For your final assignment, please take a look back at the different ways we have engaged with thinking about “food and the city” over this semester, including questions of space, relationships, consumerism, marketing, governance, and ethics. Building on all these arguments and materials, we now ask that you engage in productive thinking around the food city dynamic.
Your essay should be around 1,500 words; the maximum word count for this assignment is 2,000 words. Alternatively, you can make a short movie, podcast, or slide show covering the points below. If you choose one of these options, you must accompany it with a 500-word essay.
Pick a specific topic related to food and the city that we have discussed in class, food tourism, school lunches, food justice organizations, etc. OR you can choose a topic we did not cover such as food in museums, pop-up restaurants, food media etc.
State why this topic matters in general and then why it is interesting to you. What are some key issues related to this topic? What works? What is amazing? What is challenging? What is special in terms of the urban environment? You don’t have to solve any big issues here – that can take decades! – but rather we want to see how you understand and engage with this specific food-city dynamic.
You should bring in discussion points from at least two of the readings from the course. The readings can be from any module. Even if you pick a topic that was not covered in class, you need to relate it to two readings from the course. I am interested in what connections you can make, and I want to see that you are thinking deeply about the topic you chose.
What I don’t want to see: Generic answers that could be generated by AI. And trust me, I know what these look like!
What I do want to see: Your analysis. Your creativity! Your voice! What YOU think! How do you see or think about food and the city now that is different from fifteen weeks ago? What have you personally learned from the course? What will you take away from having taken part in this learning experience? You are now a food-city dynamic aficionado—let me see how what you’ve learned has impacted how YOU think about food and cities and what that landscape can/could/should look like. 
reading lists for this course:
Anderson, E.N. 2014. “Food as Pleasure” in Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. 2nd Edition. New York University Press, pp. 137 – 153.
Fabio Parasecoli. 2019. Food. MIT Press, pp. 1-24.
Michelle Zauner. “Crying in H-Mart” In The New Yorker. August 20, 2018
Marcel Mauss. 1973 (1935). “Techniques of the Body.” In Economy and Society 2(1): 70–85
Stuart Freedman. 2023. “Resistances from a Stubborn Past: London’s Fading Eel, Pie, and Mash Shops.” Gastronomica, 23:2, 17 – 27. (read through p22, stopping at “A regime of Disgust” header.)
Lidia Marte. 2007. “Foodmaps: Tracing Boundaries of ‘Home’ Through Food Relations.” Food and Foodways, 15:3-4, 261-289.
Supplementary Reading: Eve M. Tai. 2008. “Roadtrip to Chinatown.” Gastronomica Summer 2008: 22-25.
Krishnendu Ray. “Street-food, class, and memories of masculinity: an exploratory essay in three acts,” Food, Culture & Society, 21:1.
Lemon, Robert. Introduction, “Engaging Taco Truck Space” The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food is Transforming the American City. University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Cate Irvin. “Constructing Hybridized Authenticities in the Gourmet Food Truck Scene,” Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp. 43–62
Emily Contois and Zenia Kish, eds. “From Seed to Feed: How Food Instagram Changed What and Why We Eat,” Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation.
Schneider, Tanja & Eli, Karin. (2021). Fieldwork in online foodscapes: How to bring an ethnographic approach to studies of digital food and digital eating.
Fabio Parasecoli. 2014. “Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities.” Social Research 81 (2): 417-442.
Marie Sarita Gaytán. 2008. “From Sombreros to Sincronizadas: Authenticity, Ethnicity and the Mexican Restaurant industry.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 37(3): 314-341
Stefanos Chen. 2024. What’s Behind This $10 Chicken Over Rice? An $18,000 Permit. New York Times
Cristina Calvo-Porral, Jean-Pierre Lévy-Mangin. 2018. From “foodies” to “cherry-pickers”: A clustered-based segmentation of specialty food retail customers. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Volume 43, Pages 278-28.
Fabio Parasecoli. 2017. Knowing Where it Comes From. “Introduction” (1-21) Iowa City: Iowa University Press.
write the 2000 words essay. read the instructions carefully, and write the essay something about Korean food culture
remember that you need to bring in discussion points from at least two of the readings from the course.
what is the topic of this essay?
what are some key issues related to this topic?
what is the discussion points?
These points need to included to the essay and these have to be answered very clearly in the essay. essay should not be generic and vague
The attached file is the full essay from chatgpt4 so that it is full of AI written things. What I need is the final essay that does not include AI-looking things. Paraphrase this essay into human words. (as if student itself wrote on their own)
write it very clearly and do not use too difficult vocabs or expressions since I am not a native English speaker.
This essay needs to be over 1500 words.
what is the topic of this essay?
what are some key issues related to this topic?
what is the discussion points? also, these points need to included to the essay and these have to be answered very clearly. please read this essay written by AI and edit + paraphrase it and make it a full final essay.