Is Cooking Really Freedom?
According to Jim Sollisch’s article, cooking is an outlet of expression and is not limited to one gender (Sollisch, “Cooking Is Freedom”). Sollisch communicates of how his newfound interest and love of cooking came out of an act of rebellion to allow the enrollment of boys in Home Economics classes (Sollisch, “Cooking Is Freedom”). He effectively uses an informal tone and an abundance of short, simple sentences appropriate for his audiences of NY Times and blog post readers. His copious amounts of personal anecdotes provide credibility in the subject. His use of incomplete sentences and colorful, easy-to-understand word choice puts him in the level of the reader establishing a personal connection.
Sollisch’s article is found on the New York Times website in the Private Lives section on the Opinion Pages. Private Lives is a section for personal essays about real people’s lives and problems they may have encountered. This explains Sollisch’s subject choice and why this is mainly an opinion essay. He starts off with a personal story of how he first came upon the art of cooking (Sollisch, “Cooking Is Freedom”). He tops off his anecdote with similes such as when he describes the power cooking gives him as similar to “the power some kids feel when they get a driver’s license” (Sollisch, “Cooking Is Freedom”). Sollisch engages the readers with this simile because he makes himself very relatable to his intended audience.
The essay itself contains
Regardless the person, everyone still orders from restaurants, or they microwave a frozen dinner meal once in awhile. In contemporary society, it 's much more efficient to order take out rather than to cook and prepare your own food due to the lack of time. Sadly people even forget the taste of fresh, home cooked meals. Nowadays people don’t know what it’s like to sit down and enjoy a nice hearty home cooked meal, instead they’re always on the run grabbing a quick bite here and there. Unfortunately with such busy lives people don’t have the opportunity to watch cooking shows, go to cooking class, or even cook for their children. People just want to come home and relax they don’t want to have to worry about cooking and all the preparation that comes with it, they would much rather order take out and avoid all the hassle of cooking. In Berry Wendell’s Essay “The Pleasures of Eating”, we are given insight on how very little common people know about where their food comes from and what it goes through. “When a Crop Becomes King” by Michael Pollan reveals how corn, a single crop could be involved in such a wide array of industry and be used in almost everything. David Barboza’s article “If You Pitch It, They Will Eat”, focuses on how in modern society advertising is everywhere and it is taking a big role in everyday life. Through the work of Berry, Pollan, and Barboza we are shown that ignorance is a defining human trait.
Nowadays, many people start living a healthy lifestyle. People realize an importance of caring about what is in their food and benefits of home cooked meals over processed food. Home Cooking is not just healthier, but also it has tons of benefits. Simple examples are saving money, controlling body weight and avoiding food poisoning. “Homemade is the New Organic” written by Rachel Jones for the Atlantic (2015), discussed the new food trend-cooking at home. In her article, she explained how cooking is becoming popular recently. An earlier time, a family which has low-income had no choice but to use homemade food. Today, however, meaning of homemade food changes. People start to appreciate the goodness of cooking at home and intentionally choose the homemade. Moreover, she mentioned that social media has a huge effect on this change. Since we have all the necessary tools and food in our kitchen, only a bit of time needs to be devoted. Basically, she tried to inform a general public that home cooking has an essential value in our life. In my opinion, Rachel successfully achieves her intention with the help of following rhetorical strategies: logos, ethos and counterpoint.
Food can partially shape a person's cultural identity. Geeta Kothari explores the cultural nuances between American and Indian food in the essay, “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?” She expresses this through the symbolism of food, growing up and living between two different cultures. Kothari begins her story as a nine-year-old child curiously wanting to eat the same foods as American children: tuna salad sandwiches and hot dogs. She does not have the guidance from her mother regarding American food and culture. Kothari’s mom curbs the curiosity by reluctantly letting her daughter indulge in a can of tuna fish. Kothari describes the open can of tuna fish as “pink and shiny, like an internal organ” and she wondered if it was botulism (947). The way
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.
Throughout essay “In the Kitchen,” Henry Louis Gates Junior recalls a time when he and his friends and family constantly tried to straighten their African American “kinky” hair. They did this to try to fit in with white people. The writer is using his personal experience as an African American straightening his hair to show how black people felt about assimilating into white society. It was very difficult for blacks to fit in with white people but he remembers how this difficult time brought the black community together.
wrote the article “My Mom Couldn’t Cook”, argues that point by being the sole cook for his wife and daughter. Junod was inspired to cook for his family, by growing up eating the food prepared by a mother who he realized hated to cook and a later understanding that led him to the realization that she did not know how to cook. Tom Junod writes an entertaining piece, his credibility is built through the personal stories he shares and his emotional appeals have a way of keeping the audience interested, but his language becomes distracting and overall it takes away from his argument.
Families are different today than they were fifty years ago. Not just regarding the social changes with gay couples, divorced couples, and single parents, but other changes around us have caused the family to evolve. The invention of the television, the internet, and even freezers and microwaves have changed how the family functions. Compounding changes in the world around us, the treatment of women as equals has also adjusted the dynamic in households. In the novel Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, the author pins the changing of our family culture, with regards specifically to mealtime, on the women’s liberation movement from the sixties. (126) Family mealtime has changed over the years, but there are multiple reasons for its perceived demise. The women’s liberation movement gave women the chance to leave the kitchen and enter the workforce, but changes to the family meal began before women started taking up careers alongside men. Food processing, personal electronics, and the way our society raises children, have all changed how we eat together.
