' While food is the vehicle through which we grapple with ecological matters, rhetorical communication is the underlying concern. By most accounts humanity is facing a global ecological emergency-rising temperatures, declining resources, growing populations, increasing appetites and intensifying hunger-so the course begins within a narrative of ' crisis. Food is the most immediate and reflexive link between humans and their surroundings, so we will be digging into the rhetorical contours of human-environment relations through our habits of consumption (production, distribution, disposal, recycle). This is not a ' food ' class or even a ' rhetoric of food ' class it is a class that uses food to examine the rhetorical connections between humans and their various landscapes. This course will examine the relations between human communities and their physical surroundings through the primary example of food systems, focusing on the ways rhetoric shapes and is shaped by these relations.
Ecology is the study of the relations between organisms and their surroundings (eco = ' environment ').
