You Are What You Eat Writing Prompt

8/8/2019 You Are What You Eat Writing Prompt

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Ryan Griffin

You Are What You Eat Lesson Plan

Length : 1-2 Pages

Format : 12 pt Font, Double Spaced, Relatively Aesthetic Font Style

The purpose of this assignment is to get you to write about yourself by way of tastes and individualmemories relating to tastes . What exactly are tastes, you might ask? I would call them your personalpreferences related to, in this particular case, what you enjoy to eat or have enjoyed eating throughoutyour life. Everyone has favorite foods and memories related to them. I m asking you to write aboutthem. Write what about them, you might ask? Ultimately, I want you to use food or memories relatedto food to explain what your tastes say about you as a person. And I want you to write about yourself the way you would if you were sharing yourself with a close friend. The audience, in fact, will be yourfriends and peers, as well as myself. We want to get to know and appreciate each other through this

exercise. I m giving you a good amount of freedom here, but the central standard by which I will begrading these responses is:

1) whether or not you take the assignment seriously 2) whether or not describe your own tastes or memories related to food3) how well you relate your own identity to your descriptions of tastes and/or food memories4) how well your unique voice comes through on the page as if you were having a conversation

with your friends and peers.

We will begin with a pre-writing activity. Splitting up into pairs, we will brainstorm together and writedown some of the ideas that come to mind. If writing with your own voice on the page seems abstractor difficult, then let this brief model and consequent recommendations guide you through your initialwriting process and during the peer and teacher writing conferences we will discuss how to further honein on the self-reflective scope that I wish this assignment to have.

Recommendations (Not Requirements)

y Write about the most memorable experience you ve ever had at a restaurant. Describe therestaurant. What did you have to eat? Describe the food. Who were you there with? Describeyour company. Why is this a meaningful memory? Describe how thinking about the memorymakes you feel?

y

Write about what you remember to be your first favorite food. Why was it your favorite food?Do you still feel the same way about it as you did back then? What is your favorite food now?Why is this? Chart your development of tastes and try to connect it with the way in which youfeel you have personally changed and developed as a person.

y The metaphor of food doesn t need to be explicit. Just connect it in whatever ways you feelmake sense. There is no need to force the metaphor if it isn t working for you. But you can stillwrite about how you felt about food and how you feel about food and how that represents


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something about the way that you feel about other things and what this says about you as aperson. Ask yourself these introspective questions.

M odel:

When I was young, my grandparents kept up a fruit and vegetable garden in their backyard.

Some of my earliest memories involve browsing the rows of plants with my cousins, picking countless

raspberries and eating them off the tips of our fingers. The raspberries only ripened once a year, but the

moments when we were able to indulge in them stand out in my memory as one of my earliest and

most pure pleasures. My grandparents did not keep up the raspberries, and they soon moved away

from the house and the garden. When we ate lunch at their house, though, my grandmother would buy

only the freshest organic vegetables and the healthiest, purest proteins. They were health nuts, and I

learned to appreciate simplicity at a young age. A bowl of rice with a shot of amino acid soy sauce and

some barely seasoned baked chicken, I looked forward to the time spent with family and never thought

twice about the fact that the food was not, in and of itself, flavorful or particularly sophisticated.

Despite the lack of any real culinary or gastronomic artistry, I found the family dinners enjoyable and

looked forward to the family time as well as to the meals themselves.

At school lunches, I was stuck with high-gluten wheat bread and organic chunky peanut butter

and, on occasion, a few choice Cheez-its or Pepperidge Farm cookies. After a few years, I stopped

envying all my friends who got to indulge on Lunchables, processed potato chips and sugary sodas all

the time. I grew to appreciate the alternative diet that my grandparents had shared with me, and this

has stuck with me as I ve grown as a foodie and a cook. I started cooking experimentally in high school

by returning home from a restaurant and attempting to recreate a favorite dish in my home kitchen.

I ve gotten more skillful, and now I work in a restaurant that gives me a lot of creative freedom and

nearly unlimited resources. Sometimes my dishes get way too complicated, but I m very grateful for my


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early childhood and my knowledge that sometimes the best dishes are the simplest and the most pure.

