Release date: Nov. 20, 2003
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or dhammac@emory.edu

Coffee and Chocolate Capture Students' Attention in Emory Course

For many, coffee and chocolate are more than just consumable commodities – they are virtually essential for life itself. These two enormously popular foods make up the menu for an "intellectual feast" in an Emory University freshman seminar, providing the fuel for a deep immersion in the interdisciplinary field of anthropology.

Using the breadth of the anthropological perspective, the class has spent the fall semester exploring the impact and meaning of these foods on cultures around the world and on the human body.

"By taking two very popular subjects we can look at all aspects that affect their production and consumption, and cover topics such as politics, labor, ethnicity, marketing, economics, pubic health and policy – and give students an intellectual feast," says instructor Peggy Barlett, an Emory professor of anthropology, who created the "Coffee and Chocolate" seminar.

The course uses a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches, including history, cultural and biological anthropology, political economy, symbolic analysis and geography. The class also allows first-year students an opportunity to do original research, and gives them an introduction to the basic research methods in social science and to different kinds of writing, leaving them well-prepared for a wide range of research and writing tasks throughout their college years.

Nidhi Jain, a junior anthropology and human biology major from Macon, Ga., says the class inspired her to pursue anthropology as a major after taking it her first year.

"When I saw the class listed it was certainly an offbeat topic, but Professor Barlett really gave us an opportunity to look at issues ranging from fair trade and economics to public health," Jain says. "The class was an incredible introduction to the field of anthropology by looking at it through the lens of coffee and chocolate."

No class on coffee and chocolate would be complete without mention of Starbucks, which serves as an introduction to the topic. Howard Schultz's "Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time" is one of the required texts. In addition to one-page weekly theme papers, the students are required to write a 15-20 page research paper. Barlett also takes her students on field trips to visit a craft chocolatier, a local coffee roaster, and the Atlanta Botanical Gardens where students can see live coffee and cocoa plants.

The idea for the course, now in its third year, came from the young son of a colleague who said "'I want to go to Emory and major in chocolate,'" Barlett says. "And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that chocolate would make an excellent subject to focus on for an anthropology course, especially with the addition of coffee."

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