The Anne Allison Article And The Japanese Style Of Lunches

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After completing the interviews and collecting my own memories, I had the chance to analyze and compare the differences and similarities to the Anne Allison article and the Japanese style of lunch. One of the first things from the Allison article that I found to be the most striking, was the face that mothers spent hours planning and preparing the lunches for their children. In the American culture, many mothers work and if they do not, they spend very little time packing the lunch for their children. Allison states “food must be organized, reorganized, arranged, rearranged, stylized and restylized to appear in a design that is visually attractive” (Allison, 1991: 223). Mothers spend around 45 minutes each day preparing a “small box packaged …show more content…

The lunch box and its style is a very important thing in the American lunch culture. If you have a nerdy looking lunch box, you are not as popular or cool as the others. When I was in middle school, the Vera Bradley lunch box was the thing to have. It was what classified you as cool and what made you the loser of the group. Of course, since it was middle school, you had to comply with the norm and have exactly the same thing as everyone else so you did not run the risk of being the social outcast. For the Japanese, the container was more of a way to transport the food in a manner that would not disrupt the design and the work that the mother had put into …show more content…

This fact, shares a similar quality with the American lunch. After completing all three of my interviews and the analysis of myself, I found that for Jennifer, Mary and myself, only our moms ever packed our lunches. If our dads ever did, it was very rare and the lunches that came out of that encounter were very interesting. In Leo Coleman’s “Food: Ethnographic Encounters” Claire Nicholas spoke about one of her host families and how the family dynamic was made up in the Moroccan culture. She said that Houda, the wife and mother of the household, “balanced child-rearing responsibilities of her infant daughter and three-year-old son while accomplishing the bulk of meal preparation, dishwashing, and laundry for the entire household” (Nicholas, 2011: 86). In Berman’s article “It all started with the Bhajias” she takes a paragraph to discuss the role of women in the family. They used up a large part of their day and designated that to shopping and preparing meals along with “dishwashing, cleaning, sewing, ironing and washing clothes by hand” (Berman, 2011: 34). I think what was the most astonishing thing about this for me, is that women were given these tasks so they would be persuaded away from the work force. Jennifer and I both had working mothers and they still managed to hold a job and prepare meals, do laundry, clean the house and keep all the children very well

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