Food and Power in the Twentieth Century
MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society offers this course tracing how food has been transformed over the past century through preservation techniques like drying, freezing, canning, and salting, and how those technologies reshaped where people lived, how far they traveled, and their place in the economic order. Food also serves as a lens on broader history: mass production, industrial farming, vertical integration of firms, globalization, labor movements, and the politics of consumption. Readings and discussion move from farm to table, asking what the food industry reveals about capitalism and American culture that other manufactured goods do not. Materials include the syllabus, reading list, and assignments from MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access, with no certificate offered. The course suits students interested in the history of technology, business history, or the social history of consumption rather than food science itself.