Carolina Alumni Review - May/June 2007

Food for Thought

UNC students study food in courses such as Professor James Ferguson’s honors seminar, “Is There Dinner? Toward Understanding An Endangered Species.”

standing of the benefits of eating at and connecting with food. home and concern over obesity trends. “I see food as an alternative way of “From a political perspective, people are looking at environmental issues,” she realizing the implications of what you says. “There choose to eat. It not only affects your are things health, but it affects so many different fundamen-lives and impacts the rest of the world.” tally wrong

Undergraduates who study abroad, as with how she did, also gain understanding of the we’re dealing centrality of food and eating in most with food in parts of the world, she says. In Mali, our society.

Fabian worked on an independent study Also, there project with a women’s market garden are solutions.” cooperative. Then she spent a summer working on a farm in France, where she learned cooking methods informally.

Now she works with Andrea

Reusing, chef and owner of the Lantern restaurant in Chapel Hill, testing recipes for a cookbook and training in the restaurant’s kitchen. With Students Working in the Environment for Active Transformation (SWEAT), Fabian also is helping to start an environmental education program in area elementary schools that stresses the importance of eating locally

Vera Fabian has cooked since age 4. Fabian, who planned to graduate from UNC in May, says she always has been a little obsessed with food. When she took history Professor James Ferguson’s honors seminar, “Is There Dinner? Toward Understanding An Endangered Species,” she was blown away by the possibility of being able to study food in school. “It opened up a whole new world.”

If Carolina offered a food studies major, Fabian would have pursued it. Instead, she became a dual major in anthropology and international studies and took every food-related class she could find: a geography class on the world food supply, an anthropology class on the culture of food, an American studies class on food in American culture. And she became Ferguson’s culinary teaching assistant, handling the prep work and coordinating the kitchen when the 15 students taking the seminar — after their weekly lecture and discussion — headed to their professor’s house to cook and eat a three- or four-course dinner together.

“The whole point is reconnecting people to what dinners really can be,” Fabian says. “A lot [of the students] didn’t have family dinners growing up and didn’t learn to cook. Most have a very life-changing experience. That sounds overly dramatic, but most in the class agree that they get closer to their fellow students in this class than in any other. It affects the whole school/life, teacher/friends boundaries. People’s sense of taste changes and people’s ability to interact with other people. It creates a really strong community.”