Digesting ourselves and others through a critical pedagogy of food and race

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there have been numerous calls for Geographers working in higher education to put into practice anti-racist pedagogies. Less well-developed is scholarship on the approaches which expand students’ understanding of race and the socio-spatial and material processes of their own racialization. Within the context of food geographies, visceral pedagogies have been useful for advancing student knowledge on the multi-scalar, dynamic and complex systems of power that influence what we eat. Bringing together insight from critical pedagogy, food geographies, and corporeal feminist understandings of race, in this paper I point to the effectiveness of experimental and embodied pedagogies which expand students’ emotional and cognitive learning about the relationship between race and everyday food practices. Drawing from narrative and interview data with primarily white undergraduate students in Colorado, USA, I argue that embodied, critical pedagogies contribute to anti-racist goals by destabilizing whiteness, linking students’ theoretical understandings of race to everyday practice, and building empathy for/with others. Furthermore, I point to the effectiveness of a variety of student reflection formats, from narrative writing, to sharing a meal, to empathetic listening, to argue for greater attention to not only what we teach in anti-racist pedagogy, but how we teach.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• food geographies
• embodiment
• critical pedagogy

I pushed aside thinking about the relationship between food and race, and realized it was due to my own racial identity. I, like many other white people, didn’t consider “white” to be a race.

I think students are more comfortable talking about race when the course unsettles it. The structure in academia is typically “here is the Professor teaching about a topic” and then we repeat this thing we’ve learned. But with this class looking at race and food, especially when the majority of the class is white, it unsettles that structure of academia. When you have everyone doing food activities on a personal level, you have to critically look at yourself and your daily life, and that is immensely important for understanding what race means.

–Narrative reflections from undergraduate students in “Food Geographies” course

Introduction

In response to ongoing racial inequality, exacerbated by convergent political, economic and climate crises, there has been growing pressure for Geographers in higher education to more intentionally and effectively teach about race. While educators are by no means the only point of intervention towards racial justice, a critical pedagogy of race emanating from the classroom can prepare students to be reflexive, active citizens in the struggle against inequality. Yet, for all the calls within Geography for anti-racist teaching and learning, there is less robust scholarship on how to put into practice critical pedagogies of race (Alderman et al., 2021; Esson, 2020; Fritzsche, 2022).

Many challenges confront students and educators while teaching and learning about race and its relationship to socio-spatial processes. For instance, how can Geographers help students understand race and racism beyond its historical roots – as an ongoing set of contemporary and material process that we (unwittingly or not) take part of? Through the lens of critical pedagogies of food and race, this article argues some of the challenges about teaching about race can be surmounted when engaging with embodied, experiential activities and reflections both within and beyond the classroom. Food Geography courses, which examine relationships between people and places regarding food production and consumption, are well-suited to address the diverse, visceral and practical manifestations of race in our everyday embodied lives. By bringing together theoretical scholarship on a critical pedagogy of race, with new materialist approaches to both race and food, this article points to pedagogical interventions and visceral activities which can help students understand, and feel, the influences of race in their daily (food) practices.

As noted above, white students (who comprise a majority of Geography undergraduates in American universities) often struggle to understand the role that whiteness plays in their lives, or resist uncomfortable conversations about navigating privilege (Fritzsche, 2022). Yet Geography, as a discipline interrogating our social and spatial relationships to each other and our environment, can call attention to the material practices that continually shape our identities and unjust racial taxonomies. In particular, visceral interventions that bring out emotional and reflexive responses have been shown to be effective in Geography classrooms by helping students learn emotionally and cognitively about difficult topics (Pierce & Widen, 2017). As practitioners highlight, becoming anti-racist is a process of first awareness and reflection, which enables allyship and action (DiAngelo, 2018; Kendi, 2020). Embodied critical pedagogies of food and race can be a crucial initial step in teaching how race comes to matter in/through our contemporary practices.

In this paper, I first highlight how aims of critical pedagogy align well with teaching and learning about the embodied scales of race and food, though there has been little research as to operationalizing this pedagogy. Then, drawing from qualitative data collected with primarily white American undergraduate “Food Geographies” students, I point to activities that were effective in helping students reflect on, and better understand, the dynamic and material manifestations of race, particularly whiteness. From student narratives, I focus on learning outcomes that destabilized whiteness, demonstrated how an embodied critical pedagogy expanded students’ understanding of race as a phenomenon constantly made/remade through practices, and fostered feelings of shared humanity. Furthermore, I emphasize the utility of different formats of student reflection of course material, from individual and text-based reflection, to empathetic peer listening, to shared sensorial experiences of eating together. Rather than a how-to guide, the student insights are intended to encourage educators to adopt experimental approaches for anti-racist pedagogies suited to their own educational contexts. Finally, this paper builds on Geography scholarship in higher education that emphasizes how visceral interventions can be constructive for unpacking complex and sensitive topics, in this case aligning student learning on race and food with insights from materialist theory.

Literature review

Critical pedagogies of race in geography

Influenced by Paolo Freire’s writings on popular education, Henry Giroux is one of the foundational thinkers elaborating the concept of “critical pedagogy”. Instead of a technical method applied across contexts, critical pedagogy is an approach that “draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire and experience are produced under specific basic conditions of learning and illuminates the role that pedagogy plays … . on the formation of multiple and even contradictory versions of the ‘self’ and its relationship to the larger society” (Giroux, 2020, p. 2). Importantly, critical pedagogy develops students’ reflexivity of their role in society, and their capacity to be responsive to, and accountable for, others (Giroux, 2020).

The goals of critical pedagogy – to help students understand contested meanings, experiences, and themselves in relation to others – lend themselves well to learning about race and processes of racialization (Hooks, 1994) in Geography and beyond. Indeed, critical pedagogy scholarship has been accompanied by growing interest in anti-racist teaching within Geography educational research, especially over the past five years (Alderman et al., 2021; Esson, 2020; Esson & Last, 2020; Fritzsche, 2022; Hinton & Ono-George, 2020). From the backdrop of ongoing racial inequality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the simultaneous attack on critical race theory in education in the United States, urgent calls for intentional and effective anti-racist pedagogies in higher education abound (Flaherty, 2021; Haynes, 2017; Tuitt et al., 2018).

