Eating As If It Really Matters - Teaching The Pedagogy of Food in the Age of Globalization

Oct 15, 2026

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Eating is framed as far more than biological fuel: it is linked to celebration, temptation, power, well-being, and learning. In the era of globalization, these meanings are amplified by complex global food systems and simultaneously obscured by the interests that drive them. The paper explains the development and teaching of an adult education course, The Pedagogy of Food, designed to position eating as a pedagogical act and invite learners into global dialogue about food.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time38 min

AccessFree to download

Eating as a necessity and more than fuel

Food, globalization, and adult education

Globalization as a concept and process

Globalization and market economy

Eating As If It Really Matters: Teaching The Pedagogy of Food in the Age of Globalization Jennifer Sumner Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto Abstract To survive, we need to eat. And yet eating is much more than just ingesting fuel to keep our bodies going. Besides being a source of sustenance, food is a cause for celebration, an inducement to temptation, a weapon for wielding power, an indicator of well-being, a catalyst for change, and a vehicle for learning. In the age of globalization, these characteristics are magnified and obscured – magnified by the complexities of globalization and obscured by the powerful interests that drive this process forward. Within this global context, this paper describes the development and teaching of an adult education course called The Pedagogy of Food. Born out of the recent upsurge in interest in food-related issues, the course focused on eating as a pedagogical act, and invited students to become part of the global dialogue on food. Key words: global food system, pedagogy of food, resistance movements, globalization and change. Jennifer Sumner teaches in the Adult Education and Community Development Program at OISE/University of Toronto, where she is Director of the Certificate Program in Adult Education for Sustainability. She recently co-edited Critical Perspectives in Food Studies (Oxford University Press) . E-mail: [jennifer.sumner@utoronto.ca](jennifer.sumner@utoronto.ca) [Brock Education Vol. 22](Brock Education Vol. 22)([2](2)), 41-55 Jennifer Sumner Eating As If It Really Mattered Food is a necessity of life – people have to eat every day. And while some of us may take it for granted, many others can barely get enough to survive. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2010), over 1 billion people around the world are estimated to be undernourished – more than at any time since 1970, the earliest year for which comparable statistics are available. At the same time, an equal number of people are obese, as a result of a global food system that pushes cheap, empty calories onto vulnerable populations, not only in the global North, but now also in the global South: As affluent western markets reach saturation point, global food and drink firms have been opening up new frontiers among people living on $2 a day in low-and middle-income countries. The world’s poor have become their vehicle for growth. (Lawrence, 2011, p. 8) And yet, food is more than just fuel for the body. In the words of Michael Pollan (2008): Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology. (p. 8) In the age of globalization, and particularly with the predominance of a global food system, food merits scrutiny by academics and practitioners of all sorts, including adult educators (Sumner, 2013) . This article will address the interconnected issues of food, globalization, and adult education through an exploration of the development and teaching of a special-topics course in the Adult Education and Community Development (AECD) Program of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. It will begin with an examination of globalization, including the globalization of food, to set the larger global context for a discussion of the design and teaching of a new course called The Pedagogy of Food. It will conclude with some reflections on how globalization plays out within the practice of teaching adult education. Globalization Globalization is a fairly recent word in the English language, first appearing in 1959 (Simpson & Weiner, 1989) and gaining momentum toward the end of the twentieth century. While sometimes used to retroactively describe historic waves of coloniali

FAQs

Why is eating treated as more than just nourishment in the paper?

The paper argues that eating also functions as a source of celebration, temptation, power, an indicator of well-being, and a catalyst for change and learning.

What course does the paper discuss, and what is its educational focus?

It describes an adult education course called The Pedagogy of Food, which treats eating as a pedagogical act and engages students in a global dialogue on food.

How does globalization shape the paper’s view of the global food system?

Globalization magnifies the characteristics of food while making them harder to see, driven by powerful interests within the global food system.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by Ben