Use concrete physical details in your description and specific verbs and adjectives in your analysis, avoiding at all costs vague adjectives (‘beautiful,’ ‘natural,’ ‘great,’ delicious,

Use the link below to check your formatting of your essay against the standard for academic writing. All essays must conform to the MLA format.

FORMAT GUIDE—MLA  Download FORMAT GUIDE—MLA 

Length: 3-4 Pages @250 words per page (minimum required length)

PLEASE NOTE–YOU ARE NOT WRITING ABOUT THE ESSAYS WE READ. YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE, USING THE ESSAYS RELEVANT TO YOUR CHOSEN TOPIC AS INSPIRATION OR MODEL.

This topic draws its focus from the food culture writing in “The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken,”  “What is a Burrito?: A Primer," and "Crying in the H Mart, "”The End of Spam Shame,” and “Food and Happiness”

TOPIC

Write a narrative about your own experiences with and/or your personal attachment to a particularly memorable dish and reflect on its personal and cultural significance. The dish could be one that was  a new discovery, maybe during travels or  it could be longtime favorite in family gatherings.

 

Either way, be sure to describe the food, its appearance, aroma, ta ste, etc. in vivid and original detail. In preparing to write the analysis of the personal and cultural significance of your food, you might consider the following  questions:

· Does your food/dish have particular class or cultural associations? What are they and how did they come to be linked to the food? In another article on culture and food, writer Sylvie Kim writes about the significance of Spam in Asian Pacific cultures.  She notes that for a long time she  “suffered from class-based Spam shame” based on her love of Spam, a food dominant white American culture typically associates with lower socio-economic status.

· Is your particular food item denigrated or misunderstood by the dominant culture? Why?

· If you are writing on an emotional significance of a particular food–perhaps associated with a beloved friend or relative, think about how the food reminds you of that person or place or memory.

 

You should concentrate on accomplishing the following objectives in your essay:

      a.) describing the tone, specific physical details, sensory impressions, and other responses to the dish you have chosen in a way that engages and informs your reader.  Well-chosen and effectively organized details will be important here.  Work to give a vivid sensory (visual, aural, tactile, etc.) impression–bring the dish and setting to life by recreating it in language.  You will be using observation, memory and imagination.

      b.) analyzing the reasons for food and experience's significance for you, and making the reader understand this significance. Notice, for example,  the underlying sense of purpose, the implicit thesis in all the essays for this unit, how the details are organized  to convey an insight into the relationship between food and comfort, culture, memory, etc.. A similarly clear overall sense of purpose, something other than just pure description, should guide your writing.

 Be careful—As the analysis is the key to conveying the main point of your essay, it should not appear as one or two sentences at the very end of your essay. Rather, all of the description and narration should be illustrative of this meaning and the analysis should be evident throughout.

Use concrete physical details in your description and specific verbs and adjectives in your analysis, avoiding at all costs vague adjectives ("beautiful," "natural," "great," “delicious,” –and forget “awesome” or “yummy” altogether–etc.) and adverbs ("skillfully," "amazingly," "intensely" etc.) or dead metaphors ("raining cats and dogs") which are either so highly subjective or overused as to be utterly meaningless.