My favorite class this semester is easily my Wednesday evening class. It is the class with a million names: Comparative Cuisines, International Cuisine, Indian Cuisine. It is sort of a catch-all name, the idea being that Professors teach their specialty, and we zero in on a culture and cuisine. The 'comparative' part comes from us - our interpretation of the cuisine is inherently a comparative experience because that is of course a way of understanding and a natural instinct. We draw lines of connection and disconnection and thus we see.
My favorite Professor is teaching this favorite class, and he is originally from India so we are diving into the vast and multi-faceted world of Indian cuisine. And of course, because it's grad school, we are also wrestling with the concept of national cuisine and its overall validity/applicability. I love all that crazy theory stuff, where you get to talk in circles and say stuff like 'the thingness of stuff' and nobody laughs (too hard), but sometimes you really just need to remember that you're in food studies and maybe the best way to puzzle this out is to just cook.
