social components of how that’s created, whether it be because of political turmoil, whether it be because of social disruption, such as there’s a revolution such as the Arab Spring that happened in Northern Africa, and the Middle East, that disrupted supply chains there that affected prices there. Or such as the global pandemic, right? That the market didn’t create those prices. It was something completely out of our control. And some countries were much better suited to handle that than others. For the United States, the market probably definitely created that because we simply don’t have a market here. We import most of our food. But for the developing world that grew most of their food. They benefited because they had plenty of food to feed their own people during that very precarious time. So understanding that history and politics and social movements all play a role in creating the food that we get in the moment that we get it in. It’s not as simple as, well, that’s what the market demands, and that’s just the price. This is how much we put into it, so this is how much we expect to get out of it. It’s much, much more complicated than that.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Yeah. This is really complex and like you said, based on people’s reactions, et cetera. And at the beginning of this conversation, you said sometimes students come into this class to kind of understand their own bodies, what they’re eating and what they’re seeing on the grocery shelves. So I could see that that student, all of a sudden, you know, they have this galaxy brain moment or this moment where the emoji of the head exploding thinking, Oh, It’s more complex than perhaps I have a gluten intolerance or not. What are students’ reactions when they begin to connect the dots of what they’re seeing on the grocery shelves, what they’re taking home, what they’re eating with their friends, family, and then learning about global supply chains, international economics?

Edgar Campos: Yes. That’s probably the most fulfilling component of when I teach this course is that students’ minds really do open and they begin to ask why it is the way it is. And that’s a very complicated answer, but it’s one that, I really enjoy that they ask because for example, Fernanda, let’s say you’re hungry and you want to go buy groceries. You say, I want avocados, I want apples, and I want carrots. And how much is it gonna cost me? And that’s all you think about. You grab how much you have and then you pay for it and that’s it. But sometimes, right, maybe avocados are not available. Maybe they’re out of season. Maybe there’s some political turmoil. Maybe there was a plague in the part of the world that grows avocados, right? And then we complain as the consumer of, Oh wow, this store sucks, or I’m gonna go to a different place. And it’s the same thing over and over.

My students have noted that they’ve become much more ethical buyers in understanding that like, OK, if I like apples, I don’t have to buy the same species of apple every time. Understanding that different apples grow in different seasons based on the color they are in the region of the world that they’re grown in, right? And they become much more open. They open up their palettes and because they’re understanding how the system works and like, oh yeah, maybe something’s going on. Or trying different foods that are in season. One of the things that I teach my students is oftentimes the food that is cheaper, especially when it comes to fresh produce, is because it’s what’s in season. And so they begin to change the realities of, oh, I don’t always have to eat this way. I can do this. And that’s very, uh, promising as an instructor that they’re taking the lesson that they’re learning in the classroom and not applying it to the real world applications. But also, many students have begun to look for alternatives on how to eat food or think about food.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: My maternal grandfather was a rancher in Mexico. He grew chia, dragon fruit and had cattle. He tried other crops with varying levels of success over the years. My uncle now tends to that ranch. I grew up understanding agriculture. Even though I was raised mostly in a suburb of New Orleans. I knew that there were other people, other families that helped get my food on the table. But not everyone has this background knowledge. Do you think the events of the last five years: Covid, grocery inflation and the potential of increased tariffs has drawn students to the class?

Edgar Campos: Most definitely. When I originally taught this class was at the University of Minnesota during the pandemic. I teach now in Texas, which is a border state, so it’s a lot easier to get produce from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, which most of our produce fresh and vegetables actually come from. But Minnesota, you’re border with Canada, and it’s winter, six months out of the year. And so my students over there could directly see the impacts of supply chains, of shelves were completely empty at grocery stores. You know we were also coming back where several grocery stores were actually destroyed during the George Floyd protests and things of that nature. So the students were able to see firsthand how the global food system was now showing its cracks and how it manifested itself within the United States, right? For many students it was quite confusing. How is the richest country in the world going to have food shortages? We can just buy everything. Well, sometimes there’s very peculiar circumstances that happen that doesn’t allow us to have all the food that we need, such as, you realize, oh, we don’t grow our own food. Also, you realize, just because we’re in a pandemic, we all also have to understand that the rest of the world is as well. And atthe end of the day, people are gonna protect their own people first, right? And students begin to understand cracks in that system. And I believe that also has manifested itself. Now, when my students here in Texas also asking the same things: Why are the prices of vegetables so high when those vegetables are imported from Mexico and we’re a border state? They could not believe that when they would go visit their family on the East Coast that the food was actually cheaper on the East Coast for certain products than it was in a border state, right. And that’s economics of the market at play. And they were really asking these questions.Many of them were very curious: Why is this happening? What is going on here?

