Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

The Food Communities of New York

Professor: Cindy Lobel
ITF: Sam Han
Campus: Lehman
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/lobel11neighborhoods/

Cindy Lobel’s class at Lehman made a food-focused site with the help of ITF Sam Han. Using the idea that food is central to community identity, the class gives a history and demographic overview of several neighborhoods before delving into the culinary offerings of each area. They covered the neighborhoods of Belmont, Bushwick, Woodside, Harlem, and Jackson Heights.

Thoughts on the project from ITF Sam Han:

The central focus of this class was the peoples and peopling of New York City through the lens of food.  At the heart of it was the idea of community – from the nuclear family to the entire city – and the role food plays in building, sustaining, symbolizing, and governing communities in New York. We do so by studying five neighborhoods across NYC–Belmont, Bushwick, Jackson Heights, Woodside, and Harlem. Through a variety of sources, including films, culinary journalism and historical and sociological scholarship, and numerous walking/tasting tours, led by Professor Cindy Lobel, a former tour guide herself, the class sought to gauge the diverse and rich culinary histories of the waves of peoples in New York City. 

Divided into five groups, the students explored the demographic and culinary shifts of the five neighborhoods across New York City. This was achieved by not only researching the institutional histories of these neighborhoods but also doing a “Food Stops,” which consisted of visits to local businesses that exist today. For this particular website project, the students made use of a variety of technologies, most frequently the Vado cameras provided by Macaulay, used to document their experiences in group-based explorations of certain neighborhoods in NYC, as well as mapping software such as Social Explorer and Google Maps, to visually represent the routes they took to explore their neighborhoods.