Raining Cats and Dogma

Early suggestions from my students for potential research topics have yielded information on precisely how compelling a topic this class seems to possess. To wit: three pages of topics on food related debates. Any additions are warmly welcomed!

Atkins and other diet crazes *effectiveness of
*cross marketing and (see Subway and Atkins)
*influence of celebrities
*Health aspects of
*Impact on grain farming/ cattle industries
*vs. more established diets
*Economic impact
Other diet issues
*Making Healthy food cheaper
*Food Coaches
*Food/ Diet and the female athlete
*Healthiness of school lunches
*Fitness drinks (effectiveness of)
*Caffeine addiction
*Vitamin deficiencies in American diets
*Trans-fat (FDA Regulation)
*Increase of peanut allergies: why?
*Preventing/ Treating eating disorders
*Low-fat foods actually healthier?
*Commercialization of American diet
Fast Food, etc.
*Cola Companies in Schools
*Fast Food in Schools
*The rise of “gourmet” Fast Food
*Globalisation practices of fast food etc.
*And anti-American sentiment
*Urban myths of fast food
*Working conditions
Restaurants
*Increase in restaurant patronage
*Women chefs in top restaurants
*Immigrant employees in Restaurant kitchens
*Working Conditions for Waiters/Waitresses
*Economic challenges of non-franchise restaurants
Obesity
*Treating Obesity in Children
*and infant birthweight
*Fast Food’s responsibility
*Obesity and regionalism
**Among U.S. regions
**U.S. Compared to other nations
*American Fear of Fat
*American Obsession with weight loss vs. American Obesity
*U.S. opposition to WHO obesity guidelines
Transgenic Foods
*Regulating / Labeling
*And the environment
*Researching
*And third world countries
*Biodiversity
*Small farms and competitiveness
Meat:
*Cloning Meat
*Irradiating Meat
*Mad Cow and other food borne diseases (including avian flu)
*Regulating the meatpacking industry
*Environmental impact of cattle farming
*Beef and American identity
Seafood
*Over-fishing: Swordfish, Chilean Sea Bass, shellfish
*Farmed salmon safety scares
Food Movements
*Raw Food
*Slow Food (home-based eating)
*Fruitarianism
Vegetarianism
*activism for
*health benefits of
*ethical /environmental reasons for
*Health disadvantages of
Organic foods
*and lifestyle
*Organic Agriculture
*As a marketing phenomenon
College eating habits (including the freshman 15)*Impact of scheduling
*Aramark and other University food service contractors
*healthy options for
*Labeling and regulating organic foods (and standards of designation)
Food additives & artificial sweeteners
*Aspartame as carcinogenic
*Natural vs. artificial
*Ethics of
International Food Issues:
*Bushmeat Conservation
*Labor practices behind imported foods
**Migrant labor and domestically produced foods
*NAFTA and American farmers
*Rice and Global Food Security
*Free trade coffee and Starbucks
*Subsistence farming and free trade
Food and Psychology*Food and depression
*Food and personality traits/ moods
*Scientific basis of aphrodisiacs
Ethics and Eating
*The ethics of “adventure eating”
*Ethics of Foodie Culture
*Americanization of Ethnic foods
Miscellaneuous topics
Revising the Food Pyramid
Ensuring Water purity in urban environments
Food and religious identity (Kosher, etc.)
Food Contamination (regulating)
Food industry lobbying practices
Historical impact of food muckrakers
Conspicuous consumption
Alternative grocery stores
Agribusiness issues
Animal welfare and food production
The importance of food to retail sales
Area Food Banks
Fat Taxes

Posted by at 10:41 PM | Permalink

Last week, we read an article in Columbia Journalism Review in which Molly O'Neill, food writer for the NY Times Magazine argues that there has beena shift in food writing from the hard-hitting journalism that characterized the content in the early days of food sections to a more lifestyle-focused, foodie-oriented fashion food writing, which while it may offer possibilities for more artful writing, misses the relevance of it muckraking companion.

Part of the problem with this writing, O'Niell suggests, is that lifestyle writing that keeps its pulse on the latest trends in cuisine, are likely to end up tools of various marketing machines. In essence, food writing, because it responds both to buzz (created by advertising and PR) and to direct lobbying of food writers by food producers, is in bed with it own advertisers, a pay-for-play relationship that she believes compromises her journlistic ethics.