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Right. You hit on a lot of interesting points about the changing course given. Our changing world and political system. I’m curious about how the course has changed at two different campuses. You started teaching it as an inherited course at the University of Minnesota, and now you’re teaching it at Texas Christian University. Tell me a little bit about how the institution and the students’ curiosities demands have changed the course.

Edgar Campos: Yes, that’s an excellent question. So, first thing to start is Minnesota and Texas could not be any more different politically. Sso that plays a dramatic role in how people understand things. So in Minnesota there’s a big concept called co-ops, community operations. And they’re basic community stores in which neighborhoods buy into, and they really focus on local produce in the local area. That concept of co-ops, I’m yet to see a single one in Texas other than one I saw in Austin.

Instead, what you have in Texas is a larger range of grocery stores from very generic ones such as Kroger, Albertsons, or very specific ones like Central Market or various versions of Whole Foods, for example, um, which is a much different foodscape. Foodscape basically means the area, the direct area where an individual thinks, talks and consumes about food. And that changes dramatically how people think about food, where it is even acceptable to go buy food. And I had to really understand that in order to talk to my students a lot differently, especially at TCU, which is an incredibly upper class, middle, upper class institution. It’s a very expensive institution. And so it’s a much different student demographic. So a lot of these students are much more proactive tha nI think their own parents or sometimes administrators give them credit for. So that has changed dramatically. For me, understanding that’s important in order to teach the first part of the course,where they understand food from an individual, much more individualized perspective and how the individualized perspective shapes them as members of society. But when it comes to the bigger part, I think I’m a political and cultural sociologist and I study on, I really focus on food and sports and how these are things that are seen as boring, as mundane, but yet to shape our everyday realities.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

Edgar, we’ve been talking about how some students come to your class with blind spots about food production and the economics of food. So much of the North American food supply is imported, so food production or agricultural work may feel distant for some of the students in Fort Worth, Texas, even though it’s relatively close to the U.S. Mexico border. How do you make them feel closer to this material?

Edgar Campos: The way I teach my course, whether it be this food course or any course I do, I give a lot of personal examples of my own in order to help them understand how larger social forces shape us as individuals. Oftentimes, especially when we’re younger, we always say, I am me. I am the individual. We love talking about the individual in the United States, but the individuals shape of multiple little parts and the combination of the multiple little parts makes you who you are. But those multiple little parts are shaped by things. Sometimes completely outside your control and food is one of those.

And so for example, you were talking about your grandparents and now your uncle, right, are the ranchers. Well, and on both of the sides of my family, but especially on my father’s side, we’re seven, eight generations of agricultural workers, both in the United States and Mexico.

My uncle, he is, he is a decent farmer, but he’s no great farmer by any means. He farmed for years, never really made money. Maybe about 10-15 years ago there was a fungus plague that killed most of those strawberries in Michoacan, which is the home state where I’m from. But my uncle’s fields were completely saved for whatever reason. My dad jokes that he started to plague, but obviously, you know. But the point is that my uncle got really lucky, and because of that, my uncle got the contracts for Kirkland, the brand owned by Costco to supply their stores in Texas and in the state of California.

So for years, all the strawberries you’d buy — the fresh strawberries, not the frozen — the fresh strawberries you’d buy at Costco, were my uncles. He got completely lucky. And I would give that example and when I talk about supply chain, this is the supply chain that happens. Strawberries are indigenous to the United States and Canada, yet we have outsourced that to Mexico. The company that gave my uncle the contract is Austrian called Agrana Fruit. What the hell is an Austrian company doing in Mexico selling a fruit that goes naturally in Mexico, but grow it in Mexico and then ship it back, right. And it’s this long, complicated process and students begin to feel much more connected to it that these food supplies are much closer to themselves.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Yeah, and I think even on a smaller level,if you take yourself and you think, What are the foods that I grew up eating and what are the foods that are in my house now? There’s been a huge shift, right? Americans, one of the grains that people largely consumed in the late 90s, early, 2000s that’s my age, was rice, right? Quinoa was something that was probably exotic, bulgur wheat, et cetera, farro, they’re more exotic, maybe for the hippie sort or for people who really knew about cooking, or whose families came from cultures where those grains were the primary source of carbs on the plate. But now quinoa is everywhere. You can get quinoa at Costco, and, you know, down the street, in your Sweetgreen bowl. And so there have been shifts in the global food supply that have affected us all.

