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 Cornell Clayton's class on Italian politics is not much like a traditional class. Photo by Andrea Vogt.
The students from various Northwest universities studying in
Siena during Clayton's stay ate it up, literally. During lunch at
Amico Fioroni's Tuscan farm, University of Oregon student Matt
Stringer, 19, picks up his fourth bruschetta smothered in olive
oil, Pecorino cheese, and spicy homemade salami, washes it down
with a swallow of dark red Chianti, and puts it this way: "After
this it's gonna be really hard to go back to actual school."
It doesn't seem much like traditional class, and that's by
design. It's a pedagogical approach called "learning in the
laboratory," or learning by living. For example, students are
required to attend excursions to Venice, The Cinque Terre, and
other regions of Italy, where they must interview locals and take
in their cuisine and culture. The assignment "doesn't suck," to use
Stringer's parlance. But it's not all wining and dining under the
Tuscan sun, either. Students are required to attend weekly
three-hour seminars during which they discuss writing and reading
assignments on EU institutions and policymaking and debate news
articles about complex Italian current events and agricultural
trade.
"It's a weird combination, but he pulls it off," said David
Rudnick, a 22-year Washington State University student from Walla
Walla. "I do miss Pullman, but I know that after this I'm going to
go back and end up making pasta four out of five days of the
week."
For many students like Rudnick, life in Italy marks a new, more
intimate relationship with the food they eat-many are learning to
cook for the first time. After course excursions, for example,
students are required to plan and prepare a dinner for the rest of
the class showcasing the cuisine of the region. That assignment
proved difficult for Western Washington University student Betsy
Hartner, who, after a visit to Venice, discovered she was one of
the few vegetarians in the land of liver and onions (otherwise
known as Fegato alla Veneziana). When she began planning her
traditional Venetian meal without a meat dish, professor Clayton
balked: "I told her, 'You at least have to have shrimp, clams,
seafood . . . something.' "
Instead of a meat dish, she brought in her favorite cookbook,
The Higher Taste, A Guide To Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking and a
Karma-free Diet.
"One of the other major challenges with teaching this course to
American students now," says Clayton, "is the large number of
vegetarians, vegans, those allergic to milk products, et cetera. It
can make teaching a course about the politics of food a
nightmare."
Or at least more challenging. Some of the classroom's liveliest
discussions spring from the culture shock American students
inevitably experience in their new European surroundings-like the
day Clayton spotted several students slinking guiltily into a
nearby McDonalds to binge on comfort food from home: Big Macs,
fries, and supersized soft drinks.
But even the most hard-core adherents of American college life
can't help but notice the difference between the thick, chewy,
overly cheesy pizza delivered to their dorms in cardboard boxes and
the delicious, thin-crusted creations that emerge from wood-fired
ovens here. And despite her aversion to meat, even Hartner
discovered that many aspects of the light, healthy Mediterranean
diet appeal to her vegetarian values. While she had to hold her
nose through the tour of a prosciutto ham factory, she cherishes
that there's a fresh vegetable market on nearly every street
corner, where the produce is assuredly local, fresh, and grown
naturally, because that's still what consumers expect.
Squeezed between casks, barrels, and purification vats of his
humming wine production facility, Amico Fioroni pours a glass of
white wine directly from an immense silver vat and holds it out for
Professor Clayton and several students to smell. He expounds
briefly on its low acidity and delicate perfume-a result of
accurate selection of vines, careful pruning, organic fertilizing,
and age-old tradition. Then, with a toast to the Lunga Vita,
or long life, he downs it in one big gulp.
Andrea Vogt's article, "Nurses to the Homeless,"
(Washington State Magazine, Spring 2002), won a silver medal
in the Council for Advancement and Support of Education feature
writing awards and highest honors in the recent Spokane Public
Relations Council awards competition.
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