The students were told to bring in an unusual ingredient, or a dish made with one, and for Justin Graham, that had to be alligator.
"I had it once in Florida when I was 7 or 8," said Graham, 21 now and a senior at St. Joseph's University on City Avenue. He arranged for a friend to drive up from Louisiana with alligator tail packed in a cooler and proceeded, sans recipe, to make spicy alligator popcorn.
(Flavor some flour with lemon pepper; dust cubes of alligator meat; deep-fry in a wok or whatever. Drain and eat as is, with a squeeze of lemon or with your favorite dip.)
Alligator was indeed new to Graham's classmates studying Food Writing at St. Joe's. In fact, every week seems to bring something new for these undergrads. That was the idea when St. Joe's poet, author, and teacher Tenaya Darlington proposed food writing as a onetime course offering in early 2010.
Universities that formerly focused on educating dietitians, chefs, food anthropologists, and historians have expanded their offerings in recent years with graduate programs in food studies - a broader curriculum exploring the connections between food and the environment, politics, history, and culture, as well as gender, ethnic, and spiritual identity.
"To study food is to examine civilization - from world cultures and global commerce to the arts, humanities, and the natural and social sciences," according to a brochure for Boston University's graduate degree in gastronomy.
Indiana University, Bloomington, says it now offers "the first program in the world leading to a Ph.D. in the social science of food."
And we're not exactly bereft of programs in the Philadelphia area. At St. Joe's, the business school has a well-established and respected program offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in food marketing.
But the food writing course is new in St. Joe's English Department, says spokeswoman Patricia Allen. It was Darlington's idea, and university officials were enthusiastic, Allen said.
"We seem to have a national obsession with food writing," Darlington says, "from best-selling memoirs and novels based on food, to nonfiction focused on food safety and sustainability, and blogs."
There may well be a limit to the number of such books and blogs one culture can absorb, says Darlington, who moved here from Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin to teach, and who writes a cheese blog at MadameFromage.blogspot.com.
"But I don't think we've reached that saturation point.
"Food has become one of those topics that permeates the culture," Darlington says. "And I wanted to bring that to the undergraduate level. I think students are hungry" - she says without guile - "for information about food and how they can be involved in the food culture."
Her curriculum has a required reading list: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Consider the Oyster by M.F.K Fisher, and Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl.
And, as an English department class, the curriculum calls for plenty of writing. Darlington introduces her students to journalistic principles forbidding plagiarism and demanding more fact than opinion. She assigns exercises designed to expand the reach of their culinary vocabulary so they can describe tastes and smells.
But before they can write, the students have to get to know produce. So, they have taken road trips, shopping and sniffing at the Reading Terminal and the Italian Market. They ate in restaurants and wrote reviews that were graded as class assignments.
They kept food logs and became conscious of their habits. One freshman observed that he'd been sleeping late and eating heavily after 11 p.m. Another noticed she was eating most of her meals alone, "usually peanut butter and jelly or pasta."
They watched the documentary King Corn, and each student was required to bring in a corn-free snack to share.
"I was surprised to see how many had never cooked," Darlington said.
When she challenged her students to a 72-hour change-of-diet exercise, one student stopped eating wheat to experience the challenges faced by people with celiac disease. Another attempted to follow a diabetic diet - going so far as to interview her grandmother on the subject. Andrea Modica went vegetarian for her three days.
"As a full-time student, my health seems to take a backseat to my grades," she wrote in a follow-up report. "Frankly, I'm tired of being another unhealthy college cliche."
Kate Stulpin vowed to eat only healthful foods, "in hope of setting an example for my dad," she wrote. "I'm afraid he'll eat himself into a wheelchair soon."
Stulpin also started a blog that she's kept up: relishtherussian.wordpress.com (a nod to her Russian heritage).
Bridget Brabson discovered ginger and made a baked gingerbread pancake - a puffy, cakelike affair that deflates as soon as you remove it from the oven. Cut it in wedges and serve like pizza.
In the course of the semester, the students learned some painful truths: that fresh produce can cost more than prepared packaged foods - especially if it's allowed to go bad - and that cooking takes time and results in dirty dishes.
