Raining Cats and Dogma

A break from your regualrly scheduled food programming . . .

Yesterday, as readers of the WP Express no doubt already know, my university was the site of a rally for John Kerry, featuring Howard Dean. This landmark rally mark's GW's Kogan Plaza as the political hotspot to campaign.

To wit: as I am walking from class today at 10:30, I see a oldish white man in a white suit, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat standing in from of a white Lincoln Continental with some country music playing from the speakers. In its windows, some handpainted signs that say "Haines for President," and lest we think Haines were running for Student Association President, hastily painted in above the word "President" were the letters "US."

Ummmmm. Who's that dude's campaign manager?!?!?

Posted by at 11:16 AM | Permalink

I have a student who is trying to undertake a very interesting (and really compelling) analysis of the customer/waitress relationship by examining how the tipping custom facilitates an aspirational class fantasy for the customer, who imagines he is being waited on by a servant.

I do not, however, have the Marxist background to suggest a reading or two that I could work through with her to give her a theoretical framework for discussing this issue. Any ideas?

Posted by at 8:52 AM | Permalink

Note: "Buffet" should be pronounced BOU-fay in this context.

As part of the George Washington University Symposium on Research and Writing, my class is going to submit a proposal for a "session" entitled "Foiid Fights Political Grocery and Cultural Buffet. Less a formal academic conference than an installation, the session will be a political, historical, economic and scientific deconstruction of a number of food ranging from Twinkies and Coca- Cola to egg rolls to olive oil.

As one of their major assignments, my students are producing a "Food Backstory" paper in which they take an item of food and a disciplinary lens (say, bananas and international trade) and research and report on it. The idea is to have them write a research report to contrast later with a persuasive essay they'd write as part of or parallel to this research.

Their part in the Political Grocery is to present their backstory research in an appealling way, one that gives passers-by something to take with them, ideally both food and food for thought. I'm completely interested in what will transpire!

Posted by at 10:35 AM | Permalink

So last Monday, we read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation chapter on Why the fries taste good. After pages of exposing the inequities of potato farming, the history of McDonald's preparation of the fries in everything from beef tallow to vegetable oil with "natural flavors" and an expose of what those "natural flavors" might actually be, Schlosser narrates eating a plate of fries at the test kitchen. In response he admits, "I finished them and asked for more."

Interested in how this sort of muckraking is affecting the eating habits of my students, I decided to get sneaky, and for the day's discussion of the ethics of eating, and on Schlooser's rhetorical tactics, I went out and bought a small order of McDonald's fries for each of the students in my 12:30 class. Almost everyone ate them.

The dilemma: One student rightly noted that there's a difference between eating the fries (what she was doing) and buying the fries (what I had done), while another mock-complained that she had sworn off fries forever, until she came into the classroom, "and there they were."

So did I undermine my pedeagogy of challenge? Or did I expose a potential hyopcrisy that might have played out in a matter of days or weeks anyway?

This is perhaps complicated by the fact that I, who otherwise never goes to McDonald's (occasionally Burger King, though), ate my fries dutifully--they were gross, but I ate them. Next time, I'll buy them for the class, but I shall pass on my own portion.

Posted by at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)