I m trying to stop over-complicating things and get back to the pleasure of fruit fresh off the plant.

Reflection

It is very difficult to create a writing prompt that high school students are likely to respond to. I knowthat in my own life, I ve found it very difficult to interact meaningfully with the projects that wererequired of me. Many times I would stare blankly at a teacher s prompt and wonder how I couldpossibly channel anything that I cared about into their respective expectations of me as a student. If ateacher gave me a prompt that was too vague, I would lose myself in the ocean of possibilities and beunable to express anything of significant value. On the other hand, if a teacher gave me a prompt thatwas too specific, I would be unable to follow his or her train of thought and often be unable to connectwith exactly what I perceived the teacher to be expecting of me. It is my firm belief that writingprompts should ideally structure a student s trajectory within a specified form but at the same time

allow for creativity and personal voice within that technical structure. But I ve been reading every hand-out in this class about authentic writing and I find the discussions about the significance of who we areand what we express to be very meaningful. This is why I settled on the prompt that I did. I m a cook,and a significant portion of my days is spent creating and serving plates which represent me and theamount of effort I put into the product that I serve to my guest or audience. In other words, I find themetaphor of culinary consumption to be personally meaningful as an insight into personality. I thinkthat others might also find this subject meaningful, in some hopefully tasteful way or another.

I got this idea from a novel I read for, believe it or not, an Education class. The novel was calledStealing Buddha s Dinner and the central metaphor of the text was food and gastronomic

consumption as a major signifier for personal and cultural identity. I like this very much. There issomething about the pleasure of food that I believe will connect with just about any audience. I d loveto ask my students about their favorite novels, but this would be expecting too much. I d love to ask mystudents about their favorite films or albums, but it would far too easy to repeat the ideal of the popularculture and miss the central point of the writing prompt. Because a lot of people that watch moviesdon t dig them. And a lot of people that listen to music don t really listen to it at all, at least not as adeep signifier of interiority. But there is something pure and personal about or one s relationship tofood. Food is a light enough subject that keeps the reflection relatively neutral while allowing it becreatively personal. And, I think, it will end up representing interiority whether students realize orintend it or not.

I understand that this will be more difficult for some students than it will be for others, and for thatreason, I will be prepared to guide the class into what I m looking for by reading my model as well as anexcerpt passage from this great article by Michael Pollan published in the Times Magazine last summer.In it, he warmly recalls watching Julia Child with his mother and connects it to the significance of foodand food experiences in our lives and culture. It s an ideal piece to use as another model. We ll read thetwo models and I will answer any questions that arise and, hopefully, have a discussion that will further


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clarify what I m looking for. The students will have an opportunity to brainstorm in pairs, and I willinteract with them throughout the process in order to guide them in the right direction.

The matter of evaluation is still problematic, but my four bullet points really would determine the rubricby which I would grade. Granted, they are quite subjective, but I really don t believe that they are

difficult to understand or follow. According to holistic grading standards, I could ascribe a 1-6 valuesystem and grade each bullet point respectively. How could I grade an assignment on whether or not itwas taken seriously? As I pointed out to Kelsey in peer review, it is absurd to think that I could actuallyknow whether or not the student took the assignment seriously. But there is a seriousness of tone that Iam looking for, and whether it is ultimately authentic or not is not for me or anyone else to say. As longas it feels to the reader as if it were taken seriously, then it has been taken seriously. Similarly, analysison whether or not the descriptions were their own and how well they represented their own uniqueinteriority cannot transcend the text itself. The same is true with whether or not the voice comes fromthe deepest part of who a writer is. These are not questions that we can deal with. The point is to teachwriting, and as long as the text accomplishes what is being asked of it, then in my evaluation standards,

the writer is accomplishing what is being asked of him or her. Though this explanation is heavilyabstract, I feel like this concept is understood and accepted nearly universally. We may not be what weexpress, but as long as we express ourselves in the way that we are asked, we might as well be. So if astudent makes something up that is entirely falsified and artificial, then it is not of my metaphysicalbusiness. I will grade the text, and in terms of the text, I think that my expectations and evaluationstandards are clear and approachable at just about any level of education and experience.

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You Are What You Eat Writing Prompt