Food: Enhancing People’s Emotions

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Foods play an important role in the human’s life and help them to express their feelings. Food can help people on special occasions such as holidays and get-together to know their feelings. Thanksgiving Day is the best example of gathering and offering food to know how they feel and share their emotions with each other. The first novel “Like water for chocolate” and second novel “The Hundred-Foot Journey” proposes the theme that food is strongly associated with a person’s intentions. Moreover, food not only helps us to fulfill hunger it helps to know inner–feelings and expressions.

Firstly, in the first novel “Like water for chocolate” the main character, Tita, was born in a kitchen. She had a deep relation with the food or we can say that she had found her identity in the kitchen or the kitchen is a part of her identity. She uses food as a medium to express her feelings for other people. In other words, food expressed her identity to other people. Her love for food is shown in the whole novel and food became a part of her identity when she died. People love to eat her food. Whenever she prepares a recipe her inner feelings, it affects the taste of that specific recipe. She was remembered by her recipes even after her death. When her granddaughters prepared her recipes, they commemorate her through her recipes (pg.246) and they talk about how their grandmother used to prepare those recipes, and they tried to follow her in her footsteps. This shows that food had become a unique part of her identity and her identity is expressed to other people by the recipes prepared by her.

Also, when Tita prepares food for Pedro ‘Quail in Rose Petal Sauce’ from the bucket of roses which Pedro brought for her, Pedro tasted and closed his eyes...

... middle of paper ...

...els a certain way, you can taste it in the food that she has prepared or made. On the other hand, in “The Hundred-Foot Journey” the food was used as a different way to express the feeling of people others throughout the novel. Hassan, just like Tita, had an emotional connection with the food that he had prepared. In short, the connections that they had with the food can be transferred and felt by other people when they ate the food, just like listening to a song, or looking at a painting. The message comes across but can be interpreted in many different ways depending on who sees, hears tastes, or touches it.

Works Cited

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies. New York: Anchor, 1995. Print.

Morais, Richard C. The Hundred-foot Journey: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2011. Print

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