After reflecting on all of the interesting reading we have been assigned this semester, I have decided that my favorites readings were the “Brown 2014: Good & Cheap” and the “Grub Street 2013 25 Best Food Memoirs”.

The Good & Cheap recipe book stuck with me because of how useful and relevant it is to college students. We are all living on a budget and its extremely helpful. The recipes look great and its a free recipe book, which is perfect for its audience.

I loved the 25 Best Food Memoirs because it was a great mentor text for our research project. It was formatted good and interesting material. It also had good pictures with it.

Tacopedia was the best thing we read in this class. I enjoyed the  illustrations along with the history of the taco. It showed just how unique and diverse it is throughout different parts of Mexico. With each area having a specific type of taco and taco culture. It is interesting to look at the food as the anthropology of the culture. In this case looking at Mexican culture through the lenses of a taco.

The text I enjoyed most that I picked as outside reading was the Israeli Malabi. I enjoyed the Tasty style videos that are not done by Tasty. I also enjoyed the culture aspect of it. It’s from Israel and is popular throughout the Middle East. Having a recipe that is usually not put into Wester focus available is alway a bonus. For me it was something I grew up having at friends houses but my family never made. I enjoyed learning how to make it and the videography that went behind it.

As Not Seen on TV by Pete Wells was an article written about Guy Fieri’s restaurant called Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar. This was one of my favorite articles that we have read this semester. I have never read a restaurant review that was so extreme with its choice of diction. The subtle anger that is sown through out the story comes off as comical. This article was so entertaining and engaging I was truly sad when I found out that there was so sequel. The best parts of the article is all the rhetorical questions he ask. Such as “How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and cold gray clots of ground turkey?” He is absolutely brilliant at asking a question, while in return offering his own opinion about the food choices.

The most entertaining reader I read outside of the course was Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen by O. Henry for one of my mentor text as stylistic help for my dramatic short stories. Like many of his short stories he left his usual mark on them with irony, mocking humor, and twisty endings. With his writing you it always difficult to know exactly what O. Henry was up to. He was is satirizing the tradition of Thanksgiving, poking fun at a tradition for such a young country.

For me, there were many notable reads this semester both in our shared texts and my personal outside readings.  My favorite reading from the syllabus was David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster.”  This reading synthesized many interesting aspects of eating one normally does not think of: science, social class, and ethics.  I expected to read a light hearted review of the Maine lobster festival, but instead was greeted with a debate about the humanity of killing lobsters for consumption.  This reading was one of the best in my opinion because it was extremely insightful and intriguing.

My favorite self-selected reading was Minerva Orduno Rincon’s “The Authenticity Trap of Mexican Food in America.”  Her humorous view into the world of authentic Mexican cooking challenged stereotypes about what makes a dish truly “Mexican”  and shed light on how these stereotypes can negatively affect people.  An excerpt from my writer’s notebook displays how I felt after reading:

[Rincon] thought it was absolutely ridiculous that critics often judge a Mexican restaurant by such a petty thing as whether or not the tortillas are handmade.  She ponders the absurdity of this critique: Why should this be what determines authenticity? Why can’t the more substantive critique of the food’s actual flavor be what critics care about? Why are we, as Americans, so hell-bent on such petty aspects of Mexican food, and what is really important about the way a tortilla was made?

I thoroughly enjoyed her article and it helped significantly in forming the topic I chose for my annotated bibliography.  In my opinion, this reading was one of the best because it kept a humorous backdrop while discussing a more serious topic in food culture: authenticity.  It effectively kept the reader engaged and entertained while informing them about a problem in food critique, something I feel is difficult to do and should be commended for achieving so well.

I really enjoyed the David Foster Wallace piece Consider the Lobster.  I could dedicate the rest of my life to the art of writing and get no where close to his level.  Masking the actual purpose of the text behind a festival review is an amazing feat and I fully appreciated it.  Having not done my research on the author (which I have to note is contrary to what my professor taught us all to do) benefited me in a subtle way.  I noticed the footnotes of the piece hinted at an individual who without a doubt had a wonderful way with prose but struggled with the behavior of people.   Above the fray it’s about the mistreatment of the lobster and this festival but in the footnotes the author is exposing tidbits of his beliefs as he observes people all while hinting at his own internal struggles.  His piece evoked so much emotion and I was sorry to hear how his life came to an end.  Mr. Wallace was so meticulous with his writing though it never obscured him seeking an emotional response from the reader.

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.

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.