When The Power Goes Out

Thinking about the importance and significance of food respective to our health, ethnic culture and society can cause cavernous, profound, and even questionable thoughts such as: “Is food taken for granted?”, “Is specialty foods just a fad or a change in lifestyle?”, and even “Is food becoming the enemy.” Mark Bittman, an established food journalist, wrote an article called “Why take food seriously?” In this article, Bittman enlightens the reader with a brief history lesson of America’s appreciation of food over the past decades. This history lesson leads to where the social standing of food is today and how it is affecting not only the people of America, but also the rest of the world.

Dorothy Allison’s essay, Panacea, recalls the fond childhood memories about her favorite dish, gravy. Allison uses vivid imagery to cook up a warm feeling about family meals to those who may be a poor family or a young mother. Appeal to the senses shows this warm feeling, along with a peaceful diction.

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.

Soul Food is the type of food when consumed it does not feed you physically, but also spiritually. These dish creations are not derived from grandma’s cookbook, but from the slaves who lived on plantations. Meals consist of more than just the stereotypical fried chicken, watermelon, and kool-aid. Other dishes may include collard greens, cornbread, blackeye peas, rice and gravy, and pot roast. Since these dishes require significant amount of time to cook, they are usually only prepared for special occasions and after church on Sundays. As an out-of-state college student, I do miss soul food cuisine, but when I return home for breaks I always ask my grandma to cook one good meal before I

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.

The Potato Eaters and The Merry Family share the theme of family meals by depicting societal view of middle-class Americans versus low-class Americans and each one’s abilities to provide food for their family; while What ‘Modern Family’ Says About Modern Families depicts our increasingly busy society, family mealtimes are fading, and now it is time to call everyone back to the dinner

Sometimes she’d come to my regional finals. During the season, Sunday was soup day- she’d make it while we were with dad, zipping up and down the sidelines, and heated it up in that well-scrubbed, large silver pot when we came in from soccer. Some days it was kind of a proper soup, a bit like those Penelope had in her mansion near town, from a real recipe- cream of mushroom, minestrone, or French onion. Never cream of chicken though… the place up in town was quite pricey. Other times it’d just be a Mum’s Mix just the way I liked it, made from whatever scraps and bits and pieces needed to be used up. The ultimate rule to good cooking, she’d say, if you put nice things in it, it can’t possibly turn out nasty. In went the leftover bits of ham, corn cobs, softened tomatoes, the stalk of chives sitting at the back of the fridge, left over herbs from the garden, and a tiny cube of chicken stock. Dad would stomp in, the floor boards creaking as he limped into the kitchen. Grey eyed, and growling with hunger, he’d slurp down the whole without even picking up his spoon, bits and pieces sticking to his unruly black moustache. It was true too, I’ve lived with Mum’s philosophy to this day cooking in the front kitchen overlooking the harbour…it’s still loved by

Comfort food is easily defined; it is merely food that brings one comfort. Author and professor Chang-Rae Lee certainly seems to identify with that statement in his essay “Coming Home Again.” This personal narrative tells the story of the relationship between his mother and himself through a look at food and cooking in their lives. As he describes the comforting aromas of his mother’s cooking, readers are urged to look back on their own comfort foods, their own mothers. Although the essay is similar to an informal storytelling, if one looks at who the audience is, who Lee is, they can see that in reality it is a desperate warning to those who aspire to be successful.

no idea on how much. We both are going on what we think is enough.

Thus, this story commences with a typical school day for Mrs. Hefner at Virginia College at Montgomery Alabama. After attending her three classes taught by exceptional instructors, her stomach began to rumble incessantly for nutritious sustenance. Since her heart and taste buds desired longingly to savor a delectable and authentic home cooked banquet, she journeyed with overwhelming expectancy to Fried

In “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” by Rod Serling, The events and characters actions are what make the plot advance as the story goes on, They are in a power outage and They have many actions that lead up to what they’ve done in the story, here are a few.

You might be wondering exactly how this meal time gathering came into being. The truth is it happened because my parents are amazing people. The type of people who you can’t always appreciate growing up, but as soon as you become a parent yourself, you get it, suddenly their awesomeness shines through.

Fisher (1989) recalls his childhood food memories, were women long ago used to perform their family duties much more than recently women do. He remembered the enjoyable cannings with his mother and grandmother, although his grandmother denied men and children participation and help specifically with cooking as she thinks its prohibited. However, despite the horrible, hot and dirty kitchen they used to work in, the food they cook seems

Each family brought one or more items of food, which varied from event to event, but would always result in delicious meals consisting of some of the following: cornbread, biscuits, fried chicken, ham, chicken and dumplings, several varieties of beans, potatoes prepared in a variety of ways, cabbage, fried apples, radishes, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, slaw, onions, squash, chocolate, apple, butterscotch and rhubarb pie, chocolate cake, caramel cake with hickory nuts on its icing, blackberry cobbler, iced tea, coffee, lemonade, Kool-Aid, watermelon, muskmelon, and other goodies. Now you know why it was a