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Essay on how food can illustrate our culture
Essay on how food can illustrate our culture
Essay on how food can illustrate our culture
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The experience associated with the preparation and consumption of food always fosters some method of communication. Even without words, food provides information about a person’s religion, lifestyle, wealth, and culture. In Babette’s Feast and Eat Drink Man Woman, this experience of food is primarily how the characters communicate and always involves everyone gathering together. In each film, communication revolves around the consumption or preparation of food. With Babette’s (sometimes unwanted) help, Martine and Philippa come to realize how good food is actually nourishment to the mind and body and evolve from their jaded ways. The Chu family uses food as the one unifying force that brings them together. Whether they are talking at the dinner table or cleaning the dishes afterwards, the Sunday dinner occasion provides an opportunity for the characters to express their ideas and feelings. Each Sunday dinner helps the Chu family sort through their miscommunications and helps each member realize what truly makes them happy. Food is an outlet for their emotions and a way for them to communicate without even speaking; throughout both films the food and the characters evolve in unison to unite one community and one family together.
Usually social events revolve around the consumption and pleasure associated with food, and in these films food is a common force that brings everyone together. In Babette’s Feast, Martina and Philippa work very hard to preserve their father’s old religious ways. Eating food is a religious ritual that accompanies their worship. Although E.N Anderson, author of Everyone Eats, may sound clichéd when he says, “the group that prays together stays together-especially if its members share religious feasts”(155)...
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... transforms into a way to improve the community in worship and in life. For Martina and Philippa, food offers a spark they can use to save the church and keep their father’s dream alive, while also improving on what he built. For the Chu family, the ritual of Sunday dinner allows them to learn to accept each other while accomplishing and discovering their individual passions. This experience provides the characters with an opportunity to communicate. The meals they share together open their minds to new ideas concerning religion, family, and culture, and the transformation of food from stale and flavorless to tasty and wholesome symbolizes this change.
Works Cited
Anderson. E.N. Everyone Eats. New York New York University Press, 2005.
Babette's Feast. Dir. Gabriel Axel. Orion Classics, 1988. Film.
Eat Drink Man Woman. Dir. Ang Lee. World Films, 1994. Film.
Holy Feast and Holy Fast emerged as a pivotal work during the mid-1980s in response to a prevalent trend among scholars which placed apostolic poverty and chastity at the very core of the Western European vita religiosa at the expense of attention toward the forms of austerity, some of which were more common to women. Bynum builds up her narrative by exploring how, although the renunciation of money and sex had a shared significance to both genders, the chief metaphor governing the spiritual life of women specifically concerned food. Bynum weaves her monograph together through a careful analysis of both food symbolism and food-related religious practices as described in the works of female mystics themselves and in the hagiographical vitae of female saints. Although this review will be chiefly focused on the latter portion of the work, “Chapter 6: Food as Control of Self” in particular, a brief overview of its preceding sections may be useful for setting context.
...ctivity. It is the means of identifying the in-group.” Alourdes then says, “You eat with people, you always have food. You eat by yourself, you don’t have nothing (Brown 43).” Within the Haitian community, food is often represented as someone’s happiness and well-being. If one day, Alourdes said that she was not going to eat for a whole day, which meant that she was most likely depressed or upset.
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I have always found communion to be an important sacrament to the Christian faith, but sometimes its meaning can be lost in repetitiveness. Sara Miles, in her book Take This Bread, has shed a new light on what it means to take communion as she writes about her transformation into being a Christian by receiving bread and wine. Hunger is the main theme of the book, whether it be spiritually or physically, all humans are linked by that common need. This transformation goes beyond her and pours into the souls and bodies of the San Francisco community, by sharing not only food but the body of Christ. This book has pushed me to get past my comfort zone and heavily consider the way in which food can be an important aspect of my faith and how I share
... I had never even seen most of the food displayed, I eagerly and respectfully tried each dish. After everyone in the room sat down at the massive table, the Rabbi picked up a glass of wine and made a prayer over it. Then, Rabbi Kanelsky passed around pieces of Challah bread to the entire table. This lunch festival was yet another ceremony dedicated to one of the member’s deceased relative. At the conclusion, the Rabbi said another prayer out loud for the deceased and the relative expressed his gratitude to everyone.
Nora Ephron’s novel, “Heartburn”, is about a naïve cookbook writer (Rachel Samstat) who gets married to a political columnist (Mark Feldman). Soon after, Mark has an affair with an acquaintance of both, him and Rachel’s. Throughout the book, Rachel relates food with the ups and downs of her life. It is her passion. She turns to food in times of joy and in times of crisis and heartache. Throughout her whirlwind of life and marriage to Mark, food is the one consistency, and the one way that helps her explain or get through her everyday life. It surrounds her world and she and food have become one.
