Throughout the course of this class, we got to interact with a variety of different texts. Among all of the required readings, my favorite piece was “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace. This piece truly represents the complexity of the rhetoric of food. Though it begins as a piece about the Maine Lobster Festival, Foster Wallace quickly shifts the tone of the article from a lighthearted account of the festival to a nuanced and heavy hitting piece about pain and the living experience. Discussing this piece as a class really brought together all of the elements of the rhetoric of food that we talked about throughout the semester, as we talked about Foster Wallace’s depression and suicide, the audience of Gourmet magazine, and the overall themes of the text. Reading this was not only a great exercise of what we learned in class, it was also an extremely complex and compelling piece that reached out to me in a way that the other texts just didn’t.

My favorite piece that I read on my own was “The History of Pho” by Andrea Nguyen. I read this in preparation for my genre conventions paper, when I was thinking about turning a vague vegetarian pho formula that my friend brought back from Vietnam from me into a full fledged recipe. Though I ultimately didn’t write that piece, this article ended up informing my illustrated guide. As Nguyen writes about what pho means to her and the different varieties of pho that she encounters, I could feel my mouth watering and my stomach growling. The way that she expertly connects history, politics, and culture to pho showed just how much food means and why people are so obsessed with it.