MALAS Spring 2023 Seminar: Foodways Rhetoric with Professor Consuelo Salas

Foodways Rhetorics 

Professor Consuelo Salas

MALAS 600C: Foodways Rhetoric 

RWS 596: Special Topics in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Thursday 4:00PM to 6:40PM SH 124

Food writing has proliferated into many different genres, such as cookbooks, memoirs, and blogs; however, many disciplines have also turned their attention to the intricate network that food creates in our everyday lives. Examining a plate of food from a food studies perspective allows you to question means of production, labor and agricultural issues, as well as ideology and culture. From a rhetorical perspective, you can view the same plate of food and question the power, gender and class dynamics, and, similarly to food studies, ideology and culture. Focusing on seminal texts in both rhetorical theory and food studies and where these two disciplines intersect, this course will examine community foodways literacies and practices in the San Diego, CA area. Bringing together the two disciplines of rhetoric and food studies, this course examines foodways rhetorics.

Consuelo Salas is an Assistant Professor of Border Rhetorics. As a visual rhetorician  and a food studies scholar, her areas of interest include commodification and representations of Mexican and Mexican Americans to U.S. based audiences within “food spaces.” Her areas of interest also include foodways rhetoric, the scholarship of teaching and learning, information literacy, and the intersections of translanguaging and monolingual technological interfaces. Dr. Salas is at work on a book that critically explores images associated with the cultural imaginary of Mexico and their relationship to food and identity. Dr. Salas' co-edited collection Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think About Food, published with University of Arkansas Press, was awarded the Gourmand World Cookbook third best in the world in the category of Professionals in 2017. Her work can also be found in edited collections, such as Visual Imagery, Metadata, and Multimodal Literacies Across the Curriculum, Food Feminism and Rhetoric, as well as in peer reviewed journals, such as Gastronomica and the Community Literacy Journal.