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Notes and Queries 

 

Food as Experiential and Reflective Learning  

By: Cora Mardin and Michael A. Lange 

 

In this hybrid essay and response, third-year undergraduate student Cora Mardin presents 

some impressions and reactions to a participant-observation-driven documentary project she 

completed. Afterward, Michael Lange, one of Cora’s former professors, comments on her essay. 

This format, reminiscent of a conference paper and a discussant, attempts to evoke the 

conversational nature of academic discourse. It is in the back-and-forth exchanges where 

learning and teaching happen, whether that is at a conference, between a journal article and 

a reader, or a teacher and a student. While this special issue’s main focus is on traditional 

pedagogy – classroom teaching and learning – we would do well to remember that all 

academia is conversation, both in the moment and across generations. We start with Cora’s 

essay: 

 

Much goes into our understanding of what we consume even if we don’t always fully realize 

it. Our individual epistemologies and our sense of cultural habitus play a very important 

role in our preconceived notions of what is a delicacy and what is not (in many cases the 

two not being far from each other). That is where I started – where we all start, really. With 

a humble and minuscule understanding of any topic often emerging from our own cultures 

and the common mindsets, we often do not change unless we make an active choice to do 

so. I sort of found myself involuntarily making such a choice about food and foodways my 

first semester of my 3rd year at college, and I slowly began to understand the power of food 

and food cultures as much more than sustenance, but also as an educational tool.  

 

My name is Cora Mardin, a third year student in the Digital Filmmaking major at Champlain 

College, specializing in video editing and motion graphics with a minor in digital marketing. 

In my junior year, I took a course titled “Food Cultures” as part of my general education 

curriculum. For this class, we were asked to complete a semester-long project about a food 

or food culture of our choosing. This project involved asking a question, researching that 

question, and finally coming to some sort of conclusion, which would then be presented to 

the class. I decided to research chili con carne, perhaps because of my taste for spicy food, 

or maybe because of a very conveniently scheduled chili competition at my school. The 

Andy Burkhardt Memorial Chili Cook-off is an annual event held at the library at Champlain 

College, where I work, and it was coincidentally happening the following month.  

 

In addition to studying the event itself, the deeper question I had in mind for my project 

was related to chili’s origins and how the original recipe differed from the varieties of chili 

to be found at the cook-off. I was keenly aware that the chilis at this cook-off were not a 



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definitive Burlington style, but more a sampling of the types of chili made by the faculty, 

staff, and students at Champlain. However, I found – and do find – that concept to be just as 

interesting. In order to engage with the process more fully, I contemplated what I would be 

doing at the cook-off. Eventually, I settled on two ideas to learn about the origins of chili 

con carne and see how that recipe relates to the chilis entered into the Andy Burkhardt 

Memorial Chili Cook-off: 1) I would make my own chili con carne – one not too dissimilar to 

the way it was originally prepared in the 1850s – and enter the cook-off myself, and 2) 

being a film student, I would develop a documentary film to catalog the cook-off in the most 

efficient and entertaining way possible. To give the whole thing a better sense of structure, 

I separated it into three parts: background, execution, and examination.  

 

With the essential mise en scene of my project covered, I’d like to talk about my initial 

understanding of chili con carne and how I was able to transform that understanding into a 

20-minute documentary. Before this project, I had never made chili before. I had a general 

idea of how chili was made, but I had never been involved in making it myself, so I was 

aware from the beginning that this would be an educational experience for me, even 

beyond the initial assignment’s prompt. Furthermore, I started out with almost no 

knowledge of chili’s greater cultural relevance, I merely knew the chili that existed in my 

experiences growing up in New Hampshire. The chili I knew there was a fairly standard 

regional version of chili con carne, with beans, beef, and peppers. This was the pattern I 

expected original chili would be like. 

 

At the cook-off at Champlain College, however, the types of chili that I saw varied quite a 

lot, to the point that several stretched the definition of ‘chili’. Perhaps owing to Champlain 

being in Burlington, Vermont, an area with a reputation for being open and alternative, 

many of the chilis in the cook-off included a wide range of ingredients not often associated 

with the dish (e.g., chickpeas, sauerkraut, Kahlua, etc.). I found the amount of variation 

between the chili I had grown up with and the range of chilis at the cook-off to be deeply 

fascinating, and it was an important catalyst to my understanding of my research.  

