Projects

In collaboration with the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, we have launched a new Pathways minor, Food, Agriculture, & Society, open to students from across Virginia Tech. The minor requires our new Introduction to Food studies course along with a Sustainable Food Systems course; electives from across the humanities, social sciences, and applied sciences; hands-on learning courses; and a capstone course that can be fulfilled by study abroad, internship, thesis, or other experiential learning. See full details on the Pathways website here. Enroll in the minor here. 

If you have courses you'd like to add to or develop for the minor, please email Program Director Anna Zeide, zeide@vt.edu. We have supported the design of 9 new Food Studies courses from humanities and social science perspectives that are part of the minor, with the support of an NEH Humanities Connections grant and a Pathways Annual Grant. 

Global Education is a valuable component of the Food Studies program, as students and faculty experience the ways that food links cultures, economies, and environments around the world. Our primary partner program is the program in Food, Sustainabily, & the Environment (FSE) at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy. We have other partner programs in the works. See this page to learn more about our Education Abroad programs.  

Funded by a Humanities Connections grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Tech Food Studies Program sought to gain insight from established food studies programs in order to develop the curriculum for a new humanities-focused food studies minor and to build our interdisciplinary program more generally. We invited food studies leaders from a range of institutions to offer virtual presentations [webinar series] about and written accounts of their programs' histories, events, curricula, and central lessons. We now share these materials with the broader food studies community.

Webinar Series: How Do Other Food Studies Programs Work?
This webinar series features Alice Julier (Chatham University), Daniel Bender (University of Toronto), Megan Elias (Boston University), Matthew Hoffman (University of Southern Maine), Krishnendu Ray (NYU), Stephen Wooten (University of Oregon), and Tony VanWinkle (Sterling College/Guilford College). See Webinar Series

The Food Studies program, in collaboration with the Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives, acquired The Food Timeline in 2020. This website and accompanying physical library is the most comprehensive inventory of historical food knowledge online. Since the death of its founder, Lynne Olver, her family had been looking for a new steward. See the Eater article about the initial search for a new home and the follow-up article about VT's acquisition. Virginia Tech is proud to carry on Olver’s legacy and create space for new research and student internship opportunities through this powerful resource.  

Providing the opportunity for hands-on learning is a core part of the Food Studies student experience. We are developing relationships to create internship opportunities across a range of sites. We hosted our inaugural Student Intern in fall 2021 in work with Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) on The Food Timeline and the broader Food & Drink History Collections. In Spring 2022, we hired our first Communications Intern, who helped launch our Food Matters Registered Student Organization and worked with us on developing marketing and recruiting materials. We plan to hire a Food History Collections intern in SCUA each spring semester, so reach out if you're interested in learning more. See, for example, the online exhibit about the history of chocolate that our Spring 2024 intern created, here: America's Love Affair with Chocolate.

Throughout 2022, the Food Studies Program supported an oral history project with The Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), led by Dr. Jessica Taylor and Dr. Danille Christensen, focused on the role of baking through public events like festivals and county fairs in Patrick County, Virginia. This oral history project explores the ways that home baking finds its way to public venues in this rural county. Local staples such as apple butter, pinto beans, bottled green beans, and jello salad show up on dinner tables and at community events, but so do bruschette and biscotti, samosas and vegan cakes. The interviews are archived as part of SFA's Southern Baking oral history archives, and you can find the collection here. 

In Spring 2022, we created a new Registered Student Organization (RSO), called Food Matters. This club is dedicated to all things food. We'll get together to eat, cook, garden, forage, learn about food cultures and food politics, and think about how food matters in our world. Sign up here for more information and join us on GobblerConnect.

As funds are available, the Food Studies Program may be able to support events or projects closely tied to our mission. Small grants in the range of $100-$600 may be available for individuals associated with Virginia Tech seeking supplemental funding for speakers, films, workshops, or other projects related to Food Studies. For example, in the past, we have supported a “Cooking up Culture” class at Reynolds Homestead’s College for Older Adults, The Common Ingredient’s work on food insecurity in the New River Valley, VT’s Indigenous Community Garden, an Honors College seminar on the Chemistry of Cooking, the Love of Foraging zine, and provision of local foods from Glade Road Growing for a food lab. Some years, we will have limited funds; but when available, we accept applications for funding on a rolling basis, through this Google Form. 

Once a week during the semester, we send out to our listserv (Join Here) a Weekly Newsletter with events, calls for papers, recommended reading, and other resources. Please send items for submission to zeide@vt.edu. Access past issues of our newsletter from our first two years here: | Fall 2020 | Spring 2021 | Fall 2021 | Spring 2022