This raises the question, exactly what is intentional and effective in critical pedagogies of race? Scholars point to strategies of dismantling white supremacy from multiple levels: from institutional scales of higher education (Mahtani, 2006) to the classroom level by re-writing the curriculum and paying attention to whose knowledges we center when we teach (Daigle & Sundberg, 2017). Geographers emphasize an anti-racist pedagogy should: 1) make space for often uncomfortable conversations (especially those that challenge the privileges of whiteness and white supremacy), 2) embrace experimental pedagogical interventions, and 3) encourage us to recognize each other’s humanity (Esson & Last, 2020, p. 671).

Precisely how to accomplish these anti-racist goals is an ongoing debate, though some creative interventions within the classroom have focused on the scale of the body as “geography closest in” (Rich, 1986, p. 212). This embodied approach to pedagogy understands the body as both a boundary between self and others, as well as a social and material interface with our environments (Cook & Hemming, 2011), following renewed engagement with bodies, power, and emotions in human geography over the last decades (see Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2013; Longhurst, 1997). A few examples of experimental critical pedagogy of embodied socio-cultural difference show how regional storytelling in higher education can promote anti-racism; authors point to their strategies of collective knowledge-making in the classroom, role-playing activities, and using oral histories and archival research (Alderman et al., 2021). Fluri and Trauger (2011) discuss an exercise in which students come to understand corporeal difference through artificially marking their body as “other” in social simulations around campus (Fluri & Trauger, 2011). Nonetheless, educators have noted that teaching about race can be challenging in how to make abstract notions like race and processes of racialization connect personally with students’ everyday lives (Kishimoto, 2018). They comment that some experiential activities, when approached insensitively or without proper context, may inadvertently reproduce racist beliefs (Alderman et al., 2021). For instance, by asking students to simulate the planning of road trips in a Jim Crow-era American South, students begin to understand the challenges of averting racism in the historical automobile landscape of the Southeast, but often are ill-equipped to connect past racism to contemporary manifestations like everyday racial profiling (Alderman et al., 2021, p. 195) Finally, particularly when teaching white students, it can be difficult to overcome defensiveness or resistance to discussions of white privilege (DiAngelo, 2018). Contemplative approaches, like classroom meditation in Geography courses, may hold potential in overcoming these hurdles (Fritzsche, 2022; Pierce & Widen, 2017), though this scholarship is in its infancy.

Research on anti-racist pedagogies in Geography further emphasizes that there is limited empirical evidence on what makes these critical pedagogies effective. Often “teacher-centered” (Alderman et al., 2021, p. 196), aforementioned scholarship focuses more on the strategies of the teacher, rather than simultaneously assessing pedagogical impact on students. That is, while teachers’ voices are prioritized, it is “also imperative to engage students voices more directly and actively incorporate their stories, responses and anxieties … into an operationalizing of {anti racist} pedagogy” (Alderman et al., 2021, p. 198), a central goal of the present paper.

Race and materiality in food geographies

Geographers examining how race shapes our food systems have focused on a range of topics, from uneven and racialized food access in urban areas (e.g. Alkon & Agyeman, 2011) to the whiteness of American “alternative” food spaces like farmers markets and school gardens (for ex. Guthman, 2008; Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2013; Slocum, 2008). In terms of food production, scholars research the contemporary legacy of Black enslavement and the logics of the plantation food system (McKittrick, 2013), ongoing challenges to land access for BlPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) farmers (Penniman, 2018), and the racialization of farm labor (Mitchell, 2012).

A focus not only on race but also racialization helps us understand “the process through which racial meaning is attached to something that is perceived to be ‘unracial’ or devoid of racial meaning” and how racial inequality is maintained (Gonzalez-Sobrino & Goss, 2019, p. 505). Racialization can move beyond “race” by pointing out the dynamic nature of how social meanings become linked to everyday practices (Murji & Solomos, 2005), including whiteness.¹ However, much of this scholarship on power, discourse, and racial identities in our food systems fails to adequately address the materiality of race and food practices and the dynamic process of racialization (as argued by Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Jones, 2019; Slocum & Saldanha, 2013). Many accounts of race and food still rely on constructionist frameworks where race is understood as a (static) social identity.² Drawing from assemblage theory, corporeal feminism and new materialism, Saldanha challenges us to reontologize race beyond essentialist or performative categories. Instead, he considers how and why race and its taxonomic orderings take place, by positioning race as “a complex assemblage of phenotypes and environments rearranged by colonialism and capitalism … the material and mental division of bodies into groups according to shifting criteria” (Saldanha, 2011 as cited in Slocum & Saldanha, 2013, p. 2). Slocum similarly argues that “race becomes material through the body. Groupings of bodies do things and are ‘done’ to, becoming racialized in the process … bodies are not only inscribed; they actively participate in the material production of themselves and other bodies” through everyday interactions (Slocum, 2008, p. 858). What is helpful about these conceptualizations of race is their emphasis on both structure and agency, how bodies are inscribed but also participate in the production of racial meanings and hierarchies.

If race is an active, material and socio-spatial phenomenon that directs our attention to how bodies group in relationship to events and material circumstances, we confront related political implications: “how is embodied difference conceived without giving ground to natural essences? How does bodily difference result from matter more generally … and what politics follow from these theoretical positions?” (Slocum & Saldanha, 2013, p. 10). Slocum and Saldanha posit that a new corporeal feminism of food and race, far from being an anti-political orientation closing down discussion of the real and uneven impacts of our racialized food system, might help us better how and why racial hierarchies come into place, and what other (more socially and environmental just) biosocial relations could emerge. By directing attention to how race comes to matter (literally and physically) in/through space, a corporeal materialist orientation may address aforementioned challenges that teaching about race seems too abstract, unseen, or irrelevant in everyday interactions, especially in the context of teaching/learning with white students.

Because we literally eat our food environments, there is ripe area for understanding corporeal materialist theory as it applies to our bodies, identities and food practices within Food Geography courses. However, as noted by other anti-racist scholarship, appropriate contextualization and sensitivity are required to ensure students grasp the complexity of embodiment and race. The goals of this paper include identifying how and which tools from a critical pedagogy of food and race can help students understand difference, including dynamic processes of racialization, without falling into the trap of justifying or re/naturalizing embodied difference.

