Teaching about Globalization and Food in Ecuador

Resumen

This article describes a course we taught while on exchange at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito during the spring semester of 2006. Food studies provided a window through which to explore issues of race and class and the effects of globalization in this Andean country. The timing was also perfect in that Ecuador was being pressured by the United States into quickly signing a bilateral free-trade agreement. Popular pressure derailed the talks soon after our class was over. Protests by indigenous farmers, in fact, were happening at the same time as the class reached its apogee in the form of a field trip to the indigenous market of Zumbagua to restudy the work done there twenty years earlier by Mary Weismantel, recorded in her important book, Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes.