Eating in the Big Apple: A History of Food in New York City
In this course, we will explore the food history of greater New York. Before the first human settlements on and around Manhattan, the region's geography and environment prepared future dietary and consumption patterns. The course begins by studying the significance of the retraction of the Wisconsin ice sheet and the resultant emergence of a rich food-bearing geography. We will look at available information about seasonal human foodways practiced within this region, pre-Contact. After the arrival of Europeans, colonists and generations of later New Yorkers established their own culturally and ecologically-informed foodways. The class will also consider how and why the city's food icons emerged and changed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how new immigrant arrivals contributed to these transformations. These relationships between New York, its people, and food demonstrate how the past can be a guide for ecological sustainability in the present.
Wednesdays, 5:30-7:00 PM
January 10-31
$150 (4 sessions)
Meet your instructor
Annie Hauck
Annie Hauck was formerly a tenured Associate Professor in Food and Nutrition at Brooklyn College and multi-term president of the Association for the Study of Food and Society. Her scholarship is grounded in the ‘food voice’, a term that she coined while doing doctoral research in Polish-American communities in New York City. The ‘food voice’ explores ways that food serves as a channel of communication and avenue of identity for individuals and groups of people. The journal Food, Culture and Society dedicated their inaugural issue to the ‘food voice’ concept in Spring 2004.
Dr. Hauck served as the foodways curator of the 2001 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s New York City program. Her year of ethnographic fieldwork culminated in overseeing eighty presentations of New York life through food over a two week period, live on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.. She is co-editor of Gastropolis: Food & New York City (Columbia University Press, 2009), eighteen chapters about the rich interplay between tradition and change, individual and society, identity and community; immigration, amalgamation, and assimilation in New York through food. Within the collection, she is the author of ‘My Little Town: A Brooklyn Girl’s Food Voice’.
Dr. Hauck is a Registered Dietitian, practicing with individuals and groups of all ages. She has designed and delivered classes to improve nutritional and lifestyle wellness through thoughtful food planning, shopping, budgeting and cooking and her clients include the young dancers of American Ballet Theater.
A Master Composter, Hauck served as Sustainability Curriculum Coordinater at Poly Prep Country Day School. She is the founder of Brooklyn Mompost, an education and solutions service in every day urban green living, gardening and food sustainability. Brooklyn Mompost’s original home base was on the Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, where Hauck practiced the ease and allure of composting, captured in video tutorials found at www.brooklynmompost.com.
She holds a BA from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D in Food Studies from New York University.