Food and Media: Making Fresh Food Close

If paying attention to partnership, collaboration, and locality are the heart of food hubs (e.g., kitchen tables, farmers markets, the SW WA Food Hub), what are we eating when our food is not community-supported? What are the consequences of eating mediatized and hyper-processed foods and becoming online consumers as hyper-processed people? How can this program’s sustained engagement with local and regional food hubs otherwise embody eating as cultural and agricultural actions?  

Through weekly hub and farm practicums, media labs, film screenings, lectures, seminars and corresponding assignments, this program will focus on eating in relation to partnership, collaboration, and locality. How does food (from field to screen to box to fork) create community in relation to how it’s grown, marketed, distributed and by whom, where, and when? What can food tell us about a community’s history, identity, and vitality? How does what you eat express complex relationships among time, people, plants, machines, animals, climate, and place? 

We’ll use observation, experiential learning, and the media arts to understand eating as an agricultural act based on multispecies relationships. We’ll begin our inquiry with an exploration of our own food traditions. Students will produce short digital stories as a way to understand the interdependence between our personal and collective food histories. With support from media services and weekly media labs, students then will use a variety of media tools to document their learning and the processes of how food is aggregated, mediatized, and distributed. What can be learned when, as hunter-gatherers who have become agritourists, we re-engage with cooperative local relationships?  

With increasing intention and intensity, we’ll move between viscerally experiencing how food creates community in “real” places and reading about and watching food’s empathetic power in climate fiction and other food writing and media (e.g. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, White’s Freedom Farmers, The Southern Foodways Oral History Project, Bong's Parasite.) Our case study approach will put diverse imaginings of food’s power into conversation with students’ own documentation of place-based experiential learning, and will offer opportunities to explore our ethical responsibilities as media producers and storytellers. Why? As Wendell Berry puts it, “the circumstances, the place, knowing your place—is all-important." Where, when, why, and at what cost is eating knowable as an (agri)cultural act … and by whom?

This program is coordinated with Greener Foundations for first-year students. Greener Foundations is Evergreen’s in-person introductory student success course, which provides first-year students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive at Evergreen. First-year students who register for 14 credits in this program will be placed into Greener Foundations for an additional 2 credits, totaling 16 credits.

During the winter quarter, curricular continuity for interested students will be provided in the program: Food Science, Cooking, and Nutrition. Independent Learning Contracts regarding food and food hubs can be arranged with the faculty for the spring quarter.

First field trip: Please plan your schedule for our first field trip to the NW Chocolate Festival in Week 1, October 4th. 

This program will prepare interested students for the 2026-27 study abroad program Bittersweet: Cocoa and Permaculture in the Caribbean.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

6 - Community-Supported Food and Agriculture

4 - Farm Practicum: Food Hubs

4 - Introductory Media Arts