Food Memoir Draft Signature Assignment 1.Please read attached bellow about Real Food, Literature of Food and answer the questions bellow. During this week

Food Memoir Draft Signature Assignment 1.Please read attached bellow about Real Food, Literature of Food and answer the questions bellow.

During this week’s lecture, you learned about how and why food memoirists attach larger meanings to their stories. What theme(s) / larger meaning(s) does Adichie’s food memoir essay “Real Food” set forth? Does she imply her theme(s) or directly state it/them? Does she use any food symbolism to bring her theme(s) to light? Explain.

2. Draft Signature Assignment Part 1

Food Memoir

Prompt: Select a food-related memory from your life to write about. Then, compose a 750-1000 word narrative essay in which you bring this experience to life. Your essay should a) describe the memory using specific descriptive details and b) offer a clear purpose for telling the story (explain what you learned from the experience) (NOTE: this essay should be told from first person point-of-view).

I wrote Three short different food stories that related to me, you can choose one of them and add more to it.

POSSIBLE TOPICS:

The first time I tasted a certain food / dish
The last time I will ever eat a certain food / dish
The best meal I’ve ever eaten at a restaurant
The worst meal I’ve ever eaten at a restaurant
A meal I cooked for someone special
A meal someone special cooked for me
A food / dish that will always remind me of a certain person
A food / dish that will always remind me of a certain place
A food / dish that will always remind me of a certain time in my life
A food / dish that makes me mad
A food / dish that makes me happy
The most expensive meal I’ve ever eaten
If I had to eat the same meal every day of my life it would be
A food that did (or did not) meet my high expectations
Do not feel limited by the above topics; pick a topic you are passionate about! 1/14/2018
Real Food | The New Yorker
Family Dinner September 3, 2007 Issue
Real Food
Writer’s childhood dislike of garri, a Nigerian staple
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
was nine years old, sitting sti?y at the dining table in my blue-and-white school
uniform, and across from me sat my mother, who had come home from work at the
university registry, elegant in her swishy skirt, smelling of Poison perfume and saying
she wanted to watch me eat. I still do not know who told her that I was skipping lunch
before school. Perhaps it was the houseboy, Fide. Perhaps it was my little brother
Kenechukwu, who went to school in the morning and came home just before I left.
The rm set of her mouth told me that I had no choice but to eat the garri and soup
placed on the table. I made the sign of the cross. I plucked a morsel from the soft lump
of garri. I lightly molded it with my ngers. I dipped it into the soup. I swallowed. My
throat itched. I disliked all the variants of this quintessential Nigerian food, whether
made from corn, cassava, or yams, whether cooked or stirred or pounded in a mortar
until they became a soft mash. It was jokingly called “swallow,” because one swallowed
the morsels without chewing; it was easy to tell that a person chewing garri was a
foreigner.
I
“Hurry up,” my mother said. “You will be late for school.” We had garri for lunch every
day except Sunday, when we had rice and stew and sometimes a lush salad that
contained everything from baked beans to boiled eggs and was served with dollops of
creamy dressing. The soups gave some variety to lunch: the yellowish egusi, made of
ground melon seeds and vegetables; onugbu, rich with dark-green bitterleaf; okro, with
its sticky sauce; nsala, with beef chunks oating in a thin herb- lled broth. I disliked
them all.
That afternoon, it was egusi soup. My mother’s eyes were steady behind her glasses.
“Are you playing with that food or eating it?” she asked. I said I was eating. Finally, I
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nished and said, “Mummy, thank you,” as all well-brought-up Igbo children were
supposed to after a meal. I had just stepped outside the carpeted dining area and onto
the polished concrete oor of the passage when my stomach churned and recoiled and
the garri and soup rushed up my throat.
“Go upstairs and rinse your mouth,” my mother said.
When I came down, Fide was cleaning up the watery yellowish mess, and I was sorry
he had to and I was too disgusted to look. After I told my mother that I never ate garri
before school, that on Saturdays I waited until nobody was looking to wrap my garri in
a piece of paper and slip it into the dustbin, I expected her to scold me. But she
muttered in Igbo, “You want hunger to kill you,” and then told me to get a Fanta from
the fridge.
Years later, she asked me, “What does garri really do to you?” “It scratches my throat,” I
told her, and she laughed. It became a standing line of family teasing. “Does this
scratch your throat?” my brothers would ask. Following that afternoon, my mother had
boiled yams, soft and white and crumbly, made for my lunch; I ate them dipped in
palm oil. Sometimes she would come home with a few wraps of warm okpa, which
remains my favorite food: a simple, orange-colored, steamed pie of white beans and
palm oil that tastes best cooked in banana leaves. We didn’t make it at home, perhaps