In “A Family Supper” the author starts from the very beginning of the story to set the tone. The death of his mother puts a shadow on the story and makes the reader wonder why the author has chosen to tell us this fact. As the story continues it is like a puzzle that with each detail becomes more clear and yet more ominous. The foreshadowing that Kazuo Ishiguro uses leaves the reader feeling like he should be warning the family about what is possibly about to happen. The plot is enhanced layer by layer as the author reveals more details about the characters and their personalities and histories. In this story there isn’t really a stated conflict the reader must take the clues that are given to piece the story together. This style of writing builds that suspense and adds an air of mystery to the story. By not explaining the conflict in a straight forward way the author invites the reader to think more critically about all of the information that is being presented and to decide for himself which pieces are important to the development of the story. This technique keeps the reader fully engaged to the end of the
Originally the narrator admired her father greatly, mirroring his every move: “I walked proudly, stretching my legs to match his steps. I was overjoyed when my feet kept time with his, right, then left, then right, and we walked like a single unit”(329). The narrator’s love for her father and admiration for him was described mainly through their experiences together in the kitchen. Food was a way that the father was able to maintain Malaysian culture that he loved so dearly, while also passing some of those traits on to his daughter. It is a major theme of the story. The afternoon cooking show, “Wok with Yan” (329) provided a showed the close relationship father and daughter had because of food. Her father doing tricks with orange peels was yet another example of the power that food had in keeping them so close, in a foreign country. Rice was the feature food that was given the most attention by the narrator. The narrator’s father washed and rinsed the rice thoroughly, dealing with any imperfection to create a pure authentic dish. He used time in the kitchen as a way to teach his daughter about the culture. Although the narrator paid close attention to her father’s tendencies, she was never able to prepare the rice with the patience and care that her father
Food is an essential part of living. It’s in our daily needs, traditions, and cultures. It has evolved to the point where we are now able to eat foods from other countries and cultures thanks to importation. The tradition of food is still growing through generations as well as in cultures. Food brings a vast majority of people together and that is very well shown in the articles this synthesis discusses. We were asked to read the articles “Unhappy Meals” by Michael Pollan, “Pleasures of Eating” by Wendell Berry, and “We Need to Eat the Whole Food” by Lousie Fresco. These three articles tell the readers to stop getting their food from a supermarket, keep the culture and traditions in foods, and take note of all the industrial part that goes
As one of the many axes on which humans make social distinctions, gender can become closely entwined with interpreting the social meaning of particular foods and food practices. As such, not just particular foods become gendered, but food production and processes of the development of cuisines and the heritage of culinary traditions can also become highly gendered. Attempting to draw the connection between these different planes, this essay will focus first on the Carol J Adam’s understanding of how meat-eating is increasingly painted as masculine in Euro-American societies through commercialism, before moving on discuss Cynthia Enloe’s analysis of how both agricultural production and removed consumption of the banana, among other foods,
Summary: When people eat it is more often than not communion. In literature communion is not always a symbol of being holy. It also symbolizes sex. When dinner turns ugly it mean bad things are going to
In Chang Rae Lee’s essay “Coming Home Again," he uses food as a way to remember the connection he had with his mother. Food was their bond. As a child, he always wanted to spend time in the kitchen with his mother and learn how to cook. Much later, when his mother became sick, he became the cook for the family. “My mother would gently set herself down in her customary chair near the stove. I sat across from her, my father and sister to my left and right, and crammed in the center was all the food I had made - a spicy codfish stew, say, or a casserole of gingery beef, dishes that in my youth she had prepared for us a hundred times” (164). He made the food like his mother did and it was the lessons that his mother was able to pass onto him. These lessons of cooking were like lesson he learned in life. He recalls the times where growing up, he rejected the Korean food that his mother made for American food that was provided for him, which his father later told him, hurt his mother. After that experience, he then remembers how he came back to Korean food and how he loved it so much that he was willing to get sick from eating it, establishing a reconnection to who he was before he became a rebellious teenager. Kalbi, a dish he describes that includes various phases to make, was like his bond with his mother, and like the kalbi needs the bones nearby to borrow its richness, Lee borrowed his mother’s richness to develop a stronger bond with her.
In Eat, Pray, Love the first part of the book is mainly based on Gilbert trying to remember what it is like to enjoy everything around her. Therefore, the first theme that can be found is that people need to enjoy all aspects of ...
Why should our family eat together? - Family Health. (n.d.). Retrieved December 3, 2014, from
The social standing of food became very significant in the early modern Europe. In this period, food was not just a mere substance but was considered an indicator of social position and situation . Food consumed by people was determined by personal preference and most importantly, by one’s prestige, activities and pressure of society in general. Lack of food had social consequences. For instance, famine changed the social framework and relation and even the individual fortunes. Lack of enough food was a common challenge in early modern Europe. Famines occurred very frequently and were numerous especially during the beginning of the fourteen century . Due to this, the fear of famine was witnessed and was influential in the lives of early modern Europeans. With regard to the apparent effects on health and