When I read Jeannette Walls’ literature regarding her cooking at such a young age, I was appalled. She was the age of three and cooking with open flames. She could feel the heat rising from the boiling water which engulfed her hot dogs. While she was cooking, she could smell the boiling water that surrounded the hot dogs flaring up. She sensed the abnormally hot air in her nose as she breathed in the warmness. Personally, I can’t imagine being only three years old and cooking. First of all, why is she cooking while her parents aren’t watching? “I could hear Mom in the next room singing while she worked on one of her paintings” (Walls 5). Her mother is paying no attention to her three-year-old daughter cooking. It’s absurd to think about it.
The basic approach to American lifestyle and culture have changed drastically since the second world war. Because of the lack of men due to heavy drafting into the war, women were encouraged to join the workforce. Canning and freezing food became a cultural norm in order to cheaply stock up on food during the war. From the encouragement of both genders in the workforce and the prevalence of processed foods, society has now become accustomed to the ease of less-than-three-minute meals, gradually characterizing cooking as an archaic activity. Michael Pollan, a journalist who frequently contributes to the New York Times Magazine, has attempted to address the trend of processed food over home cooking, particularly in his article “The End of Cooking?”. He expresses the need for the revival of home cooked meals through his argument on how the fundamental views and practices behind cooking has changed since the end of French Chef with Julia Child to the present. Freedman, a journalist who has criticized Pollan in his article “How Junk Food Can End Obesity,” condemns Pollan’s views as glorifying cooking, and presents processed food as the solution to creating a healthier society. He contends that creating healthier processed foods can be the key to ending obesity rather than the praised wholesome foods. Though both make compelling arguments on which type of foods will help end obesity and improve overall health [what compelling argument], neither are willing to make a compromise or
The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region, written by Marcie Cohen Ferris, illustrates a story of southern cuisine in addition to the endeavors of whites, blacks, Native Americans and other inhabitants of the region. Ferris gives the reader a multitude of different experiences with the south during slavery. In these experiences one learns about the plantations, and the way they were set up. Ferris is able to merge food together with issues such as racism and sexism.
The series consistently brings up our primal need to cook, while trying to entice us back into the kitchen with beautiful cinematography, personal stories about people, and the cultural impact of the things we take for granted. There 's no doubt that Cooked is a passion project, with a strong message, however, there are many inconsistencies with the argument they present. These inconsistencies mostly revolve around a failure to negate questions of how to achieve their idealist viewpoints, cherry picking scientific evidence, and simultaneously trying to dismantle food industry fuckery while supporting a fallacy.
In the middle of the story, Lee recounts when his mother became his basketball coach, and how “after a few steps she turned around, and from where the professional three-point line must be now, she effortlessly flipped the ball up [and] the ball arced cleanly into the hoop” (Lee 124). Here Lee feasts on his audience’s desire to find positive experiences in his life, and instills excitement in his audience. To counter this, Lee recounted when his “mother picked up a piece of salmon toast … rolled it around for a moment and then pushed it out with the tip of her tongue” (Lee 122). The anger that wells up in a reader when they find this is frustration that a woman who cooked so much for so many years now cannot even consume the food others prepare for her. Instead she is forced to suffer, which angers a reader and establishes another emotion in this
While culture is prevalent in everyone 's lives, the way that culture is interpreted can drastically vary depending upon the generation a person grew up in. In both Madeleine Thien 's “Simple Recipes” and Kazuo Ishiguro 's “A Family Supper” the way in which the children view culture is significantly different from their parents views. While the children in each story grew up in different countries, the similarities between the children and their families are strikingly similar. The cultural views of the father and son in each story leads them in separate ways, which ultimately causes major rifts within the families and creates significant tension between father and son. The fathers in each story are authority figures to their children. Although the level of authority each father has over their children is drastically different due to the age of their children, it is clear both fathers demand a certain level of respect from them. The suppers in each story, while seemingly insignificant at first, actually carry a much deeper meaning. The suppers play a large role in how each story plays out. Although there are differences in regards to how each story conveys the message of cultural divide, the point remains the same. Culture is always evolving, and while this is generally viewed as a success for society, if those involved do not have a firm grasp on what is changing, it can lead to disagreements within society and in some cases disagreements within
You are what you eat, is a common phrase characterizing the idea of food and identity. Several questions that discuss the notion of using food as a cultural clue will be addressed, such as: What do food choices represent? How do food choices represent cultural identity? Is it important to recognize the difference between what you eat representing what you are and what you eat constructing who you are? Our identity
According to Delaney (2004) suggests that food is not biological, it is cultural. The food that is consumed shapes culture and culture shapes food and intern shapes our identity (Delaney, 2004). Counihan (1999) agrees and suggests that food is a “product and mirror of the organisation of society…it is connected to behaviours and meanings” (p. 6). The way in which food is produced, distributed and consumed illustrates power relations, gender and sex within societies (Counihan, 1999). She explains that each society has a distinct food way which structures the community, personalities and families within the society (Counihan, 1999).