By Michelle Biancardi

Throughout our studies in the rhetoric of food, we have engaged with a wide variety of texts, linking the content, author, and audience to determine where each text fits in the world of food writing. My favorite of our in-class readings is the one I still engage with frequently: Leanne Brown’s “Good and Cheap,” a PDF she compiled as a part of her master’s degree program from New York University. This text revealed to me the import of tone in a writer’s work. This piece is friendly and conversational. It’s un-intimidating, which fits perfectly with the whole point of the work. It’s a how-to for “good” and “cheap” food; its audience doesn’t want to sift through pages and pages of confusing instructions. In addition to how beneficial good images can be to a text, Brown taught me how important it is to fully consider my audience, which has been one essential takeaway from this course.

During the final section of the course, I chose Calvin Trillin’s “Alice, Let’s Eat” as a mentor text for food memoirs, and it is a text that I see myself one day revisiting because I so thoroughly enjoyed the bits of it that I close read. As I learned about what it took to compose my own food memoir, Trillin stood out to me for the charm, humor, and light that he brought to each of his mini-stories. Each of his chapters was narrative in spirit, a guide I unknowingly followed as I created my own food memoir. He created that desirable, “glowy” writing that I find so inspiring as a student of rhetoric, and I look forward to continuing to engage with his works in my future food-reading and writing career.