Jack Bobo wears a blue suit and glasses. He looks to the side as he listens to the speaker.

Back to school with UCLA’s Food Studies program

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Read the original post by Evan Kleiman | Photo Courtesy of Jack Bobo | August 22, 2025

Jack Bobo wears a blue suit and glasses. He looks to the side as he listens to the speaker.

Although he leads Food Studies at UCLA, Jack Bobo also has an entry in Wookieepedia.

Yes, food studies at the university level is a thing — as it should be. All the joys and ills of human life — health, the environment, social equity — are a venn diagram with food.

Jack Bobo, the Executive Director of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, has an impressive resume. He was the Director of Global Food and Water Policy at The Nature Conservancy and a senior advisor on global food policy at the U.S. Department of State. And, because you never know where life will take you, he has an official entry in Wookieepedia.

A friend of his from junior high who earned a PhD in paleontology got a call, one day, from Lucasfilm to help them track down locations in Tunisia. So he ended up working for Lucasfilm and writing several best-selling Star Wars books. “One night, he called me up and said, ‘I need to do a spread on lightsaber combat. I know you’re a fencer. Can you help me?'” Jack says. “So we spent a weekend designing the different forms of lightsaber combat for George Lucas.”

Jack Bobo presents a slide about global land. He wears a blue suit and red tie and stands with his arm extending outward as he speaks.

“In many ways, there’s nothing that has a bigger, more negative impact on the planet than agriculture,” says Jack Bobo.

So what is Food Studies and why does it matter? “It’s really broad, and it really touches on our entire food system,” he says.

UCLA offers a Food Studies minor and the law school is home to the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy. There’s the Healthy Campus Initiative, which aims to prioritize the health and wellness of students, staff, and faculty. So across the institution, there are several initiatives and programs that touch on food. The goal of the Rothman Family Institute is to bring them together.

“We’re trying to figure out, how do we have the biggest impact with what we’re doing? How do we identify the challenges, both at the societal level and the planetary level, as well as the individual level? In many ways, there’s nothing that has a bigger, more negative impact on the planet than agriculture yet there’s also just nothing more critical for our daily survival,” Jack says.

Portrait of Jack Bobo wearing a brown checkered suit and smiles at the camera.

In his role overseeing food studies at UCLA, Jack Bobo aims to connect many disparate programs and initiatives.

And what is his role in UCLA’s Food Studies program?

“There are a few things that we’re trying to do. The first is we want to connect all the research that touches on food and agriculture at UCLA already. If we can connect that research, hopefully we can do a better job of all the things we’re already doing. That’s the internal part of it,” Jack says.

Externally, he serves as an ambassador for that research, bringing that research to the world. “How do we talk about problems in a way that actually brings people together to find solutions, instead of further polarizing society?” he muses. “I’m really interested in how we change the nature of dialogue so that people are excited to work together instead of working against each other.”

Professor Vetri Nathan, standing, with students seated and listening to his lecture.

Food studies class spurs discussions on consumerism, sustainability, ancient cultures and more

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Read the original post by Ashna Madni | Photos by Sean Brenner | May 21, 2025

Professor Vetri Nathan, standing, with students seated and listening to his lecture.

For many students, Vetri Nathan’s global food studies course is an introduction to the humanities.

In a new UCLA Humanities course, the saying “You are what you eat” takes on a whole new meaning.

The class, Global Food Studies: Ecocultural Diversity and Sustainability, brings together students from a wide range of academic majors to explore the history, cultural impact and personal connections to a subject that links all human beings: food. It is led by Vetri Nathan, a UCLA associate professor of European languages and transcultural studies.

“Food is not just nutrition,” Nathan told students during an early-May lecture. “It is a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviors. Food is culture.”

For many students, the course is an introduction to the humanities. That’s important to Nathan, who asserts that no subject or discipline exists in isolation; the humanities, he said, are critical for tying together the messy connections among interconnected disciplines. (The course grew out of his Multispecies Futures Lab, which incubates research and teaching projects in the environmental and multispecies humanities.)

“The humanities are really great at training students to make sense of and better respond to a complex world,” he said. “Approaching food studies through a humanities lens is key to understanding why, how and what we eat. Our food habits, traditions, local-to-global food systems and even our relations with other species we eat are shaped by cultural norms, emotions, desires and imaginations.”

The course, which is cross-listed with UCLA’s food studies minor, demonstrates the power of interdisciplinary scholarship, said Amy Rowat, faculty director of the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies.

“Providing a much-needed global lens, Professor Nathan’s innovative course expands and enriches the UCLA Food Studies curriculum, and offers an exciting opportunity for students to engage with food issues across global scales,” said Rowat, UCLA’s Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Chair in Food Studies and professor and vice chair of integrative biology and physiology.

Professor Vetri at the chalkboard for discussion.

In one recent class, Nathan and his students considered some of the evocative terms food and beverage brands use in their advertising.

By the end of the quarter, students will have explored topics ranging from timballo to molasses, and from Los Angeles street tacos to tanka-me-a-lo, a Cherokee buffalo stew. Using those foods as anchors, lectures have covered the role of food in ancient empires, the transatlantic slave trade, gender roles within and beyond the family and the rise of brand culture.

“It’s really useful when you’re studying these broader concepts to have the food in focus to come back to as a concrete example,” said Elliot Heywood, a first-year history major and food studies minor. “But it’s also helpful as a jumping off point to explore other examples that we find interesting and lean into those discussions.”

Exploring family narratives

One of the course assignments, for example, encourages students to study global food-related narratives from their own lives.

Heywood delved into the history of a cookie recipe that her family makes every year for Christmas Eve. She called her grandmother to learn more about its origins.

“It turns out it’s derived from a German cookie recipe called speculatti,” said Heywood. “But no other speculatti follow the same recipe. So I’ve been looking at the adaptations of the recipe, how the recipe came to the U.S., how it has evolved and how it was eventually passed down to me. It’s been a cool way to connect with my grandma and understand my identity and culture in a more tangible way.”

The course will culminate with an exploration of solutions for a more sustainable future for the planet’s food systems. Through cultivating the art of attentiveness in students, Nathan hopes they will be better equipped to live, eat, cook and share food with more intention, and with care for themselves and the common good.

“By engaging in this kind of humanistic training, I hope students will notice that every dish or food item they eat is also the final product of a distinct global interplay of multispecies cultures, lives, bodies and ecosystems,” he said. “And perhaps that will allow them to create more joyful and ecoculturally sustainable food experiences.”