On the other hand, she refuses to question the almost certainly anti-business ethics of the journalistic approach she prefers. Now, I will admit, I'd prefer a journalistic establishment that keeps a challenge of large scale institutions central to its mission, but I am perhaps more skeptical of a notion of objective truth that gets deployed in newspapers and elsewhere. This may be a case where the false-neutral of the "objective" may serve liberal aims, but the epistemological cost is one in which power relations are almost always going to be obscured.

My solution? Aw hell, I don't know. It's just tthat this example shows how fraught even a throwaway section of the newspaper like the food section can be. While I'm trying to spend some energy de-bunking objectivity in my students' writing, I'd also like to see the very same critical interventions that O'Neill's ideal style of food writing proposes, the kind of writing that Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which we're reading right now in class, attempts to do.

Posted by at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A personal history of cultural tourism through food. . .

When I was young, ethnic cuisine included spaghetti and meat sauce. French food, with its talk of snails, was just too, oh, frenchy, and you could forget sushi. Yuck.

Spring 1990. I am just about to turn 16 and am laid up with mono. I read Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and crave chicken chow mein (I liked the bamboo shoots best). I was not aware then how my literary consumption of China (via a western pen) was connected to my craving to consume the food, or even that there was an ethical component to my desire. I had, through Buck, romanticized a time now past in a place beyond my experience. The connection to the land, the strong family unit, the degree to which these were connected to health had me unconsciously believing that if I could tap into that ethic (through cabbage, bamboo shoots, white meat and crunchy noodles) I could tap into its model of health, of vigor, a model that not even Buck's characters could recover.

Summer 1992. I am working at Ann Marie's Italian Seafood Restaurant in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Across the street was Chez la Mer, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in town, right next door to Ground Zero, which, if memories serves me, was one of several bars/restaurants that catered priamrily to Rehoboth's financially comfortable gay clientele. In one fell swoop, French food (and french culture) was consolidated for me as feminized, queer, other, and across the street. Curiously, this association was also connected to upward mobility--that to be able to afford French food was to depart from a heterosexist masculinity. I happily ate linguine and clam sauce as part of my free shift meal. And of course, I couldn't afford Chez la Mer.

August 1992. My first week at American University in DC. An older friend (a junior) I know from home was at school at Maryland, and her boyfriend's brother was also a freshman at AU. I was invited to join them for Ethiopian cuisine at Meskerem in Adams Morgan. After reciting all of the "Do I get more than one grain of rice" jokes, and hearing them from family and friends alike, I got in the car with Lisa, Chris, and Chris' older brother and sped off towards Adams Morgan. It was my first eating adventure.

I was of course intrigued by the food and the decor (poufs instead of chairs), and took a certain peasure in my vague distaste for the food, which seemed primal (we ate with our hands) and impoverished (everything seemed to be disguised porridge). The colors of the restaurant were browns and creams, connecting it with something of a bleak earthiness that particpated in my ill-formed stereotypes of what East Africa must be like.

I have since come to love Ethiopian and Eritrean food for different reasons. three years later as an RA, I found myself in an international cuisine potluck among residence hall staff. The staff of each hall was to bring a food from some international locale. My Resident Director, Liza, had the summer before been to East Africa, and gave us a recipe for Doro Wat, a braised chicken dish in a spiced butter sauce with hard-boiled eggs. It was delicious and rich, and at that point I knew that I had more than simply experienced Ethiopian cuisine, I felt a special entitlement to it, since I had mastered the art of preparing it. Lisa Heldke argues that this is itself a sort of colonialism, that in cooking another culture (especially without appropriate context), I (we) had coopted it for our own self-congratualtory motives--Look how adventurous and cosmopolitan we are. We cooked Ethiopian food. What did you cook? Curry? Ooh, how original.

A later trip to Red Sea in Adams Morgan with friends found one of my dinner companions characterizing her sense of the bread's "creepiness" as reminding her of "human skin." Now, perhaps it does remind her of skin, but I am to this day struck with the degree to which this characterization, consciously or unconsciously participates in a reading of Africa as cannibalistic, as tabboo, as creepy.