Towards teaching critical geographies of food and race

Within disciplines like Environmental Studies and Geography, there have been an explosion of university-level food courses over the past two decades. While thematically diverse, food courses incorporate elements of the political economy of food, the human-environment implications of our food system, and food culture and foodways (Harner, 2020), though little analysis has been conducted as to what is conveyed through which pedagogical practices.

Flowers and Swan argue that attention to food pedagogies carried out in formal and informal settings is crucial precisely because of is influential role in shaping, defining, and teaching us about our food systems (Flowers & Swan, 2015, p. 2). Furthermore, food pedagogies tend to reproduce moralizing ideas about “right” or “wrong” ways to eat, or “good” or “bad” bodies, grounded in problematic racist and classist assumptions that target BIPOC and low-income people (Flowers & Swan, 2015; Jones, 2019). Finally, what we learn about our food systems can unintentionally reinforce a simplistic understanding of what makes food “healthy” or “sustainable”, thus eschewing analysis of how these terms are defined, and for/by whom.

Therefore, there is growing critique about the racialized pedagogies of food, in particular how Black food is stigmatized and how whiteness is ignored through “universal” middle-class alternative food movements like Slow Food or farmers markets in the US (see Guthman, 2008; Jones, 2019; Slocum, 2011). Fascinating scholarship on the visceral possibilities of embodied public food pedagogy highlights how workshops with Black youth in a farm program counter food binaries by centering pleasure and embodied knowledge (Jones, 2019). Through creative narrative writing prompts about food, Black youth are encouraged to share personal experiences without judgement, perhaps made easier for students because they do not associate their sensorial experiences with African-American (stigmatized) eating (Jones, 2019, p. 915). Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, through their research on school gardens, also point to the visceral, sensory realm as a way to counteract the romanticization of white taste and education, emphasizing that playful experimentation with taste expands the notion of food access beyond structural factors: their methods highlight that students come to understand food access as “much more than economic ability to pay for healthy/alternative foods and geographic proximity … emotions and affective relationships also shape the practices and politics surrounding the procurement of food “ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2013, p. 88). This vein of scholarship has focused on nontraditional settings of visceral anti-racist pedagogy, like the public realm or garden workshops. While such pedagogical spaces and practices deserve attention, especially when they expand our understandings of the race-food nexus, there is ample opportunity to apply insights of critical and embodied food pedagogy to the most traditional of higher educational settings, the university classroom.

My research questions thus ask: how can critical pedagogy guide teachers and learners through the material and embodied aspects of race and our food system? Furthermore, which insights into race and food do students gain from experimental pedagogical interventions on food practices and their material impacts, and how do these ultimately contribute to the goals of a critical pedagogy of race and food? To productively engage in (uncomfortable) visceral learning in the university classroom, Pierce and Widen recommend first scaffolding of course material early in the semester, building trust and rapport with students, and incorporating more challenging and reflective material as the course progresses (Pierce & Widen, 2017, p. 50). Based on a course re-design in which I intentionally incorporate these strategies for a critical pedagogy of food and race, I detail below what and how I taught the “Food Geographies” class to help students understand their own processes of racialization, what students learned, and the challenges that remain.

Study context

Methods

The insights for this paper are grounded in three semesters of teaching a “Food Geographies” upper-level undergraduate course at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU Boulder) in the United States.³ After two semesters teaching the course, I completed an intensive two-month long anti-racist pedagogy course in spring 2021, offered by CU Boulder’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Within the framework of the anti-racist training, I redesigned “Food Geographies” to diversify course material, including experiential activities to examine and critique racialization as a dynamic, socio-spatial and material process.

After the course redesign, I collected qualitative data for one semester on how students’ understandings of race and food shifted in response to my interventions. This research thus centers primarily on the fall of 2021 with data from the 21 students enrolled in “Food Geographies”. The student response data consists of written assignments, which were analyzed after the conclusion of the course with students’ consent, along with my notes about classroom activities and discussions. Assignments about students’ personal experiences with race and food, as part of the course, were assessed on a complete/incomplete basis to encourage students to be honest in their reflections. In addition to student narratives, I conducted follow-up interviews with four students in the two months after the semester ended. These semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed (Kvale, 1996), and asked how students’ understanding of their racial identity and food shifted through the course, what a focus on whiteness added to their understanding, and which pedagogical interventions students found most helpful in their learning process (and why). Both the written assignments, my notes, as well as the transcribed interviews, were analyzed through a content analysis of emergent themes (Weston et al., 2001). I coded themes related to how students communicated about their racial identity, embodiment, and relationship to others. This project was conducted with research ethics approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at CU Boulder under Protocol #21–0381.

At the onset of the semester, students described themselves in a demographic survey. Of the 21 students, 18 self-identified as white, 2 identified as Asian-American, and 1 student identified as Latinx. No students self-identified as Black, mixed race, or native Pacific Islander. Students were primarily aged 20–21, with two slightly older veterans (aged 25). Nine students identified as male, 10 students identified as female, and 2 students identified as gender nonbinary. The racial makeup of the CU Boulder’s undergraduate student body the same year was 67% white, 9% Asian American, 12% Hispanic/Latino, and 2.6% Black (CU Boulder Undergraduate Profile, 2022). Thus, the Food Geographies class is over-represented with white students compared to broader campus demographics, which is not an uncommon concern for undergraduate Geography programs in the US (AAG State of Geography, 2022). Furthermore, the small sample size does not assume a statistically significant nor representative sample of all CU Boulder students, but demographic information provides relevant context for the classroom makeup.

It is important to emphasize that while the course material engaged significantly with feminist Black (food) geographies, along with scholarship on racialization in food production and consumption practices (see course outline in Figure 1 below), the demographic makeup of the class indicates the absence of any Black students. Thus, student engagement with embodied racialization, and learning about non-white food geographies alongside reflecting on their own racialization, occurred in primarily white spaces. While the experiences, insights and the presence of non-white students are of central importance to Black feminist theory, Collins argues that allies in social justice should participate in “advocating, refining and disseminating Black feminist thought” (Collins, 2000, p. 37). As a white female instructor, in a classroom setting with primarily white students, I situate the present anti-racist pedagogy research as allied social justice, acknowledging the important silences and absences that accompany these imperfect efforts. Before detailing the classroom interventions and my research findings, I briefly turn to a few central ways that my positionality impacts my pedagogies of race and food, and how I understand my responsibility towards anti-racist pedagogy as a white instructor.

