Food in American History
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this history course tracing how food production and consumption in the United States became a story of industrialization and globalization. Lectures, readings, and discussions cover slave plantations and factory farm labor, industrial food preservation technologies, the political economy and ecology of global commodity chains, nutritional science debates, food reform movements, famines and surpluses, and the rise of restaurants, supermarkets, fast food, and slow food. The course examines how the American model of food production and consumption spread its influence worldwide. Materials include the full syllabus, reading lists, and lecture materials as used at MIT, free to access with no certificate offered. It suits anyone interested in how eating habits, farming, and food industries shaped and were shaped by broader economic and social change in modern America.