More than chocolate; global perspectives course

   "We have 24 hours in a day that we spend sleeping, dreaming, spending time with people we care about, but we also eat throughout the day. Food is so important, why is it that we don't give it the thought it needs?" Judith Hoffmannn, associate professor of geography, said.

     "More than Chocolate," a global perspective course offered this semester taught by Hoffmann and Ana Maria Gonzalez, associate professor of modern languages, puts an emphasis on food and what it means to students individually.

     The course follows themes of family tradition in food, where food comes from, the global and cultural exchange found in the history of food and its origins.

     Projects and assignments within the course include collecting unique family recipes, field trips to My Father's Farm in Seguin, and Whole Foods Market in Austin. Visits to local
events such as Seguin's Pecan Festival and New Braunfels' Wurstfest are also a part of the course.

     The course will also host faculty guest speakers, to tell of foods native to their home countries and what those foods represent and mean to them. Guest speakers include, Rodrick Shao, instructional technologist, and Eli Shao, Rocío Ocón-Garrido, assistant professor of modern languages, Sam Hijazi, associate professor of computer science, and
Santiago Toledo, assistant professor of chemistry.

     Kamala Platt, comparative literature scholar, poet, and artist, of the Siempre Sustainable Network in Seguin will also do a presentation on "Environmental Justice in Food Production Systems & Related Poetry," sharing poetry and connecting the dots between food, environmental justice, and politics.

     The course coincides with the Krost Symposium theme this academic year, "What's for Dinner," and supports the Strategic Plan's call for "high impact courses that promote
learning beyond traditional methods and incorporating practices that allow for people to teach each other," Hoffmann said.

     At the end of the course, students will do a presentation in Hein, to teach others what they learned in the class, "that way people who weren't enrolled in the course still have an
opportunity to learn from it," Hoffmann said.

     The class is titled, "More than Chocolate"; "chocolate because it's familiar, but also because there's so much more that goes into it—traditionally it was not sweet, it was bitter
and was once used as currency, and was even served with chili," Gonzalez said. "We want students to be informed eaters."