Welcome to Geography 3660 Fall 2011!

What do you know about where your breakfast comes from? Every day we eat food that is produced hundreds or even thousands of miles away from where we are eating. For breakfast, we might eat oranges from Florida, jam that was packaged in England, granola that contains nuts grown in Hawaii, or drink coffee made from beans that grow in Brazil. Or, we might be eating more locally produced foodstuffs, such as peaches in season in Georgia. In any case, eating breakfast links us into geographic networks of food production, distribution, consumption, and ultimately power, which are international in scope. Our breakfast depends on environmental conditions, economic networks and alliances, labor regimes, international politics and other events that have happened over time in many places. Sitting at the breakfast table, we are connected by complex commodity chains to growers in Latin America, processors in Europe, labor leaders in the Caribbean, trade negotiators in Washington D.C., and their counterparts in dozens of other countries. Meanwhile, the modern food system is built upon untold social dislocation and environmental disruption. The rise of international markets for foodstuffs is closely linked to the history of empire and colonialism, as well as to agricultural, industrial and technological and social revolutions. Entire national economies have been formed around the export of single commodities such as coffee or bananas. This course is intended to inform you about the “where” of your food, stimulate your curiosity about where your food comes from, and illustrate how people, places, governments and economies are connected to one another in the production of food, and how those connections are made possible.

While this is officially a lecture course, lecturing time will be heavily interspersed with in-class discussion. I place a high value on in-class participation, which means that your full attendance for the term will be important to your grade in the course. Full attendance means that you arrive for class on time, and do not make plans to leave until the class period is over. For my part, I will start the class on time, and will not extend the class beyond the allotted time period. Your active participation in the class should also contribute to a positive learning environment for yourself and others; this means that we should all respect the right of others to learn, and respect the diversity of each other’s backgrounds and learning styles. Among other things, this means that you pay full attention to the course material, do not talk during lecture, do not peruse unrelated reading material during class, etc. This is part of your education – it is up to you to claim it and make the best of it, while making room for others to do the same.