because it was not native to our part of Igboland. Or perhaps because those we bought
on the roadside from the women who carried them in large basins on their heads were
too good to surpass.
I wish I ate garri. It is important to the people I love: My late grandmother used to
want to have garri three times a day. My brother’s idea of a perfect meal is pounded
yam. My father once came home from a conference in Paris, and when I asked how it
had gone he said that he had missed real food. In Igbo, another word for “swallow” is
simply “food,” so that one might overhear a sentence like “The food was well pounded,
but the soup was not tasty.” My brothers, with a?ectionate mockery, sometimes ask
whether it is possible for a person who does not eat swallow to be authentically Igbo,
Nigerian, African.
On New Year’s Day of the year I turned thirteen, we went to my Aunt Dede’s house for
lunch. “Did you remember?” my mother asked my aunt while gesturing toward me. My
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Real Food | The New Yorker
aunt nodded. There was a small bowl of jollof rice, soft-cooked in an oily tomato sauce,
for me. My brothers praised the onugbu soup—“Auntie, this is soup that you washed
your hands well before cooking”—and I wished that I, too, could say something. Then
my boisterous Auntie Rosa arrived, her wrapper always seeming to be just about to slip
o? her waist. After she had exchanged hugs with everyone, she settled down with her
pounded yam and noticed that I was eating rice. “Why are you not eating food?” she
asked in Igbo. I said I did not eat swallow. She smiled and said to my mother, “Oh, you
know she is not like us local people. She is foreign.” ?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published three novels, including “Americanah,” which is
being made into a ?lm. Read more »
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Literature of Food!
2. The Food Memoir: Themes & Symbols
Last week we talked about the importance of incorporating vivid
descriptions of food into a food memoir. This week, we are going to
talk about a final important element of food memoirs: themes and
larger messages.
In the introduction to Eat, Memory, editor/writer/chef Amanda Hesser
sheds light on just how important it is that a food memoir be about
more than just the food. “The food doesn’t matter, really. What it
evokes does,” she says (12).
In her article “The Meaning of a Food Memoir,” writer/baker Ruby
Tandoh has some memorable things to say about the power food
memoirs have in bringing light to other issues:
When I read Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava, I’m
reminded of the
nausea of falling back into a home that is not quite yours anymore,
even though her home is Jordan and her table heaped high with shish
kebabs and grape leaves, and mine is not. In Madhur Jaffrey’s
Climbing the Mango Trees, I understand the vastness of family,
lineage and legend. In Maman’s Homesick Pie, by Donia Bijan,
I recognise the cruelty and insatiable appetite of adolescence, despite
Bijan’s formative years being spent in, and then out of, an Iran in
turmoil.
She goes on to say:
The proliferation of voices of women of colour in this genre is no
coincidence, and I was shocked to read a list of top 10 food memoirs
where only one of the 10 was
authored by a non-white person. Food pierces to the heart of identity,
forging the stuff that makes
the bodies and bones of us. Women’s stories of
displacement, family, culture and
difference are ways of yanking power away from
postcolonial stories about “us” and
an alien “them”. They refuse to speak to some imaginary universal
human
experience, instead delving deep into fuzzy, tactile,
indefinable things such as taste
and hunger. They centre foods and people that are too
often exoticised, and poke
fun at the obtuse old gatekeepers of the food world…”
A final important thought from Tandoh on the messages food memoirs
deliver:
Somehow, it is in these little details that we see our own lives
mirrored: a first dizzy
taste of queerness, or the dullness of cooking for one, or a story
begun with a full
pot of tea. The people may be different, the flavours unusual or the
places far-off,
but the message – that food informs who we are, and how we love
– stays true.
So, how do food memoirists go about incorporating larger messages
into their stories?
Sometimes a theme or message is directly stated in a food
memoir. For example:
• from “Orange Crush” by Yiyun Li: “I realized that every dream ended
with this bland, ordinary existence, where a prince would one
day become a man who boiled orange peels for his family” (74).
• from “I Scream” by Colson Whitehead: “Say what you will about ice
cream haters — pity us, condemn us, take us off your guest list
— but we don’t need anyone’s validation. We are content in
ourselves” (3).
• from “I’m Scared to Come Out to My Mom…As a Meat Eater” by T.
Wise: “During that time I realized that for all we have shared,
including her uterus, my mother and I are deeply connected, but
we are not the same. I believe that we can tell different stories
in the same language and walk in the same direction on different
paths.”
Other times, themes and messages are implied rather than
stated directly. For example:
• In her food memoir “Rice,” Jhumpa Lahiri does not directly state a
larger meaning
• or theme. However, she repeatedly shows how methodical a man her