Figure 1. Food geographies course overview.

My identity and privilege

As feminist, critical pedagogy and anti-racist scholars emphasize, our teaching and research practice emerges through our own locatedness and positionality (Daigle & Sundberg, 2017; Rose, 1997). As a cisgender, white American woman with a PhD, I bring bias and blind spots into my attempts at an anti-racist pedagogy. My identity at the intersection of whiteness and gender in food pedagogy deserves special attention, due to the gendered roles and responsibilities associated with care labor around food and feeding practices, as well as racialized and gendered norms about “healthy” or “acceptable” bodily appearance. For instance, as a slender white woman teaching about food and the body, how students perceive my body in the classroom impacts how students learn, and how they respond to course content (Eaves, 2020). While teaching about the racialized origins of fat bias, critical fat studies (Guthman, 2011), or exclusion in white-coded food spaces, for example, I confront my own limitations of not encountering that lived experience myself. At the same time, through my white racial and (cis)gendered embodiment, some students in the CU Boulder Food Geographies course may see me as similar to their own background, and thus could feel more comfortable disclosing their own life histories.⁴).

The role of a white teacher in higher education and its privileges afford me the responsibility to confront my own white identity and embrace the accompanying discomfort of potential loss of privilege. For white teachers in primarily white spaces, Delaney underlines the need for critical awareness about the role of white privilege and teaching to decenter whiteness as the “universal” position or frame of reference (Delaney, 2002). Outlaw (2021) similarly argues that teaching should illuminate how whiteness becomes an unmarked position, but he maintains that whiteness, and white supremacy, should be studied intentionally and re-centered, as to ensure its power is recognized and challenged (see also Kendi, 2020). As such, in my teaching, I tried to model for my students how I understood my own privilege and position marked by whiteness, and engaged in (often uncomfortable) experimental activities alongside students in which I mapped my own racial identity. A recent study highlights the importance of white instructors critically interrogating their own whiteness, as it aids their ability to identify racism within and beyond the classroom, and tends to lead to faculty challenging unjust power structures that persist in the classroom and higher educational spaces (Haynes, 2017). As my pedagogical interventions aim towards the anti-racist goals of destabilizing whiteness, practicing experimental teaching, and cultivating empathy within the classroom (Esson & Last, 2020), the findings discussed below chart the process of what materials, methods and reflective formats were effective towards teaching students to reflect on their racial identity and its relationship to everyday food practices. They are intended as initial learnings, both for me and for my students, as a point from which to reflect upon, and deepen, effective anti-racist praxis.

Experimental interventions and their results

The revised course curriculum was structured around the political economy of our food practices and the cultural aspects of meaning-making of food within the US. In Figure 1 below, I include an overview of the course curriculum thematically, listing the guiding questions of each unit, related course material, accompanying student assignments or activities, along with the reflection format of the activities. In the findings, I elaborate which material and assignments were successful towards anti-racist goals.

Destabilizing whiteness in/beyond the curriculum

In light of recommendations that an anti-racist pedagogy should destabilize whiteness, especially when white instructors teach in primarily white classrooms, my first goal was to better understand how students perceived their racial identity as it interacts with their everyday lives. Thus, in the first week of the class, students completed a short reflective essay about how their racial identity influenced their food practices. Unsurprisingly, white students expressed that their race did not factor into their daily eating or grocery shopping. After identifying as white, they wrote phrases like: “I don’t think race informs my food practices in any way … .” or “I consider food practices to be mostly a matter of personal choice, not related to my race.” Out of the 18 white students in the class, two students admitted that they benefit from white privilege through food access. They framed the relationship in terms of how whiteness relates to wealth accumulation and thus privileged food purchasing power: “my better access to high quality foods and higher income is linked to the historical advantage of being white,” one student wrote.

In an effort to explicitly address whiteness and the racist epistemology through which “whiteness … serves as the norm against which others come to be viewed as different” (Baldwin, 2012, p. 172), the revised curriculum drew upon material that de-centers white food as the norm and highlights BIPOC agency and non-white contributions to the food system. While scholars encourage curricular reform towards non-white histories (Alderman et al., 2021; Sultana, 2019), it is important stress that this commitment should go beyond “adding” a few pieces on race, but instead focus on different ontologies and epistemologies that challenge white supremacy (Esson and Last, 2020). Thus, in this case, curricular reform of American food systems with a critical eye towards race included re-telling the history of American agriculture from the plantation (Muhammad, 2019)to community supported agriculture in Fanny Lou Farmer’s freedom farms (McCutcheon, 2019) to little-known culinary histories (Netflix, 2021). In addition, while reviewing Reese’s Black Food Geographies (Reese, 2019) to understand food apartheid, students were challenged to think beyond deficit food desert metaphors to examine self-reliance, agency, and community assets of Black communities in Washington DC within the context of racial inequality (Reese, 2019).

Furthermore, I introduced content about the process of racialization in our food system, prompting students to consider the historical, economic and cultural moments (or movements) in which racial meanings become attached to food production and consumption. Thus, students learned, for example, through the New York Times 1619 Project how “Black” as a racial category was codified in relation to plantation agriculture (Muhammad, 2019). They also explored the naturalization of racialized farmworker suffering through Holmes (2013) and farmworker justice movements like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (Rawal, 2014). These course materials helped students expand their cognitive knowledge about how race comes to matter in our capitalist food systems, encouraging conceptualizations of race beyond a static (ahistorical) identity category. To assess learning outcomes, students submitted a film critique of Food Chains, as well as an analytical essay on racial capitalism, and participated in teacher-led classroom discussions. This introductory course material, while presenting new content, was not intended to engage students in specifically personal or visceral ways – perhaps as such, I encountered no instances of outward student defensiveness or resistance to course material. Instead, cognitive-based learning in the first unit successfully developed a scaffold of course themes while strengthening students’ knowledge about race in the American food system.