Edgar Campos: Right. And that’s an excellent example, Fernanda, right? Because our realities right, our social realities have changed, but for this younger generation, they think it’s normal to eat quinoa all year long. We actually learn about avocados and how NAFTA has shifted how Americans eat avocados. Before NAFTA, Americans would average about a pound of avocados a year, and you can only eat it between September and December. Now Americans average about seven pounds of avocado per individual. Not everyone eats avocado. So there’s some people eating a tremendous amount of avocados, and we learn about the dangers of that. It’s caused many droughts in southern Chile, for example. You bring up quinoa. Quinoa, for the average American, was incredibly distant and foreign, or to use the word that you used exotic for many people. But for people of the Andes, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Chile, Bolivians, that was part of their everyday diet. And so one of my best friends growing up, Luis, he’s Peruvian, and I would eat quinoa going to his house because that’s what he was used to rather than rice. And now to see it so readily available as, as a complete shift that unless you’re from, you know, we’re about the same age, you know, you’re born, you know, the post-9/11 era, they think it’s all normalized, like, why can’t I get avocado toast? You know, why can’t I get kale smoothies? Why can’t — what’s this new one? Uh, mate now has become huge mate’s an herb from the Southern Cone, very popular in southern Brazil, and Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay. Now there’s a brand called, Guayaki, and all my students I see themwith these yellow cans, and they have no cultural connection to this food at all. So that’s an excellent example that you gave.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: When you think about it, you can probably name a handful of different food products that are now more readily available, that before were a special treat at a friend’s house. So speaking of eating, I’ve read news reports about GLP1 drugs like ozempic, that in part help with weight loss. So when people take these medications, they aren’t as hungry. For some people making and eating food is a love language. For others, it’s how they gather and socialize. Now we have a group of people who aren’t as interested in food as they once were. How will these drugs change the sociology of food?

Edgar Campos: I’ve been reading mixed results. It’s so early and most of this research that’s coming out on the effects of Ozempic and food has been much more from the traditional science part. So biology, epidemiology, even some kinesiology reports on how people’s relationship with food has affected, right? Because they’re not as hungry, they don’t overconsume. So this idea of, I’m just going to eat because I can eat is reducing among those populations that are taking Ozempic. I think what’s going to happen is that people are still gonna see the value of eating. It’s just gonna shape something that’s different such as portion sizes. I do think from a sociological perspective, this will help as a tool, right?

We shouldn’t rely on these drugs, but for some people, right, they might need this extra assistance and that’s totally OK. What I think is not gonna change is the cultural dimension of food where I think people are still gonna realize, well, I’m eating less, so I’m always in a, what we would call a calorie deficit.

However, once it comes to the holidays, let’s say an American holiday like Thanksgiving, I’m going to still gonna eat all my turkey. I’m still gonna eat all my stuffing. I think that, as you mentioned earlier in Fernanda, in the podcast, this emotional connection of what we eat and, and this idea of socialization and gathering, I do think that is gonna be the same. And to be honest, it might even make it even better because people are going to eat much more healthy during the regular weeks. And then on the special occasion, being able to indulge much more in this.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Yeah. I’m thinking of scenarios where maybe someone from a different generation sees that you’re appreciating food by getting a second helping, stuff like that. And so perhaps, you know, my grandmother in Mexico would be like, oh, you didn’t like it because you only served yourself once. Those shifts perhaps are interpersonal, but I’m curious if they would affect the sociology of food as a whole.

Edgar Campos: I mean, it, it definitely could be, right? But those are much more cultural context dependent and that’s fine, right? Because cultures are evolving. The concept of fast food did not exist in most parts of the world, outside of the U.S. until the late eighties, and has changed dramatically how people understand food in other parts of the world. China’s the most famous example. There’s many sociological, anthropological studies of fast food in China, where in China the idea is to sit down and have a long meal together and you talk with the people you’re with. All of a sudden fast food made it OK to have a much more individualized perception of food that you can go get your food, eat real quick, and leave; you don’t have to waste an hour, two hours of your day eating with people. That’s constantly happening and that could definitely happen, Fernanda. It’s just the way that human society works. But I think the core aspects of what we use food for: a sense of create an identity, a sense of who we are as community, I think those will remain the same.

