Taste: What We Hunger For

This program incorporates Greener Foundations. Greener Foundations is Evergreen’s 2-quarter introductory student success course, which provides all first-year students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive at Evergreen. First year students will get 14-credits from this program, and 2-credits from a Greener Foundations course.

One of three affiliated programs with taste as a central focus, this program explores how what we hunger for as well as what we eat are, to paraphrase Sun Yung Shin, intimacies bound with language. How does human taste--aesthetic and gastronomic-- shape the stories we tell about food as well as what we know about hunger--ours and others? Why for humans must food be ""good to think"" to be ""good to eat""? From weekly tasting labs for articulating our individual taste experiences to making meaning of the inequities of global food systems, our focus will be food stories in the context of the interdisciplinary fields of Food Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Environmental Humanities.

In collaboration with The Olympia Food Coop, The SW WA Food Hub, and The Culinary Breeding Network, this year-long academic program will include skill-oriented workshops, professional guests and conferences, hands-on learning experiences, and independent research as well as internship opportunities. As (post)pandemic circumstances allow, students may choose to learn through doing at the campus Community and Shellfish Gardens and the Flaming Eggplant Café to produce locally grown, waste-minimized, culturally relevant, and flavor-focused food. Students and faculty from across the three Taste programs will come together for once-weekly lectures, films, or workshops, supplemented by short readings to gain a broader sense of how people make choices in their lives to create, consume, and enjoy particular sounds, foods, and elements of material culture.

Taste: What We Hunger For will be a hybrid offering, with weekly two-hour in-person seminar discussions, which will include time for small group and individual advising and program conversations with peers and faculty. In-person learning opportunities also include individual projects and internships through community collaboration, which will be a learning goal for all students by spring quarter and developed within the program. Throughout fall, winter, and spring quarters interested students may participate in the co-curricular Campus Community Gardens project to plan, manage, and experience the taste of student-grown organic produce. Otherwise, expect synchronous, remote instruction requiring stable, high-speed internet and a computer (not a cell phone) for using Canvas, WordPress, and Zoom for 10-12 hours per week of tasting labs, guest lectures, workshops, online reading and hypothes.is annotation, films, and conferences.