Subsequently, in our unit on alternative food networks and exclusion, we connected this base of cognitive learning with an out-of-class activity to more directly address personal experiences of whiteness. First, we read McIntosh’s classic article on “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and discussed its insights, but also limitations, of the relationship between identity, race, privilege and space (McIntosh, 1989). I assigned Guthman’s article on farmer’s markets in California, and we analyzed her critique that “alternative” food practices often turn a blind eye to present and historical racialized elements of our food system, creating white spaces where many feel unwelcome (Guthman, 2008). Students then independently visited the Boulder’s farmers market⁵and reflected on the article’s resonance within their local context, specifically paying attention to symbolic, material, and affective elements related to how/if the food space could be coded as white and the degree to which students felt as if they belonged in the farmer’s market space. One student then remarked:

I had assumed that socioeconomic inequities were the primary limiting factor for why people of color did not generally buy at farmers markets, rather than considering how other aspects of alternative food systems (such as the types of food they sell and lifestyle they espouse) may interact differently with non-white bodies. Walking around the market, it was really the first time I noticed how many white people there were, why that might be the case, and I felt my whiteness, too.

Another student commented that learning about food and whiteness helped him understand the nuances, and complexity, of our racial identities as an ongoing practice:

It’s often like white people think about race related only to historic discrimination, like it’s already happened. When you do learn about race, it’s only as if race means people of color, so this is the first class we’ve actively discussed whiteness. By investigating whiteness, unpacking it, it also helps me break down the idea that race is so separate somehow or a single monolith, that you know, like here’s this one Black Food Culture over here and White Food Culture, and they are so separate.

McKittrick discusses that sociospatial past racial relationships are reconfigured and reproduced through a “historical present” (McKittrik, 2006), similar to the students’ reflection above that race is not only “related to historic discrimination”.

Critical food scholar Breeze Harper emphasizes the links between whiteness and exclusion, as systems of white supremacy are intertwined with intersectional exclusion surrounding other identity markers – such as economic class, gender, sexuality, religion, or ability (Harper, 2016). Students listened to a podcast interview on “Whiteness” with Harper, which for many was helpful in understanding how whiteness relates not just to personal experiences, but also intersectional systemic inequalities driving redlining, food apartheid, poverty and inadequate healthcare (Harper, 2016). One student, referring to the podcast and her farmer’s market visit in her essay, narrated the exclusion she experienced at the intersection of upper-class white food spaces and economic precarity:

Although I might not be excluded from whiteness based on phenotype, I am excluded in some ways because of class and a feeling that I don’t belong. When I was growing up, my family was food insecure and used SNAP [federal food assistance], and even as a child I was conscious of the idea that certain food practices “weren’t for me,” since they were too expensive and too time-consuming for my single working mother to prepare. As a result, I still feel that I don’t belong in Boulder’s vegan food movement, local food movement, or the organic and Fair Trade movements, although it was difficult for me to identify why I felt this way prior to this class. Exploring the farmers market helped me connect Harper’s podcast with my own experience—whiteness as a system is much more than just one person’s race, and it impacts so many different aspects of American society.

Interestingly, for non-white students who had often thought about race and daily food practices, they expressed the value for them in critically examining whiteness as a set of discourses, practices and institutions. An Asian-American student wrote:

Understanding the role of unmarked whiteness, particularly related to prescriptive food practices, further shows the importance of topicalizing race in order to make food justice spaces more inclusive. It also suggests how other default, normative identities define spaces without our realizing it. While much research on equity tends to focus on studying marginalized, othered, and oppressed experiences, we have much to learn by understanding the ways in which dominant identities assert themselves and maintain power. Doing so pushes us to consider dismantling these systems altogether rather than simply elevating the position of non-dominant identities within these systems, allowing us to envision more truly just futures.

It was the insight from class material in conjunction with an experiential activity that helped students understand something contemporary makings of race, the role of intersectional difference, as well as how whiteness in food systems serves as a form of exclusion related to, but also beyond, an individual’s phenotype. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the personal and vulnerable reflections above emerged from reflective writing about the experiential activity – but for my instructor eyes only. My sense is that the format of sharing responses directly with the instructor, as opposed to broadcasting them verbally for the whole class, permitted many students a degree of vulnerability when discussing their reflections on race. How students came to develop empathy with others in the class, during the unit on hunger, food access and racial privilege, became more evident in our experiential food challenge and empathetic peer listening described below.

Eating our way to embodied privileges

While the previous findings detail interventions which helped students begin to move past white universalism, the degree to which embodied pedagogy can illuminate the corporeal materiality of our socio-cultural identities was foregrounded through an out-of-class food consumption challenge.

During our unit on uneven food access, hunger, and US federal funding for food assistance programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as “food stamps”), students read about emergency food assistance programs and racial dynamics of “feeding the Other” (De Souza, 2019), as well as gained insight into the local context of hunger through a guest speaker from a Boulder food rescue nonprofit. Then, students were asked to participate in the “$4.20/day” SNAP challenge. This challenge, modeled after various state-wide anti-hunger campaigns, asks participants to limit their daily food expenditures to $4.20, the average amount of federal nutrition assistance a SNAP recipient received in 2021 (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2022). While food insecurity impacts one in five Americans, Black households and Latinx households both experience food insecurity at twice the rate of white households (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2022). Thus, while some white students initially mentioned during the first week of the class that white privilege affected their food practices, this activity was designed to help them reflect critically on material impacts of socio-economic and racial privilege, and had mixed results.

Throughout this day-long challenge, students kept a journal detailing their visceral feelings, energy levels and overall insights, along with what they bought and consumed.⁶ Based on the narrative writing, as well as in-class empathetic peer listening activity students shared their reflections about uneven food access and how embodied impacts vary. For instance, several students wrote how the $4.20/day challenge resulted in lower energy levels, difficulty concentrating on schoolwork, and frequent irritability throughout the day. Students who considered themselves physically active noted that it felt difficult to eat in a nourishing, fulfilling way within the limited budget. A few students demonstrated empathy by beginning to wonder how other aspect of embodied difference, like for pregnant or breastfeeding women, or people engaged in manual labor, or children at key developmental growth phases, leads to people having different caloric needs depending on who they are, and what they do.