Fernanda Zamudio- Suarez: Well, perhaps you and your students will study this change one day.

Edgar Campos: Hopefully.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: You’ve given us a lot to think about, but what’s something you wish more students understood about food that they probably don’t?

Edgar Campos: I’ll give you two. As a much more individual level is food is memory. I had this question like towards the middle of the semester and I asked them what was the one of the hardest things about moving away from home for college? And they would say, I miss my mom’s cooking, or I miss my grandma’s cooking. Food is emotional. It’s an emotional experience. And then my students talk about, oh, I can’t wait to go buy for Thanksgiving break and we’re gonna have, my mom makes the best apple pie or my aunt makes the best sweet pecan pie or whatever it might be. Food is incredibly emotional. It’s something that’s very attached to us.

Some of our earliest memories of, I remember when we went to go eat this. Or for many students, the first time they learn about a different culture is through a restaurant. I remember the first time when we moved here from Mexico when I was about five or six years old. The first time I seen someone who was Chinese, my dad wanted to go eat Chinese food. I was like, whoa, what is going on here? It was, I never seen people that were Chinese before,and it was an emotional experience because I remember, I vividly remember go walking in that restaurant and just being completely culture shocked. And so food is incredibly emotional and from a many different ways. And it invokes memories for people. And then the other one, the basic idea that the way that we understand food, especially in the United States, food is a commodity, not a human necessity. And the quicker they understand it, the easier it is for them to defend themselves in this very almost predatory world of how we try to sell and market these processed foods to children and to adults, and we sell them on these fat diets and now we have all these pills to fix a problem that we created ourselves with this processed food. Now we’re selling Ozempic, and now we’re selling that as a product as well, right? We keep creating solutions to problems that we made ourselves. And I don’t think it hits until after they leave the classroom. The amount of emails I’ve gotten since they left, like, oh, this class has completely changed how I view food. Oh, I don’t, I don’t buy three boxes of Pop Tarts just because there’s three for 10 anymore, right? They’re learning to understand like, oh, they’re only trying to sell me three boxes of Pop Tarts for $10 because they want to get rid of that so they can put new merchandise in to then sell it to me again.

And that has made me very proud, but it’s something that I wish students would get a lot more while they’re in the classroom so we can have better discussion. But that just mean more being an idealist. They do get it eventually, but.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Okay. Final question I have to ask it. What’s your favorite food?

Edgar Campos: Are we talking about like Mexican food or are we talking about a specific thing within Mexican food?

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Your favorite dish ever. I can tell you mine is tortas hogadas, which is a Mexican sandwich that literally means drowned sandwich because you drowned it in salsa. It’s made famous in Guadalajara, and legend has it, it’s because of Guadalajara’s altitude that that type of crusty almost French bread can only be done there. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s delicious.

Edgar Campos: The French were heavy in Guadalajara. It is French inspired, My favorite there’s two. There’s tacos al pastor comes from the tradition of the Middle Eastern population that came after the fall of the Ottoman Empire specifically to the regions of Puebla, originally, and then they spread to the rest of the country. And in Mexico, we’re not, we don’t eat as much lamb as they do in the Middle East. And so many of these Middle Eastern populations are assimilated and instead of using lamb, they would use pork. And then it became evolved using Mexican spices to what we now have as al pastor. That’s my absolute favorite. After that, it is lomo saltado which is Peru’s national dish. I first had it when I was nine years old at my friend Luis’s house. I eat it and it evokes emotion, a friendship, but it’s also so good. Peruvian food is absolutely astounding. You wanna understand colonialism and imperialism in food, you gotta eat Peruvian food. It’s in indigenous and Spanish and Italian and Chinese and Japanese all mixed in one. It is quite fascinating. Those would be my two favorite foods on the planet.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: Wonderful. Well, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Of course.

Edgar Campos: Thank you for having me Fernanda

Jack Stripling: College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes and much more at chronicle.com/college matters. We are produced today by Corinne Ruff, who provided audio editing and engineering. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues, Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible.