Gastronomy

• MET ML 441: Anthropology of Food
  This course introduces students to the anthropological study of food and to the concept of food as a cultural system. In this cross-cultural exploration, we will examine the role of food and drink in ritual, reciprocity and exchange, social display, symbolism, and the construction of identity. Food preferences and taboos will be considered. We will also look at the transformative role of food in the context of culture contact, the relationship between food and ideas of bodily health and body image, food and memory, and the globalization of food as it relates to politics, power, and identity. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Ethical Reasoning, Social Inquiry I, Research and Information Literacy.
  BU Hub Learn More

  • Ethical Reasoning
  • Research and Information Literacy
  • Social Inquiry I
• MET ML 565: Food Marketing
  The course applies the fundamental concepts and tools of marketing and brand management to the food industry, with a particular focus on the burgeoning New England culinary scene. This class will focus on marketing throughout key stages of the food-to-table supply chain, from raw ingredients and processing equipment in early production stages, through immersive culinary experiences targeted to distinct consumer segments. An additional emphasis of the course will be on marketing food products vs. services, and the strategic challenges and strategies that each portion of the food industry requires.
• MET ML 590: Baking Essentials: From Cookies to Cake Decorating
  Learn to identify and prepare a variety of cookie doughs, master both stovetop and baked custards, and create Swiss and French meringues while understanding differences in peak development. The class also covers essential cake-making methods, emphasizing how gluten formation influences texture, as well as basic cake decorating skills such as torting, leveling, crumb coating, and icing. Additional topics include making German and Swiss buttercreams and piping decorative elements, such as borders and roses. By the end of the course, you will gain a strong foundation in preparation methods and the ability to execute a wide range of pastry techniques. Restriction: This course may not be taken in addition to MET ML 698; only one may count towards degree program requirements.
• MET ML 591: Baking Essentials: From Pâte à Choux to Showstoppers
  Learn the science and method behind pâte à choux for items such as profiteroles, éclairs, and churros; master classic pie and tart doughs, including pâte brisée, pâte sucrée, pâte sablée, and pie dough; and develop proficiency with laminated doughs such as blitz puff pastry, traditional puff pastry, and kouign-amann. The class also covers enriched yeast doughs like brioche and babka, as well as breakfast favorites including English muffins and Danish pastries shaped into bear claws, braids, and twists. By combining these techniques, you will gain the skills to create classic pastry showstoppers—from tarte tatin to chocolate Charlotte to delicate macarons—while learning how preparation methods influence texture, flavor, and form. Restriction: This course may not be taken in addition to MET ML 699; only one may count towards degree program requirements.
• MET ML 595: Directed Study
  Students may work with a full-time Boston University faculty member to complete a Directed Study project on a topic relevant to the program. These projects must be arranged with and approved by the Gastronomy program coordinator.
• MET ML 610: Special Topics Food Studies
  This course covers relevant topics in Gastronomy and Food Studies. The topic will vary by semester and course section. Refer to class notes in MyBU for individual course descriptions. Email foodma@bu.edu for more information.
• MET ML 611: Archaeology of Food in Ancient Times
  How people have obtained and processed a wide range of foods through time, beginning with early humans. Food used by hunter/gatherers; changes in diet and nutrition through time to early farmers. Examines archaeological evidence for types of plants and animals exploited for food, as well as human skeletal evidence for ancient nutrition and diseases related to diet and food stress. Consideration of early historical periods, especially in terms of how certain foods such as wine have played a significant role in culture beyond basic dietary needs.
• MET ML 612: Pots and Pans: Material Culture of Food
  Exploration of the food cultures and technologies through material culture- pots, pans, and utensils. Course will range broadly across cultures, time, and space with emphasis on medieval and early modern times. Life histories of humble, overlooked, everyday objects associated with food preparation and consumption; kitchens from prehistory to the present; tradition and fashion in cooking & dining vessels; pots and cooking technology; pots as metaphors & symbols.
• MET ML 613: Debating Diet
  Derived from the Greek word “diaita”, meaning “way of life,” the term “diet” originally referred to the foods and beverages people regularly consumed. Over time, however, it came to be associated with restrictive eating, particularly for weight loss. Diet culture is deeply embedded in Western society, influencing everything from media to nutrition advice. In this course, you will explore the different meanings of "diet" while examining the socio-political impact of diet culture on food systems, eating habits, and moral views about food. You will trace the history of anti-fatness, from its roots in anti-blackness to its influence on modern Western healthcare, and have the opportunity to broaden your understanding of nourishment by exploring food's role in joy, pleasure, comfort, community, and more.
• MET ML 614: Philosophy of Food
  'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.' - Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826). In this course, we will use the tools of the philosopher to study various aspects of food - its classification, preparation, consumption, and judgments about the practices affected by it. The focus in this course will be how philosophers contribute to food studies through engagement with long-standing philosophical questions - not just in aesthetics, moral and political philosophy, but also in metaphysics and epistemology. Topics addressed in the class may include foods as natural (or non-natural) kinds; cultural knowledge, know-how and food traditions; eating and identity; eating, rationality and norms; vegetarianism and moral philosophy; and neuroscience, culture and taste.
• MET ML 615: Reading and Writing the Food Memoir
  What is your food story? If we are what we eat, what foods made you who you are? Was it fruit from a country you no longer live in or a soup your best friend made when you visited him last week? Did it pour out of a box? Get toasted over open flames? And how do you explain its role in your life? Food can be a great connecting theme for a complicated story. In this course we will ask what makes a food memoir different from other kinds of personal writing and we will work on our own unique food memoirs. Food memoir can take lots of forms, including visual narrative, comics, film, podcast, poetry, walking tour, and creative non-fiction. We will study some examples to learn about the form and workshop our memoirs while we write them. We will also spend some time in the kitchen cooking from our projects to find out what we can learn by engaging with the material of food itself.
• MET ML 619: The Science of Food and Cooking
  Cooking is chemistry, and it is the chemistry of food that determines the outcome of culinary undertakings. In this course, basic chemical properties of food are explored in the context of modern and traditional cooking techniques. The impact of molecular changes resulting from preparation, cooking, and storage is the focus of academic inquiry. Illustrative, culturally specific culinary techniques are explored through the lens of food science and the food processing industry. Examination of "chemistry-in- the-pan" and sensory analysis techniques will be the focus of hands-on in- class and assigned cooking labs.
• MET ML 620: Food and Literature
  Food plays many roles in world literature. It helps to set a scene and define a character and sometimes it provides a plot twist. In this class, we explore these many roles, focusing on food in the analysis of literary texts, including novels, poetry, and drama. We will identify how food works in literature, focusing on what we can learn about art, culture and society by focusing on food. We will be reading works from diverse literary traditions to compare how food is portrayed and how it shapes narratives across cultures. Students will have the opportunity for some creative writing as well as critical analysis in this course.
• MET ML 622: History of Food
  History is part of a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to food studies. Knowing where our food comes from chronologically is just as important as knowing where it comes from geographically. Historical forces bring our food to the table and shape the agricultural practices, labor arrangements and cultural constructions that make meals possible. We will read, research, write and cook food history to explore the ways in which the history of food has shaped our world today, paying careful attention to structural inequalities that restrict food access. We will examine ways in which contemporary questions and problems inform historical inquiries and vice versa. Readings and projects in this course will typically focus on one geographic region but as a class we will be taking into account global connections and influences. The course material is organized both chronologically and thematically, with subthemes such as race, urbanization and industrialization. Students will learn about historical methodology and apply it to their own research.
• MET ML 623: Food and Museums
  Students will examine interpretive foodways programs from museums, living history museums, folklore/folklife programs, culinary tourism offerings, "historical" food festivals, and food tours to compare different approaches to public histories of food. Through several case studies, students will examine mission statements, interpretive goals, and different methods of communicating with the public. Guest lectures and field trips lay the groundwork for a final project in which students develop a proposal for an interpretive food history program for an area museum, tour program, or public history program. The course offers opportunities for focused inquiry, hands-on research, and creative thinking.
• MET ML 625: Wild and Foraged Foods
  Humans have been foraging for food since prehistoric times, but the recent interest in wild and foraged foods raises interesting issues about our connection to nature amid the panorama of industrially oriented food systems. From the political economy to Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), this course explores how we interact with, perceive, and know our world through the procurement of food. Students take part in foraging activities and hands-on culinary labs to engage the senses and reflect on the connections between humans, food, and the environment.
• MET ML 626: Food Waste: Scope, Scale, & Signals for Sustainable Change
  Food waste is a hot topic but not a new one. Some wasted food is the sign of a healthy system - if there were exactly enough calories produced to meet each of our needs, there would be mass starvation, riots, and hoarding as we all scrambled to get our share. But by some estimates, food loss and waste account for nearly 40% of the food produced. How much wasted food is too much? At the same time this food is wasted, food insecurity is everywhere, even on BU's campus. Is all wasted food "trash"? Need it be? Why is food wasted and where along the supply chain is it wasted? What are the ethics of donating surplus food/waste/trash of those who have too much to those who don't have enough? This hybrid course explores the history, culture, rhetoric, and practicalities of wasted food, from farm, through fork, to gut (is overeating a form of food waste? What about wasting micronutrients by converting them to ultraprocessed foods?). Each week includes readings, discussion, application activity; and several weeks will include a guest lecture from a food system practitioner. Students will develop practical solutions in a final project.
• MET ML 629: Culture and Cuisine: The African Diaspora
  The foodways of the people displaced from the African continent are interwoven with many societies, cultures, and cuisines across the globe. In this course, we will study five geographic regions of Africa; north, central, east, west and south. The list of the countries that encompass each region will follow. Cookbooks, maps, songs, poems, and even some folklore will be used as texts to analyze and add context to the history of the people of the diaspora. This course will have real, and courageous, and respectful conversations including race and power and how those two elements are embedded into the food systems in North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean and Europe. We will trace ingredients that came with the enslaved people and track their integration into cuisines and cultures (agriculture, pop culture, aquaculture etc.) as a collective group and then independently as a capstone course project.
• MET ML 630: Cookbooks and History
  What can cookbooks and recipes tell us about an individual? A community? A culture? What does the language of the recipe say about systems of knowledge and ways of thinking about the world? The movement of ingredients and food technology? The transmission of cooking knowledge? Does the analysis of historical cookbooks have contemporary applications? In this course, students will consider these questions through a survey of historical cooking texts and in-class exercises. We will examine cookbooks as a source of culinary history and a window into the changing material culture, practices, spaces, and relationships associated with food preparation and consumption. In addition, students will examine cookbooks and recipes as social documents that reveal the presence of social and economic hierarchies, networks and alliances, and political, economic, and religious structures. We will also examine these documents as cultural texts that reveal the construction of ethnic, gendered, and other identities. Students will study and analyze a selection of cookbooks from different historical periods and geographic regions leading to a final project and paper.
• MET ML 631: Culture and Cuisine: France
  The association between France and fine cuisine seems so "natural." French society and history are intertwined with the culinary, and have been since the court society of the Old Regime. After the French Revolution, French cuisine became a truly modern affair in the public sphere. The invention of the restaurant, the practice of gastronomy, a literature of food, and strong links between French cuisine and national identity all came together in the 19th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, French food, featuring both haute cuisine and regional culinary specialties, was widely considered the world's best. In the 20th century, the culinary allure of France continued to fascinate people all over the world. It is still said today, enviously, that the French really know how to appreciate good food and wine "la bonne chère" in their daily lives. This course looks at how the history of French culinary culture evolved in the particular way that it did. The course is organized largely chronologically, but not entirely, as some of the readings weave issues of different times periods thematically. In studying culture and cuisine, with France as a great example, we will explore the relationship between a place, a people, and their foodways. We launch our investigation with the question: how and why is this relationship distinctive in France'