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Teacher-Scholar Spotlight: A Conversation with Kate Burt

  • Writer: Kelli R. Gill
    Kelli R. Gill
  • Nov 3
  • 6 min read

Food Rhetoric Spotlights feature teacher-scholars who work at the intersection of food, rhetoric, and writing studies. The goal of this series is to amplify and share the work around food that is happening across campuses. If you would like to be featured in a spotlight, please submit your responses in this form, we'd love to feature you and your work!


image features a photo of Kate Burt in front of a library of books
Image features a photo of Kate Burt in front of a library of books.

This Teacher-Scholar Spotlight features Kate Burt, a PhD student in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kate's work spans from diet and nutrition narratives, food literature, and identity and a lot of things in-between. Her classroom innovation around food has earned her the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award at UNCG. In addition to her interview featured here, you will find examples of her classroom activities at the bottom of this post.


What interests you in food rhetoric? 

I've been obsessed with food since I was a child.  I used to sit on the living room floor in front of the couch, where my mother sat, while we watched The Food Network two or three days a week after school.  Her favorites were Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals and Giada De Laurentiis's Everyday Italian, but I always wanted to watch Good Eats and Unwrapped.  Food was magic to me back then, and getting to learn how different foods are made scientifically and industrially felt like being let in on a secret.  My mom—and she admits this readily—was and still is not a particularly good cook, but she loves experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.  One of the ways we managed to keep a healthy relationship through all of my stages of development was cooking and baking together, so I learned very early to associate food with more than just nutrition. 


In middle school, I stumbled across episodes of The Biggest Loser and the British reality show Supersize vs. Superskinny, and I became fascinated with body size discourse, the psychology of eating disorders, and how these two things could influence people's relationship with food. These shows were my introduction to the extremes of food and nutrition discourse, and I remember being both uncomfortable with how the shows' participants were talked about and fascinated by their stories.  I watched and rewatched episodes because it was mind-boggling to me just how many ways there were to relate to food, and I wanted to understand.


For a long time, I wanted to be a food chemist, and then a dietitian, but I fell in love with British literature and ended up letting go of food for a while.  I came back to food during a Major Victorian Writers class where we read The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.  There's a scene in that book I've never been able to let go of in which the two siblings, Tom and Maggie, are children eating jam puffs together when there is suddenly only one left.  Tom, who is older, cuts the last puff in half and asks Maggie to choose one.  Now, one of these pieces is clearly better than the other because it is larger and has more jam, but Tom offers to let Maggie choose which piece she wants.  At first, she chooses the less appealing piece, but Tom tries to make the situation fairer by having Maggie close her eyes and choose the piece in either his right or left hand. She happens to choose the bigger piece, and Tom is taciturn about it.  She offers to let him have the nice piece, and he tells her to go ahead and eat it.  Then, when she does, he calls her a "greedy thing" and makes her feel bad.  I know I've gotten a bit off-topic here, but I paraphrase the scene at length because it encapsulates the things that fascinate and excite me about food: the power dynamics associated with sharing and accessing food; the moral meanings we assign to different foods and to the act of eating; the gendered nature of how we interact with food; and how our relationships with food connect with the relationships we have with our bodies.


What excites you most about your current work? 

I've had the opportunity to teach two different versions of a food literature class: one that focused more on narratives around hunger and the act of eating and one more rooted in cultural and sensory rhetorics.  I received feedback from students that they really wanted a class that dealt more directly with food, and I had a lot of fun choosing books and developing lessons that asked students to develop their sensory vocabulary, do genre analyses of different cookbooks, and consider how recipes can be interpreted as narratives with or without the narrative framing that we see in a lot of physical and digital blog-style cookbooks.  It was so much fun, and I really appreciate how much my students were willing to collaborate with me in the learning process.  I'm still playing around with different ideas for activities or readings that can get students more engaged with the digital realm of food—which is my area of research—but I and my students have found it rewarding to focus on more material engagement with food and food texts because so much of their exposure to food discourse is online.


Any favorite readings or scholarship that have supported your work in food? 

My food literature course covers some texts that I've come to think of as canon food literature because they show up so often on undergraduate food studies courses: Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, "Persimmons" by Li Young Lee, and How to Cook a Wolf by M.K. Fischer, for examples.  However, I've found a few texts that don't get the attention they deserve and that students really love talking about.  If you're interested in talking about recipes or food poetry, then Alan Pelaez Lopez's poem "Chicatanas for Mourning, A Recipe" should be essential reading.  It's a sort of news/editorial piece about the murder of activist Carmela Parral Santos written in poetic form that also plays on the recipe genre. 


 If you want to talk about gender, class, sexuality, or disordered eating, I cannot recommend Sam J. Miller's YA novel, The Art of Starving, enough.  It's linguistically accessible for an undergraduate class, but it features an unreliable narrator and a lot of challenging themes around food and our relationships with it.  Finally, because I cannot offer any recommendations without offering at least one video essay, Rowan Ellis's "Almond Moms and the Cult of Generational Diet Culture" is one of my favorites to give to students as an alternative assignment when they review the content warnings on my syllabus and let me know that it isn't safe for them to read or participate in a particular text.  I'm also fond of The Leftist Cook's video "Even leftists don't talk about animals" because it's an analysis of the animal agriculture industry and how we assign meaning to the act of eating meat that doesn't resort to disturbing videography of agricultural animal abuse to make its points.  I would also be remiss if I didn't point to Shanspeare's new video essay, "Mukbangs: The New Crusade Against Fatness."  These video essays are thoughtful and engaging.  Importantly, they also include in-text citations in the video and full citations in the description.


For research purposes, I want to shout out a few dietitians whose work I've found so important to how I think about food and nutrition rhetoric.  First, "The Nuances of Health Literacy, Nutrition Literacy, and Food Literacy" by Stefania Velardo has been a foundational text for me in any conversation about food literacy.  Jessica Wilson's book It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies is a beautiful, semi-autobiographical analysis of the absence of black women's bodies and voices in the field of dietetics and how white supremacist and capitalist logics underly our current health and wellness movements.  In a similar vein, Dalina Soto's book, The Latina Anti-Diet: A Dietitian's Guide to Authentic Health that Celebrates Culture and Full-Flavor Living, is a very funny piece written for a general audience that explores the "whitewashing of food" and reframes the principles of Intuitive Eating from a culturally informed perspective.  Soto's Instagram, @your.latina.nutritionist, is also not to be missed.


Tell us about your food-related assignments:

One assignment I give to students is the "Health Mythbuster" project, which asks students to identify, research, and report on health commonplaces, usually ones related to food and dietary guidelines. I created this assignment as part of a 200-level health rhetorics course that focuses on health information literacy and the rhetorical construction of health expertise. Students have researched commonplaces such as "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," and "Organic foods are better for you than nonorganic foods." Through this multiple-part project—in which students have to rely on and verify the reliability of popular sources—students practice lateral reading, source evaluation, and understanding who the stakeholders are in a health commonplace.


Use the links below to access assignment artifacts provided by Kate:



 If you use or share these materials, please make sure to cite this work using the citations below:


Food Rhetoric: A scholarly resource devoted to food, rhetoric, composition and everything in-between. 

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