Psychology tripping

Sigmund Freud. It’s a name that resonates even with those who don’t know much about psychology.

For those who study the discipline, Freud remains an integral piece in the 20thcentury psychology puzzle, but he isn’t at the top of the list.

“Everyone knows Freud and everyone still thinks we bow down to Freud, and in reality, you do not,” says Julie Madden, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “The layperson is like, ‘Oh, you do psychology? Psychoanalyze me.’”

Still, Freud’s legacy can’t be denied, and his home in London was one of the stops when Madden took a group of 17 psychology students in summer on a two-week trip to Europe. It was the debut year for the journey and, once there, students visited locations where history’s key psychologists have lived, studied and authored their research. Other visits were related to broader social, cognitive and general psychology themes.

“It was a variety of locations where research had happened,” Madden says. “Some of the sites have profound influence on certain theories and cultural understanding of humans as well.”

Along with London, the group visited Munich, Wurzburg and Nuremberg in Germany, Vienna in Austria, and the World War II concentration camp Dachau. Naturally, there also was time for sightseeing in the cities.

Along with providing some exposure to the field of psychology in countries other than the U.S., the trip also offered some cultural immersion. Starting with a stop in London, students had an English-speaking major city as their introduction to study abroad. Following that, time in Germany and Austria brought time within cultures in which English is not the primary language and perspectives possibly unlike what students have previously experienced.

A visit to Vienna took students to the home of Viktor Frankl and the museum dedicated to him. In his psychological concept, life has meaning even in the worst circumstances, and the search for the meaning of life is the central motivation of humanity. His theory is understandable since he was a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps including the infamous Auschwitz.

“From that point on, he was very much about: I survived a concentration camp. How did I do this? How can I look at the issues that people are having in their own lives and help them to realize that, yes, suffering is part of life, but you can grow positively from it,” Madden says.

The group toured Charles Darwin’s Down House, south of London, and exhibits in the city’s Wellcome Museum, which offered insight into the connection between the body and psychology, a vital relationship.

“It was our intention to show that psychology developed from a marriage of biology and philosophy,” Madden says. “You can see the influence by looking at the artifacts of the related fields throughout time.”

You open the refrigerator, pull out the meat drawer and there it is: Bacon. You don’t wonder how it got there. Someone went to the grocery store, obviously.

But how did the bacon get here? How did it get to the South?

Mark Johnson knows. He has studied it.

“I’m asking a simple question, actually. How did bacon, which has been condemned by major world religions, dietary advice and—surprisingly—elites and cultural influencers, end up taking over the 21st century?” asks Johnson. “It is such a staple food.”

Johnson is a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of History lecturer who combines his love of Southern food with his love of history. It’s a tasty relationship that led him to write “An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce (American Palate),” published in 2017.

Johnson combines these loves into his “Food and Southern History” course. Students examine how the processes used to grow, prepare and eat the South’s food connect to the region’s cultural meanings.

In the course, Johnson discusses the multiple steps to making and eating Southern food: Cultivation and production, distribution, marketing, preparation and consumption.

Bacon is one of those foods with a deep connection to the South, he says. It’s so ingrained in the culture, Johnson brought in barbecue expert James Scott to teach students in “Food and Southern History” how to cure pork.

Toting a “giant hunk of pork,” Scott, a UTC history alumnus (2014), former UTC adjunct instructor (2016–2017) and current teacher at Baylor School in Chattanooga, came with a scale, sugar, sodium nitrite—also known as pink salt—a vacuum-pack sealing machine and a hog from North Carolina.

Curing meats involves a combination of salt, sugar, nitrite and/or nitrate for preservation, flavor and color. Scott learned about curing bacon as a UTC student, thanks to a book his brother-in-law sent him about charcuterie.

“I grew up eating country hams and lots of bacon, but I’d never done it myself. I wanted to give it a shot,” Scott says.

The guest instructor and students work together on five sections of the hog’s belly. One part is left alone; no spices at all. Scott calls it, “Our control chunk o’pork. When we cook it, it’s going to taste a lot like a really fatty pork chop.’”

Piece by piece, the other hog sections are seasoned. One with salt but left uncured. One with salt that will be cured. One with the mixture of salt, sugar and sodium nitrite will later be smoked with hickory and oak. One with the complete mix that will be smoked with applewood.

Once the spices and other ingredients are rubbed into the pork, it takes several weeks of refrigeration, turning the meat every two days, before it is ready for the smoking process. Once it is fully cured and cooked, Scott brings the bacon back to Johnson’s classroom for a taste testing.

“Next time somebody asks you, ‘Have you ever cured your own bacon,’ you can go, ‘Yes, I have,’” Scott says with a laugh. “That’s part of every humanities education, right?”

As one student says while tasting the different pieces, “I don’t know which one is which but that’s really good.”