Dates: Fridays, July 12 & 19
Time: 10:00—11:30 a.m.
Place: ISU Cunningham Memorial Library
Room 028
Cost: $10

ISU Associate Professor of History, Dr. Anne Foster, presents the first installment of a three-part series called The History of Food. This first class, Game Changing Foods, will examine two foods, sugar and corn, that changed the way people eat. Prior to 1700, sugar was so rare and expensive people took it as medicine. In 2024, sugar is so cheap and common that Americans on average consume 17 teaspoons per day, more than twice what is recommended. Sugar fueled slavery and the industrial revolution, and it has transformed nearly every food people eat, from marinated chicken to bread to spaghetti sauce. In Indiana, people eat a lot of corn: corn on the cob, cornbread, corn pudding, and of course, corn syrup. Corn is a New World food, not known in Europe, Asia or Africa before 1500. Corn consumption quickly spread around the world, but for animals, not humans. Corn made it possible to raise animals more quickly and cheaply for meat and milk. This course will explore how everyone in the world has come to eat a lot of corn, although outside the United States, they rarely eat it directly.