“…the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.  Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.  Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the composition of its flora and fauna.  Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species—plants, animals, and fungi—with which we have coevolved to a point where our fates are deeply entwined.  Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart.  It defines us.”
--Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006

Course Description

Though Pollan doesn’t directly talk about it in the quotation above, agriculture has also fundamentally shifted how we picture the natural world, and mediated images help either to perpetuate perhaps quaint preconceptions of nature or to reorder what we are able to see in it.  While the history of this mediation through imagery is as old as the creation of images itself, it reached new heights in the age of mass media and is being further refined in the age of customizable Web-based multimedia.  This course uses Michael Pollan’s recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as a jumping off point for creating multimedia content for the World Wide Web, developing aesthetic judgment and building technical skills while coming to a new and deeper appreciation of how our meals are mediated by industry as well as imagery.  Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver will be the primary tools used in this course, but these tools are only a means to an end, not an end unto themselves.  Critical and creative thinking, the exploration of complex ideas, and unconventional approaches to problem-solving will be encouraged.