Food in Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

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.

But besides the satisfying effect of fictional food, Hansel and Gretel already hints at a more negative approach to food. The siblings are tempted by the witch’s house consisting of bread and sweets. Especially evangelical discourses demanded dieting to resist the temptation of sins like gluttony or sloth (Labbe 94). Also the required dining etiquette of the increasing middle class, as well as the partly lethal food alterations of nineteenth century England, led to a rising number of didactic tales about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ food (ibid. 93). According to Daniel, the detailed and stimulating descriptions of food in children’s literature are a meant to seduce the child reader to “swallow the bitter pill of

In Jessica Harris’s “The Culinary Season of my Childhood” she peels away at the layers of how food and a food based atmosphere affected her life in a positive way. Food to her represented an extension of culture along with gatherings of family which built the basis for her cultural identity throughout her life. Harris shares various anecdotes that exemplify how certain memories regarding food as well as the varied characteristics of her cultures’ cuisine left a lasting imprint on how she began to view food and continued to proceeding forward. she stats “My family, like many others long separated from the south, raised me in ways that continued their eating traditions, so now I can head south and sop biscuits in gravy, suck chewy bits of fat from a pigs foot spattered with hot sauce, and yes’m and no’m with the best of ‘em,.” (Pg. 109 Para). Similarly, since I am Jamaican, food remains something that holds high importance in my life due to how my family prepared, flavored, and built a food-based atmosphere. They extended the same traditions from their country of origin within the new society they were thrusted into. The impact of food and how it has factors to comfort, heal, and bring people together holds high relevance in how my self-identity was shaped regarding food.

Food is used in different circumstances in life represents a culture, but can also reflect one's personality, lifestyle, and socio-economic

As well as providing nutritional value food and drink also play a significant role in culture and rituals. For

My earliest memory of food is lentils and rice cooked in a pressure cooker. Lentils were cooked at least three days a week. Other days we had different vegetable curries, curd and more rice. This was what I took to school as my lunch every day. As I grew older and started caring more about my social life and people around me, I started noticing what my classmates brought for lunch from their homes. I started understanding how food reflected different cultures and communities. One day, in our

Modern culture allows the discussion of food to be a matter of opinion, but this narrative reveals that Puritans did not understand the different tastes in food that other cultures had. During the first week of Rowlandson's captivity, she refers to the natives' food as "filthy trash" (265). She later admits that the food was savory but can not believe that her stomach was not rejecting the

The Significance of Food In the short story, “Recitatif,” by Toni Morrison, food represents something that people come together for, whether this be purposefully or by coincidence. When Roberta and Twyla had just arrived at the girl’s home, they were not welcomed by the other girls due to their backgrounds, so they befriended each other. When the story explains and describes the budding of Roberta and Twyla’s friendship, part of the description is based on the idea of coming together for a meal, and sharing not only time together, but actual food too. “Roberta hated it and left whole pieces of things on her plate...and she didn’t care if I ate what she wouldn’t” (244).

According to the Puritans, women were only to attend to household duties and not to appear in the public sphere. Rowlandson does more than she was able to do in her old habitat; she began to work for profit and used her special skills. “During my abode in this place Phillip spoke to me to make a shirt for his boy, which I did, for which he gave me a schilling. I offered the money to my master, but he bade me keep it, and with it I bought a piece of horse-flesh. Afterwards he asked me to make him a cap for his boy, for which he invited me to dinner.” (71). Rowlandson vindicated her work by her obvious need to stay fully nourished and healthy. She accepted numerous dinner invitations and gifts of beans, meat and cake. Conversely, some of the “bad” Natives had lied to her when she asked of her son’s welfare; they said he was roasted and cut into pieces and he made good meat. Then she had thought they knew nothing more than to lie. “Yet

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

Sleep, sex, and food are the three most important aspect of a human life. Each of them represents resting, reproducing, and surviving – essential elements that form the foundation of human culture and society. The status of these elements always represents the social stature and cultural ideology, of the desire or dislike of people. Some standards are universal, while some are uniquely formed through generations of different cultural traditions. Food in this case might be the most simple and yet the hardest ideology of desire for anthropologists to catch. Its meaning is never as plain as a recipe of a cooking book, but always attached with the cultural and psychological ideology that is connected with individual and cultural identities.

The movie then fast forwards to a stormy night when Babette, a French refugee, came to them for help. A good friend of hers and former acquaintance of theirs, Achille Papin, recommended the sisters to Babette. Papin knew the kindness of the two and knew they would take a stranger into their home, especially a stranger in need of shelter and love. In France, Babette had been a world class chef. She loved to cook, it was her passion. When she began to work for the sisters (for free) she no longer was able to cook gourmet meals. She was only given a budget to prepare dried cod and ale-bread, the staple diet for those who lived in Jutland. Even though she could only prepare simple, cheap, and rather unpalatable dishes, she still put her heart and soul into each dish. Her love of food was apparent if you watched her cook, she took time to add spices which she picked herself or had specially ordered to the corner store to add to the normally bland dishes and made them her own. The differences in the food was apparent when Babette was unable to cook the soup for one of the elderly followers, so the sisters prepared the dish instead. The was an obvious look of disappointment on that man when he looked into the dish and realized it was not Babette who had made it. Her presence with

Food is only one aspect of cultural tradition, but it is probably one of the most prevalent. Because of the significance of food in our lives, many ethnic and religious groups incorporate it into special occasions. Funerals, weddings, birthdays, festivals, fairs, political holidays and religious celebrations would all loose a bit of their sparkle without the pleasure of food. Various foods are given symbolic and even transformative connotations. This is a universal truth in most cultures.

The subject of food is as diverse and complex as the many dimensions that encompass it. We need food to survive, but once we get beyond the basic needs of nutrition, the subject of food takes on an entirely different character depending on ones values. People associate food with their own personal lifestyles, culture, history, values, heritage, history, identity, and other attributes that make them unique.

“Food is the material object we have the most intimate contact with on a daily basis.” Stated in research paper called Survivor Woman: colonial edition, this statement magnifies that role that food plays in people’s lives. Most people are almost constantly preoccupied physically and mentally with food. Not only that it is vital part of human life where without it, it would be impossible to continue on with one’s life. Also a great deal of time we spend with food tells us that people are inseparably connected to each our food that we eat. (Gabaccia, 7) We spend time with food preparing meals everyday, thinking about what to eat for lunch or dinner, and we also taking time eat. Beyond simply necessary human obligation, eating has important