UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item The Contemporary Local Market: Creating a Network of Food Distribution(2017) Shanklin, Eli William; Lamprakos, Michele; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the United Nations’ 1996 World Food Summit, the concept of “food security” was defined as existing “when all people, at all times, have physical, [social] and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. In the United States, the Department of Agriculture, measures food security on four levels—high, marginal, low and very low, with income and access as two of the major factors contributing to the problem of food insecurity. The country is dotted with hundreds, if not thousands, of food deserts—rural, suburban and urban census tracts—wherein the inhabitants do not have access to fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthy whole foods. Today, 1 in 7 households, which equates to approximately 17.5 million households, are estimated to be food insecure. This thesis seeks to address the problem of food insecurity by creating a community-supported agricultural prototype in which nutritious foods are made accessible to an underprivileged neighborhood while debunking the beliefs surrounding the practices, processes, and sourcing associated with food production and distribution (e.g. “Farm to Shelf”).Item In Questionable Taste: Eating Culture, Cooking Culture in Anglophone Postcolonial Texts(2009) Phillips, Delores Bobbie Jean; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation produces an extensive and intensive study of the culture of food in postcolonial literature and cookbooks that describe particular regions and cultures. My interrogation treats novels and cookbooks that depict food and eating in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean to argue that while both cookbooks and novels depict as unstable the connection between food and culture; the key difference lies in the manner in which each genre describes that instability. My dissertation uses memoir cookbooks (cookbooks that use the autobiographical accounts of their authors as a method of organizing content and providing context for recipes) and literary depictions of cooking and eating to trouble the neat tautology that establishes food and home as interchangeable cultural signifiers of equal weight. I evaluate the work that cookbooks do by comparing them to representations of cooking, eating and food in representative novels that frame depictions of citizenship and the nation in deeply ambivalent terms even as they depict delicious meals, well-laid family tables, and clean, productive kitchens. I use both cookbooks and novels to illustrate how the text under consideration in my dissertation act out the concerns that structure postcolonial critique. If regional cookbooks provide obscured or incomplete insight into the cultures they purport to authentically depict, then the novels I study provide openly ambivalent accounts of cultural identification. My dissertation begins by examining how pan-cultural cookbooks do the work of drawing multiple nations beneath the aegis of the global--and how this work fails to engage the problematic cosmopolitics of globality as revealed in two South Asian novels. I then examine African texts to analyze the difficulties that press bodies into motion--hunger and impoverishment, political disenfranchisement and oppression, and attenuated relationships with cultural traditions. The dissertation then moves to America via the Caribbean, examining diasporic longing in Cuban expatriates and the manner in which regional cookbooks and memoirs construct the past by reinventing the spaces that their authors have left behind.Item At My Kitchen Table(2008) Thomas, Brandon Paul; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This story is told by a narrator living presently in Buenos Aires. He reflects on the life he has lived, the cooking jobs he has worked, the food he has eaten, the people he has met, and the cities he has lived in. The following chapters take place in San Diego, Buenos Aires, and Madison, Wisconsin.