At the same time, the overwhelming response from students was the limitations of this activity in simulating persistent food insecurity. One student stated:

This was not a realistic activity. I only had to think through the short-term consequences of eating just ramen (instant noodles), it wasn’t like eating less nutritionally for a day would have long-term impacts on my health. Sure, I could be grumpy, but then I knew it would be over.

Other students reflected on how the privilege of time, background and/or prior knowledge made the activity “easier”:

Look, I had the time to shop around and compare prices, think through a menu for those two days. It was a “challenge” but not a constant sense of stress, like if you really have to worry about your food budget all the time.

A female white student, whose parents were college professors, mentioned how she learned healthy cooking through her household norms, as well as her later experience living in a cooperative housing arrangement. This background made the activity more comfortable for her than it would be for others, as she writes below:

I grew up eating vegetarian and we had lots of beans, lentils and everything, but since I grew up eating that and associate it with comfort food, it’s what I eat now, which is pretty cheap. For me, shopping on $4.20 meant just some vegetables to round it out. I also cheated a little bit with the shopping because I already had bulk food items from my co-op. I deducted the estimated cost of my portion, which is probably cheaper than if I had to go shopping again. But if I really think about it, if you are low income, how easy is it for you to buy in bulk, pay for it and carry it home, especially if you are busy with work or taking care of children?

Only one white gender nonbinary student explicitly mentioned whiteness as a form of privilege during the challenge. They used part of their food budget to buy food from McDonalds.⁷ During the checkout, they mentioned that the male cashier added “a little somethin’ extra,” a free side of fries. They wrote, “I don’t know why or how I got the fries, but I’m guessing me appearing like a white girl had something to do with it.”

For our in-class conversation after the SNAP challenge, I structured the class into two concentric circles for an empathetic peer listening activity. In this setting, I read students a prompt related to their experience of the challenge, and asked only the students in the inner concentric circle to share with their partner. The listening partner was not to respond, but only listen to their classmate thinking through, and reliving, aspects of the challenge for two minutes. After each question, we rotated the listening/sharing partners so that students were exposed to listening/sharing empathetically with various classmates. I participated in the peer listening circles, as well. After several rounds, I facilitated a more general class discussion about student takeaways from the SNAP challenge. The structure of the empathetic peer listening format was extremely effective at encouraging student sharing and growing empathy. I was struck by the concentrated efforts of the listening students, as well as the deeply personal nature of the stories students shared with me when we were face-to-face. Afterwards, I observed several students, who had not previously interacted during class, make plans to continue their conversation over coffee.The goal of the $4.20/day SNAP challenge, to have students reflect on the contemporary and material ways that advantages/disadvantages of our racialized food system manifest in our bodies, was recognized by most students as linked to education level, privilege of time and resources, but also, for a few students, to being white. Using our bodies to understand “access”, as inspired by Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2013), helped students’ think through and feel dimensions of food access beyond economic ability, as intricately connected to food histories and the emotional relationships surrounding food. The last aim of a critical pedagogy of food and race, recognizing our shared humanity, emerged partially through the empathetic peer listening exercise described above. To further develop empathy through emotional, cognitive and sensorial realms, we participated in a final cookbook and potluck activity.

Breaking bread, sharing stories: a class cookbook towards empathy

The third common goal of a critical, anti-racist pedagogy is that students and educators cultivate empathy and recognize others’ humanity. In our module on foodways, “ethnic” cooking and meaning-making through food, students (and myself as the educator) shared a recipe of personal significance, along with a short essay about the role of that dish for their food identity. With student permission, the recipes and accompanying essays were compiled into one class cookbook which was distributed to all students. We also cooked our food dishes for the class, briefly presented a verbal food history of how/why the food was significant for us, and then shared a potluck meal. Students overwhelmingly enjoyed the exercise as it built trust and connection, especially important after a year of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Although having a potluck isn’t a common practice in an academic setting, I think maybe it should be. Sharing food with someone has always made me feel closer to them, and I think a sense of closeness would be helpful in most settings where people work together. However, in an academic setting specifically, I think sharing food as a trust-building exercise leads to better class discussions and engagement; I certainly feel more comfortable sharing my opinions and ideas in my classes if I feel a sense of closeness with my classmates.

Cooking for other people can be a vulnerable or somewhat intimate experience, and so I feel that we all got to connect on a more personal level.

Most students chose a food that had meaning for their racial and ethnic identity, as we had spent class time discussing the slipperiness of “ethnic” cuisine (through Heldke, 2001). White students primarily prepared food from their European ancestors (e.g. German, Polish, Scottish), and a common thread in their accompanying stories was how foods marked outsider/insider boundaries. For instance, one student with German grandparents wrote about how “stinky” her school lunches were, and how other grade school classmates poked fun at her sauerkraut.

Another student with Japanese and Korean roots, made similar comments about peer disgust when she unpacked her fermented cabbage dish, kimchi, at lunchtime. At end of course evaluations, students unanimously rated our class potluck and cookbook their favorite activity, and the actual potluck of chatting with each other, while tasting these different dishes, created an environment where students got to glimpse each other in a less critical, less analytical format than is typical for undergraduate classrooms. The potluck not only helped develop empathy and build community, but also produced interesting student reflections about how/what aspects of our identity we eat, when we share food:

It’s easy to get caught up in all of the bigger structural issues with our food system, but it’s important not to lose sight of what food means at the personal level. From our class potluck, I saw how much everyone valued the opportunity to showcase a food that made them feel comforted or excited and explain how it related to their family heritage. There is a reason a certain smell or taste can bring back a memory: we are so linked to the food we eat because of its sensorial aspects … by sharing meals with others from different backgrounds, we can learn from each other, about belonging and exclusion, in a different way than just reading and discussing.