father is and how dedicated he is to making his pulao, no matter
the circumstances. Through repeated examples of this, Lahiri is
able to demonstrate how food preparation is a way people show
love for their family and culture and also how some dishes are
not replicable. The rice in this story is definitely symbolic of a
father’s love, dedication, and persistence! Consider: How does
Lahiri use symbolic language to get her message across?
>>>She uses simile (a comparison using like or as): “More water is
flicked on top with his fingers, in the ritual and cryptic manner of
Catholic priests.” [NOTE: In this case she uses “of”—but it’s definitely
still a simile in my book—to compare her father’s pulao preparation
process to a priest baptizing a child with flicks of water].
>>>She also uses metaphor (a comparison without like / as): “[He
is] [a]n oracle of rice, if you will.” [NOTE: In this case she likens her
father to an oracle, a deliverer of prophecies!]
We will talk more about food symbolism when we get to our Food
Fiction unit in a few weeks, but hopefully you can see that even in
nonfiction, symbolic language can be quite powerful in driving home
larger messages.
________________________________________________________
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3. Food Memoir Structures
When it comes to structuring food memoir essays, there are three
options:
• OPTION 1: Tell the story first and save your larger message /
theme discussion for your conclusion. You’ll notice that this is
the most common setup if you look back at the food memoirs we
have read so far!
• OPTION 2: Sprinkle hints of larger meaning and theme throughout
your entire story.
• OPTION 3: Frame your story in your larger purpose/message. Using
this method, you approach your food memoir essay like a
traditional essay, stating your larger meaning up front like a
thesis, and then restating it in your conclusion.
Consider: Which of these structures would work best for your Food
Memoir essay?
Three short food story
1.I was in elementary school and my uncle came from Japan and he brought us some
gifts as a tradition. One of the gifts it was Ramen noodle; we got very excited
because we haven’t had Japanese Ramen Noodles. Back in the days you could not
find much Asian restaurant in Iran. My uncle said is just taking 5 to 10 minute; I
didn’t think is going to be one of my favorite foods. After a while my dad
consistently looking for Noodles at different Markets but none of the markets had
Asian food. I remember one day when he came back from his work he had a big box
on his hands and he said I finally found Noodles and I got a lot of those because I
wasn’t sure they’ll bring it again! My brothers and me were crazy about it and
screaming for those simple noodles, which was very delicious and easy to make. The
funny part was those days we were watching Oshin a Japanese TV Series and I was
seeing their different foods and Ramen noodles on the TV; therefore, I was obsess
with their foods and their small bowl and chopsticks but sadly we didn’t had one so
me and my brothers use straw which was not very helpful to eat the noodles with.
We keep trying and trying until my dad and my mom got mad because we just want
those chopsticks and we event couldn’t eat our food. 6 years ago when I came to
united state for the first time, my dad took me to Japanese restaurant and he told
me here you go chopsticks and we laughed, for the first time I taste the real
Ramen noodle soup which was very tasty and so good and we both laughed
about those days that I was obsess with chopsticks and noodles.
2.Back in the days when I was a teenager for the first time I went to a date and it
was high class restaurant which I was not expected because we were very young
and I never thought of it so I was very nervous even I couldn’t order food therefor
he order it for me and when our food came he start eating but I had a hard time to
cut the meat not because of the quality of the food, food was very delicious but he
ordered file minion shish kabob and it the pends how they make it because some
people making it differently and it was hard for me to cut the meat and finally I
dropped almost more than a half of my food on the ground which was very
embarrassing. He tried to help me too but it got worse. Now each time my friends
want to go to a date I recommend them if they’re going to a Persian restaurant do
not order shish kabob.
3.My mom had cancer and I remember does days how everything was too hard for
all of our family member one day my grandma invited all the family and we gathered
together because of my mom, my grandmother wanted to make Ash Reshteh which
is a thick vegetable, noodle soup, and is traditionally prepared for different
occasions; for example, ash-e posht-e pa, which marks farewell ceremonies, is
cooked to shorten the duration of the sojourn. According to Islamic ritual, acts of
charity alleviate illness, and these acts are also accompanied by the preparation of
some type of ash for distribution among the needy. Therefor all of the family start
prepare the intergradient for ash, they put big pots in the front yard and everyone
stirring food and prayed Also, they prepare the Ash Reshteh in to separate bawls for
neighbors and my Uncles and cousins carry the big tray of Ash Reshte .

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