Tufts University's Experimental College Course: “An Insider’s Guide to the World of Food Media”
When Denise Drower Swidey, local television producer, food writer, stylist and chef reached out to us during the spring COVID-19 school shutdown to introduce her Tufts University Experimental College undergrad course, “An Insider’s Guide to the World of Food Media,” we were immediately intrigued. As a visiting lecturer, Drower Swidey assigned a final project for which students (mostly seniors) would have their choice of a variety of assignments across the food media landscape, from producing a YouTube channel to running a social media campaign for a food start-up.
Read Drower Swidey’s course description below, then follow along to four chosen final projects from recent Tufts graduates—a foreign student’s ode to the food of home; a student athlete’s cookbook and workout planner, created when college sports were suddenly cancelled; a Corona Kitchen Cookbook using college students’ pantry staples in new and interesting ways; and a recap of a student’s experience as a marketing intern with a local food producer, helping to build FreshZen Foods' website and promotion of their authentic, fresh and healthy Asian sauces.
Image courtesy of Tufts University
By Denise Drower Swidey
I’m a Boston-based television producer, food writer, food stylist, chef and Visiting Lecturer at Tufts University. The class I designed, proposed and taught during the spring 2020 semester through Tufts’ innovative Experimental College was called “An Insider’s Guide to the World of Food Media.”
In a niche career like food media, and as an active Tufts alum, I regularly received inquiries from undergraduates or recent grads wondering how to get started in the field. With the elevation of food in our culture, and the proliferation of food media, the last few years have been especially active for my inbox. It seemed like the right time to teach an introduction to food media class, formalizing all the information I had been sharing with students one on one over coffee.
For the last half century, Tufts' ExCollege has offered small, participation-based courses, with faculty drawn from the professional world, across a wide range of disciplines. There’s an emphasis on interactive and collaborative learning, which was the perfect format for the range of topics we discussed in my food media course. We started with basics like food and recipe writing, food styling and food photography. Talented newspaper and magazine writers, photographers and podcasters joined our class—in person for the first half of the semester, and then via Zoom when the pandemic pushed courses online. These speakers shared their insights about life in food media, even helping us process in real-time the dramatic changes that were reshaping food media as a result of the pandemic.
Students had an option to pick any form of food media and topic for their final projects, and their choices showed how interdisciplinary food media is. In addition to the terrific work featured below, here’s a taste of what some of my other students tackled:
•A future medical school student who changed her life by changing her diet wrote the beginning chapters of her cookbook on clean eating that she plans to share with her future patients.
•An economics major created a fully thought-out mock business and designed an Instagram marketing guide.
•An anthropology major, with a minor in food systems and nutrition, blogged, "Julie and Julia"- style, about the Iraqi-Jewish cookbook her great aunt wrote, adding her own personal updates to the heirloom recipes.
Not only did I enjoy teaching, but I appreciated the chance to learn so much from my students. I’m hoping to teach the class again, perhaps in Spring 2021. Given all the seismic changes in food media that are still happening as a result of these last few volatile months, we’ll have a lot of new material to cover. At least I won’t have to learn the ins and outs of Zoom this time if the class once again moves online.
This story appeared as an online exclusive in September, 2020.