 

Much of my understanding of chili and, as I later came to discover, food as a whole, came 

not from text-based research, though, but from the actual making of my chili. In light of my 

question, I decided to make an 1850s style chili, in the manner of the Chili Queens. The Chili 

Queens were women who first crafted chili con carne and served it in San Antonio’s 

Military Plaza in the 19th century (Jennings). I learned a lot about these women during my 

research, but what I took away from their story/recipes was their resourcefulness and the 

sense of community they were quickly able to build. As is true of countless dishes across 

space and time, the Chili Queens made their stews with what they had available to them to 

feed their families. Selling their meals, made with what they could afford, to the people of 

Texas was, among other things, another means of providing for family. The Chili Queens’ 



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recipes varied widely because of personal preference, uneven availability of ingredients, 

and more. Inspired by the straightforwardness of their approach, I decided on a very basic 

recipe for the chili that I would enter into the cook-off. The core ingredients across the 

Queens’ countless renditions of chili, which I wanted to use as a pattern, consisted of beef, 

peppers, and whatever spices fit your spiciness preference.  

 

Having never made a chili before, I struggled quite a bit, as might be expected. It’s not easy 

to do something you’ve never done before, especially when you’re filming yourself as a 

nominal expert and pretending to know exactly what you’re doing, as was the conceit of my 

documentary film. In a strange way, this somewhat tricky situation helped me out a lot in 

the long run. When you are in front of a camera, as I was, if you’re not confident in yourself, 

people notice. It’s not enjoyable to watch, often difficult to understand, and puts up red 

flags about your knowledge on your subject/execution. I was not at all confident in my 

ability to make a chili, but having my camera there and knowing that I didn’t want to feel 

the chagrin of watching myself muddle through cooking while editing it forced me to, for 

lack of a better word, pretend. This aided in my ability to learn and to teach others both 

during the cooking process and later on at the cook off. Even now, the idea of this chili, 

delicious or not, makes me feel pretty good about myself. Having a healthy level of 

confidence about things, even if you’re unsure of them, can make you feel a bit better about 

trying something new, and you might even surprise yourself. I know I did!  

 

The final step in my chili research was to go to the chili cook-off. I did not believe that I 

could win this event (and I didn’t), but that was never the goal. I did, however, benefit by 

entering because I now had a shared perspective with the other entrants, which allowed 

me to have a stronger bond and more empathy toward their processes. As I went around 

the cook off, interviewing people and trying various chili concoctions, I quickly learned that 

chili meant something different and unique to each person. For some it was a way they 

connected with their families, for some a means of creativity and personal escape, and for 

others they just thought chili was delicious. Within all this, I was still able to answer my 

original question: chili has, in fact, changed a lot over time. Though some people did seem 

to hold light-hearted prejudices about what should and should not be in chili, everyone at 

the cook-off was able to agree that these changes are welcomed and appreciated for their 

uniqueness. That being said, I answered much more than just that. Chili, and in many ways, 

all food, allows people the opportunity to express themselves and connect with each other. 

There were people I met at this event that made their own chilis and held a sort of pride 

and excitement when I gave them the outlet to talk about them in a meaningful way. On the 

other side of it, there were individuals, much like myself having never made chili, who were 

instead using the platform to talk about chili in relation to loved ones, holidays, the comfort 

chili provides them, etc. It was all very beautiful and touched me in ways I cannot explain. I 



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was slowly developing a much more concrete idea of what food is actually able to teach me 

and its greater effect on others that I had not considered before. 

 

I think my experience with chili was not always necessarily a good one but more so a 

meaningful one. I had great difficulty every turn in this process. Nothing ever quite felt like 

it was enough or right or important, but it was. I struggled constantly, but I always 

overcame it, and the feeling I had at this experiment’s conclusion was a fond one. I never 

would have expected that it taught me so much to do this project. I learned that what we 

put into our food experiences is what we get out of them. Throughout this process, I 

discovered many times that, a lot of people have far deeper connections with food than just 

its taste. Food holds the ability to help us understand people: ourselves, our communities, 

and global food cultures. The choice we must make is in our willingness to learn from food, 

to let food into our lives and not be closed off to those possibilities of what you could 

potentially learn both in and out of the classroom.  

 

And now, Professor Lange’s commentary: 

 

Cora was my student in several general education classes throughout her undergraduate 

education, although not for the “Food Cultures” course for which the project discussed was 

assigned. As a side note, I entered one of the chilis into the Andy Burkhardt Memorial Chili 

Cook-off, losing rather handily in both the judges’ eyes and the popular vote. One of the 

particular joys and fears of being a classroom teacher is that fingers-crossed moment after 

the semester, when you hope that something that you have taught has lodged in a student’s 

thinking for longer than exam week. In the scholarship of teaching and learning, as well as 

fields that study interdisciplinarity, they talk about transference, the ability to take a bit of 

knowledge from one intellectual context and apply it in another. For the classroom teacher, 

one of the most obvious forms of transference is when a student takes something from 

your class and uses it to make new knowledge in another class.  

