SOCI 315- Write a description of a food memory, preferably from your childhood
SOCI 315
Assignment #1
FOOD MEMORY
Write a description of a food memory, preferably from your childhood.
This could be a memory of tasting or liking/disliking a particular food, or it
could be a memory focused on a dish from a particular eating event, collective
or individual. Pay attention to as many senses as you can invoke to evoke this
memory.
Do a bit of research to place your memory in wider context.
Discuss the cultural, symbolic, social, structural, or other meanings of
this dish. Specify the social group for whom it has meaning, for what kinds of
occasions and settings is this dish prepared, who is involved in the
preparation, serving, and consumption of this dish, etc.
Is this a food
that unique to your culture? What are its traditional names? (And do these
names have any special significance and/or meaning?) What ingredients go into
making these foods? How and when are they eaten? Are there unspoken family
“rules” about food consumption (e.g., what’s okay, and not okay, to eat; how
and where should one eat, etc.)
There are many ways to approach this assignment:
1) If you recalled a dish at a specific event, talk to others who were
also present and see how they remember the dish and the event; analyze the
similarities and discrepancies between your recollections;
2) If you remembered a specific dish, you might also try to find the
recipe for it. You may find multiple, slightly different recipes for a regional
dish (say, gooey butter cake or black eyed peas) – if so, see how many varieties
you can collect from friends, family members, and other sources (do not only look in Better Homes and
Gardens or some other standard cookbook, or the internet for a general recipe).
If it is a family recipe that has one ‘original’ source (say, a great grandmother),
see if others with access to this recipe have come up with modified versions.
You might also try to interview at least one other person about his or her
memories, feelings, associations with this dish and/or recipe. DO NOT HAVE MOST
OF YOUR PAPER BE THE RECIPE! Just summarize it into ONE, particularly if you
have several!
This paper needs to be 4
pages or more. You will need to use .12 Times New Roman Font. You need to
double space and provide a cover page/reference page, following APA-formatting
guidelines. These two items are NOT part of your page count.
___
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”
~Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826). The Physiology of Taste,
1826. ~
“When I walk into my kitchen today, I am not alone. Whether we know it
or not, none of is. We bring fathers and mothers and kitchen tables, and every
meal we have ever eaten. Food is never just food. It’s also a way of getting at
something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.”
~Molly Wizenberg,A
Homemade Life~
“American food is in crisis. Never before has there been such a
rapid and profound change in what we eat and how it grown…We have become a
society too rich to farm, too busy to cook, too preoccupied with our created
selves to acknowledge the legitimate and very read needs of our natural
selves…We are a society addicted to the idea of unblemished cheap food.
Americans spend less of their incomes on food (on a percentage basis) than any
other industrialized country in the world. It has been, however, a
Faustian bargain.”
~ George Schenk, “American Flatbread.” ~