In addition, after the potluck activity, students were asked to read the compiled class cookbook and respond to the following prompt: “what did the potluck and cookbook activities change about the way you understand the relationship between food and your identity? Why?” The goal of such an assessment tool was to facilitate student contemplation, asking them to reflect on their own recipes as well as consider the interconnection with/to others developed both in the cookbook and potluck activity. One white student discussed how through preparing and eating food together, she started to better understand food as a social and material, dynamic force that relates what we eat to our (racial) identities:

I was forced to delve deeper into the relationship with food and identity as a result of this assignment. I had seen this relationship to be static prior to this assignment, thinking that food simply reflected demographic aspects of our identities, like race, ethnicity and class. While we often discuss the ways cuisine ties into larger structural forces and systemic issues, and this is important to recognize, I had neglected to consider the nuanced emotional ties that people share with certain foods to the same degree. Thus, this is what I learned from my own and my classmates’ experiences … it complicated my understanding of the various ways that food and identity intersect, as well as opened my eyes to types of effects this had on my peers.

While critically unpacking the notion of whiteness was a key component of the class, not all students in the course identified as white. One Asian-American female student was especially contemplative about the role of food and its material impacts on her identity:

I have thought a lot about my personal identity, race, and food. For me, food has been the primary way I connect to my heritage cultures, since I don’t speak either Japanese or Korean, and it’s certainly the most accessible way to stay connected without living near large Asian American communities. While I had thought about race in relation to food access, particularly through narratives about food deserts, class, and geography, I certainly compartmentalized the cultural aspects of race and food from more economic and political aspects of race and food. From this course, I have learned the importance of mending these frameworks of thinking, recognizing the importance of structural aspects of the food system in influencing cultural understandings of food, and how cultural understandings of food can also impact access and nutrition. To be honest, all of this impacts how food tastes, or feels, when I eat it, and when we eat food with each other.

This student’s comments demonstrate the role of food in making her feel part of her heritage cultures, as well as how the cultural, structural and material aspects of food (taste) come to matter when we share food.

Discussion

Through diverse pedagogical interventions, from curricular redesign to linking course material to out-of-class, experiential activities, like a farmer’s market visit, food access challenge, or class cookbook, students’ self-assessments of their learning align well with goals of critical, anti-racist pedagogy of food. They were able to better understand whiteness, including their personal relationship to systems of white supremacy and privilege, through exposure to critical scholarship on race and racialization in food systems, and experimental interventions. By sharing personal stories of their food histories and racial identities, students developed curiosity and empathy for one another, which helped them understand race and processes of racialization in space beyond abstract or purely theoretical analysis.

In terms of engaging with material, more-than-representational aspects of race, students expanded their familiarity of theoretical concepts related to the nonessentialism of race, and the multiplicity of white (and non-white) identities. This complexity became clear, for instance, through an intersectional analysis of inclusion/exclusion at the farmer’s market, or the similarities they noted between foods coded as “ethnic”. Drawing inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s multiple ontological orientations to race, Saldanha suggests that“the molecularisation of race would consist in its breaking up into a thousand tiny races. It is from here that cosmopolitanism should start: the pleasure, curiosity, and concern in encountering a multiplicity of corporeal fragments outside of common-sense taxonomies“ (Saldanha, 2011, p. 21). Sensorial and practice-oriented activities around food sparked curiosity, concern, and an analysis of the multiplicity Saldanha describes. Furthermore, combining the experiential activities with first a conceptual grounding of the makings of race in our food system (i.e. Harper, 2016; Holmes, 2013; Muhammad, 2019) provided important context within which students came to understand their own racialization, including the overlapping experiences of feeling “othered” through stinky food at the potluck, for example. This finding resonates with other visceral scholarship which highlights the effectiveness of linking cognitive and emotional learning in the classroom (Pierce & Widen, 2017).

However, the cosmopolitanism of thinking through race as mobile and dynamic has an important caveat: “cosmpolitanism without critique and intervention remains complacent with its own comfortably mobile position. In a word, ethics encompasses politics, and politics starts with convincing people of race’s materiality” (Saldanha, 2016, p. 22). That is, reontologizing race to understand its social-material and cultural composition means it is precisely crucial to interrogate how and why race continues to matter. Universalism and colorblindness are the opposite, as they assume that race never comes to matter because people’s experiences and processes of racialization do not matter. Instead, a pluralist ontological understanding of race keeps the “focus on embodied, social interaction, in which an ethics of responsibility follows” (2016, p. 22). Where a critical pedagogy of food and race was effective for students is when students were able to analyze how race and processes of racialization emerge not only through historical processes, but also through daily, embodied social interaction. At the beginning of the course, students generally failed to recognize themselves as white, or see the role that their racial identity played in daily food practices. Through course readings, podcasts and the subsequent visit to the Boulder Farmer’s Market, they started to notice “feeling white”, reflecting on how their presence contributes to an affluent white coded space which may be unwelcoming to some along racial and socio-economic class divisions. The moments of discomfort, when considering how white privileges relate to others’ exclusion, ideally can provide students with the imperative that they can and should feel compelled to, work towards different anti-racist relationships with others. Interestingly enough, an Asian-American student also articulated the value for her in re-centering whiteness to better understand, and dismantle, its power in systems of oppression.

A key goal of the class was to operationalize pedagogy that helps students define themselves, within a racialized world in formation, and understand the “role of spatialities in the maintenance of structures of domination, subordination and inequality, and how these are experienced in body and being” (Delaney, 2002, p. 10). To accomplish this in practice, the course was structured to first scaffold course material through diverse curricular materials of race and space, before asking students to engage in more vulnerable, body-centered and experiential activities later on in the semester (following Pierce & Widen, 2017).

I also experimented with diverse student reflection formats, with mixed results. On the one hand, reflective (ungraded) writing assignments on experiential activities allowed students to share perhaps more openly than they would in front of their classmates. In addition, because I assigned the writings before classroom discussion, I observed only rare instances of defiant white defensiveness during class time, as students who completed out-of-class activities and reflections beforehand perhaps brought this contemplation and insight into the class setting. The empathetic peer listening activity also broadened student participation in verbal formats and built trust through vulnerability in the classroom. However, in these formats students were often interacting directly with me (through writing assignments) or in one-on-one conversation with a peer (empathetic listening). Furthermore, while non-white students had insightful written comments about class material, I did not explicitly bring their reflections back into group discussion, as to protect their anonymity. However, this was also a shortcoming in class learning, as personal experiences of the racialization of non-white students did not figure prominently into group discussion, nor in the curriculum. In future iterations of the course, I would deepen the focus on racialization to move beyond Black/white binaries of race, and would try to explicitly center intersectional analyses of the race-body-space nexus in formation.

