FASTING, FEASTING ANALYSIS Essay

1. From the perspective of Native Americans, the Spanish and English empires in America had more similarities than differences. Assess the validity of this generalization.

Eating and drinking is not only a necessity, but also a pleasure. Humans have known and experienced this since the beginning of man. Food plays a very important part in everybody’s daily life. However, the role of food in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath vary immensely. The complexity and need for sustenance differ between the books, but both reflect the events, viewpoints, and attitudes of the time periods they are set in.

Neither life nor culture can be sustained without food. On a very basic level, food is fundamentally essential for life, not simply to exist, but also to thrive. A means by which carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, nutrients, and calories are introduced into the body, food is a mechanism of survival. However, on a more abstract level, food is also fundamentally essential for culture by establishing its perimeters and dimensions and in shaping its authenticity and character. Food becomes the

Food can teach how cultures developed their cuisine. Sometimes poverty forces people to utilize strange ingredients. Sometimes certain crops are more abundant than others, thus the brunt of their food composes of that crop. Necessity forces people to improvise their cuisine; in the earliest times, people cooked food to survive, not to entertain their taste buds. People can also learn how each culture savors its food. For example, the French eat their food quickly. People can also learn about the community through food, how families, schools, and religious institutions eat. Food is essential as it is “where culture and ecology intersect”, and the act of eating teaches people humanity. Someone can refer to this source’s many points on what food teaches to build an argument on how food is cultural

Food, has a specific meaning to all of us; for some it is a form of nourishment, for others it is a cultural act,

My essay will have an outlook of the history of the first Americans “Indians” and how they’ve adapted with their religion, subsistence strategy, social organization, and material culture. Over the years things have change in the history of Native Americans, prior to the reconstruction period, Native Americans knew who they were and what they lived for. Before the Europeans came and changed their living they one with nature and the land they’ve came to know. They believe that America was there’s and they lived free. In today’s history of Native Americans culture was founded in many ways, started in the mid 8200s B.C and before Christopher Columbus discovered America. Living in the Americas they were in touch with nature as well as their

1. What were the common characteristics of all Indian cultures in the New World, and what were the important differences among them?

The passage in Fasting, Feasting, by Anita Desai, Arun is out of his comfort zone going to the beach. Arun from the very start, starts making excuses to not go to the beach. He also, does not want to be anywhere close to Melanie While they walk to the beach. He complains about the noises of the wilderness and how horrible they are. He does these things because he does not feel comfortable in these places he has never been before. He talks about how his hands are sweaty and his hair on his neck raises. He also, wonders why people live in such close area to the wilderness. The story says “The town may be small and have little to offer, but how passionately he prefers its post office, its shops, its dry-cleaning stores and picture framers to this creeping curtain of insidious green…(Desai). This complaining about the wilderness is most likely due to the fact that he has most likely stayed in town most of his stay in America. He has adapted to the town he has probably only really seen.

8. Explain four different ways in which the Indian people of Mesoamerica and North America develped.

b) Briefly explain a second example of how American Indian societies in the 15th and 16th centuries were affected during the Columbian Exchange.

Compare the experience of the French, Spanish, and English in colonizing the New World. What common perception of the region did they share? Discuss the differences in their relationship with Native

Fasting and Feasting is a novel written by Anita Desai that narrates the story of the protagonist, Uma, and her family’s life. The novel is divided in two parts. Part one deals with Uma’s life in India until the tragic death of her cousin Anamika, and part two tells the story of Uma’s brother, Arun, as he spends his summer with the Pattons, a typical American suburban family. Throughout the novel, Desai explores the theme of family life and uses the novel’s two settings, America and India, to compare and contrast the values and customs that constitute each respective culture’s family life. At first glance, American and Indian families are foils of one another because of the relationships between the family members that composed them. As

It is a known fact that every human being communicates through language, but perhaps a little known fact that we communicate even through the food we eat. We communicate through food all the meanings that we assign and attribute to our culture, and consequently to our identity as well. Food is not only nourishment for our bodies, but a symbol of where we come from. In order to understand the basic function of food as a necessity not only for our survival, we must look to politics, power, identity, and culture.

Food is looked at as nourishment, an instrument of solidarity, and a mechanism of community (Theres Nothing Like Church Food). Something that we take for granted everyday is a major support system for not only our bodies, but for our families and making the community in which we live in

In many of the stories that we’ve read by Franz Kafka, food has been a reoccurring motif, tying into many of the themes present in Kafka’s storylines. The main characters have consistently been seen hungering and some desperately search for food while others try to abandon the requirement of eating. In his stories, Kafka has used the object of food and the state of hunger to help identify the major conflicts regarding the main characters in their lives. In these stories, the protagonists each suffer in some way and at the root of their suffering is food and hunger, whether it be literal or figurative.