So the questions I posed to my class yesterday, in the form of an icebreaker exercise, were the following:

If you could be any food, what would you be and why?
Choose a food that you consume fairly often. What does your consumption of this food tell people about you? would they be right in their assumptions?

When I was applying for college, my personal statement was an attempt (vaguely successful, I think) at 18-year old creative humor. My essay title? "My Life as a Granola Bar." The basic argument was that reading my application materials was like reading the box on a granola bar: test scores, trasncripts, letters all painted a very wholesome nutrictional picture, but they gave no taste of whatI was really like. For that you had to get inside the wrapper to experience the Almond-sweet nuttiness, or the earthy quality from my metaphorical oats (the wild ones had yet to be sown). It went on for a couple of pages this way.

Yesterday, I introduced myself (depending on the class) as either a dark chocolate bourbon truffle or a pecan bourbon brownie--they are crowd-pleasers, slightly decadent, a bit nutty and have just a splash of something a little tawdry.

I also told them that you couyld probably learna lot from my obsession with the Toblerone bar--it says that I aspire for higher quality things, but still want to buy them at a grocery store. It says that despite all of my lefty impulses, I'm still vaguely europhilic, and that if you watched me eat one in its entirety between the grocery store and my car, you would learn that I like to multitask, and that I'm an unrepentant chocholic.

What this all leads to, beyond some mildly amusing insights about how I view myself, is the way that food serves as a cipher for any number of self-identifications, anxieties, desires and aspirations. And it can be used metaphorically in so many ways. While many of my students cited ice cream for its versatility and sweetness, no one said, "I'm like ice cream because I'm frigid."

In gauging some of the reasons my students took this course, I see those trying to come to terms with the way that extensive food allergies shape their experience, I see those wanting to experience "the exotic" (In those words, and words I would also have used as a freshman), students trying out vegetarianism and finding food a site for other moral stand-taking, and students who fancy themselves sensualists.

When I first proposed this course, I think some saw it as a bit of a vanity class--they guy likes to cook so he is teaching a writing course through the theme of food. But as I explore the topi furtehr, I am beginning to recognize the extreme degree to which the very food issues I tackle in class tap into my students anxieties about their own deveoping identities, and about the way we as a culture think about ourselves.

I'd be lying if I said that my desire to elarn to cook, and my subsequent forays into Martha territory weren't signs of my own economic aspirations, my desire to signal my upward mobility, just as my student who says she loves chocolate-mint Clif bars is signalling to others her concern for her health and fitness.

I thought this class would be a lot of fun, and so far (its early) I'm right, but it is going to be charged at every turn, which may make the class even more exciting.