I still love Ethiopian food, and still eat it on occasion. Indeed, I am glad that Lisa invited me to Meskerem 12 years ago, and that it wasn't just a single grain of rice that I was served. I am sad that it's taken me most of those 12 years, and a lot of education in critical thinking to just begin to understand the ethics of my relationship with a corner of the world (or the center of the world, if you live there) that I will probably never visit.

More later, including Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Morroccan, Brazilian, and Japanese food!

Posted by at 12:28 PM | Permalink

Through our explorations of a variety of reviews, we have come up with the following guidelines for writing a good restaurant review.

1. Audience: Readers of the review want to know whether or not they should go to this restaurant, so they will not want to just hear your opinion of it, they want to feel like they've experienced the restuarant themselves. This plays out in several aspects of the review. Don't forget that different publication sites offer different exigence for a food review: a student newspaper, a vegetarian newsletter, and a major metropolitan publication mey have overlapping readers, but the priorities for choosing a restaurant change with each.

2. Thesis: the idea of a thesis statement in an academic paper--direct, clear, and positioned according to a specific expectation--is gone here. While most reviews do yield up some statement that might be considered a thesis, it may appear anywhere, or it may be more metaphorically phrased. The central evaluation is instead cumulative, building and changing as each element is reviewed.

3. Organization: Almost all reviews are structured chrionolgically, mimicking as best as possible the experience of choosing, entering, dining, paying, and considering another visit. They frequently start with the chef's experience, or what used to be in this space, or the neighborhood, or how long this restaurant has been around.
They then take you through getting reservations, or checking out the facade, then welcome you to the ambience: music, decor, lighting, crowd, etc. They may discuss the service, if it is remarkable at this stage, or they'll jump into the menu--appetizers, entrees (at which point the wine list may come up), and desserts. These elements may be considered for price, value, presentation, preparation, freshness, variety, originality, or conceptualization (does cocoa make a good seasoning for venison? for example). The food must comprise the bulk of the review, at least half of the word-count.
Other meals served--lunch, brunch, or special events--may come up, and the entire bill may be at issue, and then a wrap-up brings it all together, just like we all do when walking out of a restaurant for the first time. ("Well, that was good!" "Y'think? I didn't think it was worth the price" etc.) Usually, when done well, the wrap up is stylish, and yet fairly clear in its evaluation of the restaurant.

4. Evidence: Details are as concrete as possible, always relying on a tactile sensation or a specific flavor over empty adjectives like "delicious," "amazing," or "savory." When possible, cite as many prominent ingredients as possible. This way, the audience feels like they know the dish, instead of simply relying on your taste, which we all know is subjective.

5. Your taste: While it is indeed subjective, it appears more through your framing of the details (Is fois gras smooth and velvety, or mushy and slimy?) than through simple evaluations.

6. Style: The best reviews show just a little of the personality of the reviewer--personal favorites might come up, and a bit of writerly flair often go over well in moderation. But this is not the place to make your words go off like fireworks. James Joyce would've been a horrible food reviewer. Hemingway, however, may not be much better (see 8c.).

7. Narrative: Avoid telling a story of your experience. If the goal is to allow the audience to feel as if they are experiencing the restaurant first-hand, just through your words, the the reviewer should be as invisible as possible. Narrate a particular experience only if it is both crucial to the review, and an experience unique to a specific incident not likely to be duplicated in your reader's experience.

8. Mechanics:
8a. Tense: To accomplish the effects descibed above, describe the restaurant in the present tense, reserving past tense only to narrate those rare experiences when you as a reviewer become visible.
8b. Sentence subjects: use either direct second-person address, ("You enter into . . .), or put the details of the restaurant as the subject, which often requires passive voice (The shrimp is prepared in a . . .).
8c. Sentence Structure: Avoid both overly short sentences, as they make the review, and therefore the experience, feel rushed. But similarly avoid overly complex constructions that convoulte he central idea, two or three clauses per sentence maximum.
8d. Pronouns: when possible, avoid pronoun use, particularly the impulse to call the restaurant and its staff "they," or to refer to an item of food as "it." With all of the details flying about, these pronouns easily lose their antecedents.

Remember, it takes more than just knowledge of food to write a good review. It takes a knowledge of language and your audience.

(NB. It seems my sense of audience here is changing, since my students and peers may both be reading this site, and since it's searchable, who knows who else? Therefore, feedback, additions or revisions to this guidline welcome and encouraged)

Posted by at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)