Discomfort and extended silences did occasionally accompany our classroom ambience, for instance, as I modeled vulnerability by sharing my own personal history of utilizing SNAP benefits and the stigma I experienced. These emotionally uncomfortable aspects and personal disclosure challenged traditional classroom dynamics in that I tried to situate myself as a fellow learner, and students often did not know how to react. At the same time, uncomfortable feelings often accompany anti-oppressive pedagogy as worldviews and power dynamics are challenged (Fritzsche, 2022). Moving forward, I would be interested in further developing the socio-emotional aspects of my teaching toolkit, perhaps putting into practice contemplative strategies to work through emotionally-charged class sessions, as described by Fritzsche (2022)

Finally, the results presented here are limited by the small sample size and data analysis of one course. Evaluating a course sequence within an undergraduate curriculum, and coordinating between educators to ensure a commitment to anti-racist goals, would certainly strengthen students understanding of race and Geography, as well as help educators better analyze what works well when operationalizing critical pedagogies of race. I am also unsure of the longer-term impact of the course on students, as my data was collected during the course and subsequent two months. Longitudinal studies would contribute important insight as to pedagogical impact for students’ future development. In terms of the activities presented, critical pedagogies emphasize the importance of context, so teaching and learning about race and food as a white instructor with primarily white students in Colorado undeniably shaped which strategies were effective. The specific experimental and embodied activities helpful to connecting social and material understandings of race should thus emerge from the site, depending on who is in the classroom and what they bring. Important questions thus remain as to what experimental pedagogies of food, race, and embodiment would look like with different socio-economic and racial makeup of classrooms, or in different universities in different national contexts.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that as food and race are both experienced through the body, critical pedagogies in Geography should situate the relationship between our identities and food as emergent, relational, and as material phenomena that arises through specific assemblages. Through curricular changes and experimental food experiences, (white) students’ understanding of race and racialization expanded to locate the role of race in their personal spheres, as influenced by structure and agency and the role of white privilege. At the same time, through examining the multiplicity of “white” and “Black” food geographies, they also started to take into account the intersectional and infinitely plural ways that race manifests, though much room remains for further curricular development. It is my hope that students leave the course with the desire to work towards anti-racist futures; while empathy and awareness are important building blocks for anti-racist work, they must be accompanied by action and allyship with BIPOC leaders and movements for meaningful societal change.

Anti-racist pedagogy in Geography is a reoccurring theme, though assessing undergraduate student learning outcomes has lagged behind. By centering student voices, this paper brings forth interventions that effectively destabilize white universalism, build empathy, and expand students’ understandings of race’s materiality in their everyday lives. Furthermore, I encourage educators to be experimental in curriculum, assignments and assessment formats, even within constraints of a more traditional classroom setting, and to take advantages of resources on campus and toward an anti-racist pedagogy. As Giroux reminds us, critical pedagogies of race cannot follow a simple script, and should adapt to course content, students, setting, and the instructor (Giroux, 2020). While Food Geographies courses can provide ample opportunity for critical pedagogies of race, other courses related to socio-cultural difference and everyday experiences of the city, housing, labor or migration could also apply insights from this research. An important challenge for Geographers is to think through connecting theoretical and conceptual learning goals to student experience. In this case, the aims of critical food geographies and race align well with students’ understandings of corporeal feminist understandings of how our socio-economic and racial identities emerge.

As Kendi reminds us, “The opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist’. It is ‘anti-racist.’ … one either allows racial inequalities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist” (Kendi, 2019, p. 9). Geographers need to adopt an active stance towards anti-racist goals in the roles we play as educators, faculty and community members. Towards this end, experimenting with diverse ways to put into a praxis anti-racist teaching in Geography classrooms, and assessing its effectiveness for student learning, is one avenue through which we can, and should, expand pedagogical scholarship.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank CU Boulder’s Center for Teaching and Learning for the supportive environment to both learn about and operationalize anti-racist pedagogies. The anonymous reviewers of this manuscript also contributed insightful and valuable feedback which greatly improved the quality of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank my “Food Geographies” students for sharing so openly with me, and for challenging me to become a better educator.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author acknowledges financial support from the University of Graz for Open Access publishing.

Notes

1. While in this paper I often focus on how white identity is seen/unseen in relationship to Black geographies of food, contemporary scholarship on racialization argues we need to explore mechanisms of racialization beyond the black-white binary (Gonzalez-Sobrino & Goss, 2019). A few of my pedagogical interventions attempt to move beyond the black-white binary through course material and activities related to Latinx and Asian-American racialization, but this complexity remains underdeveloped in the curriculum I discuss here.

2. For example, geographers have contributed to food desert scholarship by mapping the presence or absence of supermarkets and linking this analysis to data on race and income to “explain” health disparities. Yet, food desert maps fail to provide insight as to the variety of factors which have contributed to the emergence of food deserts, including historical and contemporary processes of supermarket investment, redlining or urban displacement (Jossart-Marcelli, 2022, p. 17). Furthermore, such static understandings of race and health also fail to capture the diversity of food practices within communities (Reese, 2019). Nonetheless, this vein of food and race analysis has been very influential in health and urban policy circles.

3. The data collection occurred while teaching and working in Boulder, Colorado, though data analysis and paper writing took place at the author’s current institution, University of Graz, Austria.

4. While here I highlight some potential ways my embodied identity could shape classroom learning, the focus of the paper is intended to center student assessments of their own learning.

5. Boulder is a small city of 100,000 people in the heart of Colorado, notorious for its high quality of life, environmentalism, and affluent white community inextricably linked to the socio-spatial geography of the city (Hickcox, 2007). While recent efforts have attempt to make the market more socio-economically accessible, the downtown farmer’s market is often understood as expensive and exclusive (Haas, 2016).

6. For this activity, students were only asked to complete the challenge for one day, limiting its approximation to a “real world” scenario. The anti-hunger campaigns ask participants to commit to one week of living on a SNAP budget.

7. Technically, SNAP benefits can only be used for grocery purchases, not for prepared food from restaurants.