Interface: Christine Barbour

A political-science instructor turns her passion for food into an innovative course on what America eats—and how that fare gets to the table.

By Christine LaFave, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 3/15/2008

Indiana University-Bloomington instructor Christine Barbour knows that some of the students who enroll in her Food & Politics course do so because they’ve heard she’ll cook for them at the end of the semester. This matters little to the senior political-science lecturer, food writer and co-founder of a local Slow Food chapter, who aims in 16 weeks of sociology studies, political analysis and farmers-market field trips to give students more than enough food for thought.

Q. What inspired your interest in the connection between food and politics?

A. I’ve just always loved food. More than a fuel, more than get up and go, have a breakfast, I love to eat and I love to think about food. And I love to read about food.

I kind of thought being a vegetarian and being interested in food was being a good person, and then I started to read about Slow Food, and I started to read about the sources of foods. I was really interested in the idea that we should preserve our food traditions and that we should buy food locally.

I’ve always been a farmers-market shopper. I got fascinated by the idea that you could eat well locally, or that if you were going to eat some other food, if you were going to eat Parmesan cheese, get it from Italy. Get it from the people who really made it the original way of making it, and get food from the source. I can’t tell you what resonated with me about that. I just was charmed by it. It seemed like, "This is the way it’s supposed to be."

Q. What was the genesis for the Food & Politics course?

A. I started writing about food and was interested in food, and meanwhile I’m a political scientist and I’m a political junkie and I’ve written a textbook on American politics and I teach these big classes. And my husband looked at me one day and said, "Don’t be stupid—put these together; you could teach a food and politics class." Once he said it, I just lit up, because the way we teach American government in the textbook is that politics is about who gets what and how they get it. And food is the ultimate thing we’re all after.

Q. How do you structure the class?

A. We start out the class by talking about food identity, and they’re not used to thinking about that as political, that politics in fact can mean something more than who’s running for president. It can mean who has power in a family, who has the power in a community, who has the power to sort of control what traditions people have.

We read some stuff from a sociology reader. [The students] do food trees, and they interview their families [about family recipes and food traditions]. Most of them haven’t bothered to ask, you know, "Where did this food that we eat come from?" And then we move from that to Marion Nestle’s "Food Politics." That’s a revelation, because these kids aren’t political scientists—they’re all kinds of majors. They don’t know how lobbying works.

Then we read "Fast Food Nation," and that grosses them out. And then we read Michael Pollan’s "The Omnivore’s Dilemma." At this point they’re just sitting there saying, "I can’t believe I eat this stuff, but I don’t want to stop eating it."

Q. What have you discovered about your students?

A. My students come into the class and they’re just all over the place. Lots of them haven’t got a clue how to cook something. Or they don’t know how to go to the market and shop. They don’t know how to go to a farmers market. They don’t know what the choices are.

I take a group of kids to the Bloomington Farmers Market [as part of the class]. Dave Tallent [executive chef and co-owner of Restaurant Tallent] has for the last couple of years taken students around the market shopping, and he’ll talk to them and he’ll tell them, "Go buy a tomato; this is what you’re looking for in a tomato." You know, "Here’s the grass-fed-beef producer; he’s going to tell us why we should want grass-fed beef as opposed to grain-fed beef."

And then we bring everything back to the restaurant. He lets these kids have the run of the kitchen, and he helps them, and they cook an amazing lunch. And they’re so excited.

We have this sort of narrow idea of what academics is all about, but that’s part of a liberal-arts education, and it’s certainly part of "news you can use" in terms of something you can carry with you.