Audrey Richards, the great British anthropologist, once pointed out that the need to eat is the most basic and important of all human drives. We need food more frequently and more urgently than we need sex. The central place of food in our lives has made food one of the major foci of human existence. How we grow, process, distribute, and consume our food often defines us as a society. In our society, the food system has become the target of enormous critique in the last ten years, and also enormous innovation. How does what we eat define us? What does it mean to eat food made in factories and advertised on television, or to seek out "fresh," local or organic food? How do we use food to define ourselves as men and women, as Americans or punks, or Chinese, as children or adults? What does it mean to eat too much, or too little, and how does it define us as social beings? These are the key questions we'll be asking in this course. This course approaches food from two perspectives. The first is the political economy of food. We will look at food as a commodity, and study where it comes from, how it connects members of different societies and social groups as it travels along the commodity chain, and how it creates social and geopolitical inequalities. We will also study food as culture, including the symbolic meanings of different foods in various world cultures, the role of food in defining gender, national identity, and social class. We'll look at food, memory and place, the relationship between food spaces and gender/race, and the role of food in transnational culture.

See the  for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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"Encompassing South American wildfires, Arctic sea-ice retreat, post-Soviet politics, climate change in Tibet and GIS, ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ geographers keep their fingers on the pulse of a changing world"

A new article titled  by CU's Clint Talbott featuring the Geography Department has been published in the Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine. The article presents an overview of the breadth of research undertaken by several faculty members and aims to redefine "Geography" by discussing the nature of our work. 

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As part of a NASA grant awarded to Dr. Jennifer Balch and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Idaho to study climate and  land use drivers of invasive-grass fueled fires across the western U.S., Jennifer Balch and her team just published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) entitled “Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States”: .  

Project Fire Team: Back row (L to R): Jeff Thompson, Carson Farmer, Jennifer Balch, Billy Armstrong, Greg Tucker, Adam Mahood, Oliver Wigmore, Travis Williams, Tim Dunn, Brian Johnson, Max Joseph. Front row (L to R): Trisha Shrum, Babs Buttenfield, Matt Rossi, Nate Mietkiewicz, Mariela Perignon, Leah Wasser, Sepideh Dadashi, Megan Cattau, Lise St. Denis, Chelsea Nagy, Mollie Buckland. Kneeling: Bill Travis

The human-caused Waldo Canyon fire started 4 miles northwest of Colorado Springs, CO on June 23, 2012 and was fully contained 2 1/2 weeks later. The fire left two people dead, destroyed 346 homes and burned 18,247 acres. (uncredited photo)

On May 1, 2016, a fire began southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. On May 3, it swept through the community, forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta's history. The fire is believed to be human-caused.(Getty Images)

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