The Chocolate Chip Cookie Experience: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Eating Via Home Baking

February 14, 2016February 16, 2016Leave a comment

“Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household.”—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating”

Food today is available more readily, and in more varieties, than ever before, as supermarkets, and restaurants offer an abundance of convenient eating options. But this proliferation of quick and easy food products, while certainly advantageous at times, is not without problems. In his essay “The Pleasures of Eating,” farmer and author Wendell Berry draws his audience’s attention to a major issue confronting our population: the modern-day phenomenon of “industrial eating.”

Berry describes the industrial eaters of today as “passive consumers”(64), disengaged from and unaware of the stories behind their meals. While, as he states, “Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth” (64), many people do not think of themselves as active participants in this drama. Instead, “eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing” (66), which people hurry through with little or no awareness. Continue reading →

Remember When We Just Ate Burritos?

February 13, 2016February 26, 2016Leave a comment

“Just like the music of, say, Drag City bands on a nineties campus, food is now viewed as a legitimate option for a hobby, a topic of endless discussion, a playground of one-upmanship, and a measuring stick of cool” – Michael Idov

Our generation’s relationship with food and dining has shifted from pure nutrition to a kind of cultural capital. Food has become a way for people to meet, interact, and prove that they are in the know. Michael Idov explores this hipster food culture through his case study of Diane Chang, “When Did Young People Start Spending 25% of Their Paychecks on Pickled Lamb’s Tongues?”Chang is a young New York woman who despises being called a foodie as she explains, “When I hear the word foodie, I think of Yelp. I don’t want to be lumped in with Yelp” (102). Idov chronicles this movement from the old and fusty discussing fine dining to the “Generation X ethic” as a two-pronged endeavor: the growing use of social media and cell phone technology, but also the restaurant revolution in terms of aesthetic dining (102). The restaurants changed and so the culture around the food changed, too. Continue reading →

The Edible Hyphen

February 12, 2016February 12, 2016Leave a comment

“I should mention before you envision me slaving away in a kitchen to create the perfect dumpling that the ones I like come out of the freezer.”

– Lily Wong

What does it mean to be multi-cultural? As a Chinese- American Lily Wong grapples with her clashing culinary identity in her article “Eating the Hyphen.” Wong depicts a meal of traditional Chinese dumplings prepared and devoured in an unorthodox manner that few outside of her family would recognize. Wong is able to blend her two gastronomic cultures into one by simply utilizing a diverse utensil combination of a fork, a knife, and chopsticks—then adding ketchup.

Lily Wong depicts her favorite dish of dumplings: “Thick and chewy and starchy and the bottom should be a bit burnt and dark golden brown from the pan-frying” (40). Her descriptions of the perfect brown skin are quickly accompanied by a vague description of the traditional mystery meat and veggies that erupt from inside of the dumpling with the first juicy slice, smash, or bite. Continue reading →

“No-Good-Dirty-Rotten” Banana Beer Bread

February 10, 2016February 10, 2016Leave a comment

“Through engagement with mortality—engagement with the life-and-death cycles of raw cooking ingredients both practically and metaphorically—I can encounter
the divine, or pure spirit.”

–Jordan Shapiro, The Eco-Gastronomic Mirror: Narcissism and Death at the Dinner Table

Biosphere 2

In The Eco-Gastronomic Mirror, Jordan Shapiro claims that the gastronomic experience is inherently narcissistic. Every time humans eat food, we reinforce our superiority over the rest of the food chain. Shapiro describes picking an orange from a tree and feeling a sense of divine power by taking away its soul and “cut[ting] off the life force” (54). Additionally, Shapiro believes that taking food away from nature and using it for our own purposes makes it impossible to claim that our food is “natural.” On the other hand, he does not offer his own opinion about how we should view and consume food. Unlike Arizona’s isolated “Biosphere 2” project, our world does not exist in a laboratory where every condition is meticulously controlled and human effects analyzed. There is no way to survive in the real world without being a consumer of it. Continue reading →