Learning to eat, eating to learn

In the midst of midterms, while most professors fed students exams, Jack Kloppenburg simply fed them.

On a February evening, a dozen students hovered around a dining-room table brimming with mouth-watering bounty. They filled plates with peanut noodles, goat cheese, Kalamata olives, homemade pesto and hummus, fresh breads, rices, and an Indonesian stew made with coconut milk and pineapple, and for one night at least replaced cramming with nibbling and tasting. But during this evening celebrating food, there was still a healthy side order of learning to be found. That’s because food is the pièce de résistance of education à la Kloppenburg.

“Food has something to teach us,” says Kloppenburg, an associate professor of rural sociology. “By getting into it and tasting it, you see that there is a lot to learn from food.”

To that end, a centerpiece of all Kloppenburg’s courses is a potluck dinner he and his wife host at their home near campus. It’s an evening devoted to sampling new tastes, but also to sampling the social and cultural power of food: how food brings us together and how it defines our cultures.

The dinner epitomizes Kloppenburg’s belief that there’s more to appreciate in food than just taste. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Kloppenburg’s diet included sorghum porridge and sour milk, stewed goat, fresh heart of wildebeest, and even roadkill porcupine. Although they don’t often make the menu at L’Etoile, the foods had a specific relationship to the culture he lived in, and Kloppenburg grew to tolerate – and even enjoy – the local delicacies. “Any item of food taken individually has a complex and interesting story to tell,” he says. Recognizing that history, he says, is “like the difference between seeing a deer in the zoo and seeing a deer in the forest. You can get more pleasure from eating if you know where the food came from.”

When Kloppenburg came to UW–Madison, he noticed that few classes in the university’s agricultural curriculum taught the holistic value of food. “There weren’t any courses that placed food in the context that we’re most familiar with – that we all eat it,” he says. Five years ago, he launched what is now his most popular class: an epicurean journey called Food, Culture and Society.

The class draws students from majors as diverse as entomology and French. They read selections from Chew magazine, The Art of Eating and The Primal Cheeseburger and debate topics such as the ethical care of animals, the centrality of meat in the American diet and cultural differences in cuisine.

One of the most unique aspects of the course is its final project, an analysis of the commodity chain a given food follows. Students start with two similar food products – say Heinz ketchup and a generic brand – and follow each through its production and processing to when each (presumably) was a tomato. As they trace the chains, they consider differences, such as whether the raw tomatoes are farmed on corporate or family farms, whether they are shipped over great distances, or whether they have chemicals or preservatives added along the way.

Ultimately, students must decide which product they would prefer to consume. “I want them to recognize that their choices might have ethical, environmental and social implications that might lead them to choose one over the other,” says Kloppenburg.

Junior Monique Hoch, one of three students investigating the differences in brands of pasta, says the project has given her new appreciation for the pride and care that goes into the organically grown noodles she chose to study. As a result, she’s made a few shopping trips to local cooperatives and pays more attention to labels. “This class brings a whole new outlook,” Hoch says. “I never really thought about food at all before.”

The class has also brought Hoch and fellow classmates face-to-face with such foreign creatures as kumquats and blood oranges, foods most might never try except for Kloppenburg’s frequent eat-and-tell presentations. “It’s hard for me to try new foods. When I go to restaurants, I usually end up ordering the same things I always get,” says Hoch. “But now I am trying new things, and I’ve ended up liking them.”

Kloppenburg’s own tastes run wide and rare, the result of his travels and a mother willing to experiment in the kitchen. But he can certainly relate to having a favorite meal. At lunch, he rarely wavers from peanut butter-and-apricot-jelly sandwiches with olives and parmesan cheese.

Proof that, at least in some cases, enjoying food still boils down to a matter of individual taste.