 

With that in mind, several ideas jump out at me as I read Cora’s essay. The first is the 

perpetually tricky cultural concept of authenticity. Popular understandings of food are rife 

with misguided discussions of authenticity, which fight against or ignore the immense 

fluidity of culture. All aspects of culture flout the artificial taxonomies people like to impose 

when assigning exclusive places, groups, or identities to the things people think, feel, 

believe, have, and do. Academics are not immune from the seductive surety of authenticity, 

either, even long after the likes of Bendix and Bhabha critiqued the notion and provided us 

with better ways to think. Cora’s engages with chili con carne, which has a traceable origin 

to the Chili Queens of San Antonio, is nevertheless part of a larger complex category of 

stewed and spiced meat dishes, the edges of which are at best indeterminate. By 

recognizing that chili con carne has simultaneously a center to its identity and a wide and 



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varying boundary around it as a category, Cora is acknowledging the constructed qualities 

of our cultural taxonomies. As much as we might want a nice, neat, clean category called 

‘chili’, with-well defined edges, what we have are central nodes of identity and ranges of 

variation expanding out from them and toward other nodes.  

 

The discussion of the documentary side of the project brings up another set of terms that 

many of us teach in our classrooms, performance and performativity. Anyone who uses 

performance theory of any kind, from Goffman through Kapchan and beyond, discusses 

how viewing a culture bearer as a performer can enlighten the communicative and 

purposeful aspects of engaging in one’s identity. In the case of food, so many acts can be 

understood through the lens of performance: growing, selling, cooking, eating, preserving. 

A chili cook-off has another obvious layer of performance involved, as different chilis are 

cooked and then presented for a very public consumption and competition. Cora touches 

on both the performance of cooking chili as a culinary act and the performativity of making 

chili for her documentary camera. The self-conscious nature of cooking for a camera is 

similar to the self-conscious performativity of entering one’s chili into a competition, and 

Cora acknowledges both layers in her essay. When we engage in a cultural act, we perform 

for ourselves and others.  

 

One of the most heartwarming parts of Cora’s essay is what follows her discussion of the 

performative aspects of her cook-off participation. She touches on meaning, which is at the 

core of how I teach about culture. Knowledge is information that is made meaningful, that 

is situated in what Geertz calls our “webs of significance”. The sum of, and interactions 

among, our bits of knowledge help shape who we are, which becomes the foundation of 

culture when it interacts with the sums of the many others around us. When the edge of 

one of our epistemologies, our systems of making knowledge and meaning, comes into 

contact with the edge of someone else’s epistemology, culture is enjoined. Tsing calls these 

moments of friction, and it is through our systems of meaning making and the friction that 

results in their contact that people live their lives. I decide what kind of chili I want to make 

by choosing certain meanings for the moment, and rejecting others. The set of meanings 

the end up in my pot of chili come into friction with others’ meaning making systems when 

they taste it. The productive result is a new meaning, in this case quite probably “yuck” or 

“yum”. On one performative hand, I want people to like my chili. On another, as Cora 

insightfully recognizes, the fact that people are investing meaning in their chili and chili 

making, and that they and others are making meanings with the result, is what is most 

important, as well as most fascinating.  

 

All of these insights and interpretations are made more possible for Cora because she 

engaged in participant observation, a cornerstone of cultural research for over a century. 

Food provides enormous opportunities for participant observation, as it is something that 



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is easily shareable, deeply meaningful, and requires much “doing”. Simply put, there is a lot 

of available participation to be had in people’s foodways, and much to observe along the 

way. It is telling that Cora chose to learn about chili con carne through not only the distant, 

supposedly objective lens of the camera, but also the immediacy of entering the chili cook-

off. That kind of emic and etic perspective taking, which is such a common norm in folklore 

and anthropology as to go unnoticed, is worth pointing out in an undergraduate 

educational setting. The power of interacting with people in order to learn, to understand 

their meanings by engaging with them and asking people to share their knowledge and 

wisdom about those meanings, makes such a project a very valuable pedagogical tool. If 

equipped with some good theory beforehand, students can learn by doing, not just how to 

make a pot of chili, but how to be human. The fact that Cora talks about the empathy she 

gained through the enactment of her project tells us everything we need to know about the 

value of participant observation.  

 

  



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Works Cited 

 

Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.  

 

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 

 

Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford 

University Press.  

 

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday 

Anchor Books.  

 

Jennings, Frank W. n.d. Popular Chili Queens Graced San Antonio Plazas. Journal Of The Life 

And Culture Of San Antonio. http://www.uiw.edu/sanantonio/jenningschiliqueens.html  

 

Kapchan, Deborah. 2007. Traveling Spirit Masters. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University 

Press.  

 

Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  

 


