According to a famous Chinese proverb, “Foods are the most important to the people (民以食为天)”. Specifically, food is an important element in Tampopo by Juzo Itami and Eat Drink Man Woman by Ang Lee because it can be related to work and pleasure. With regard to food as work or pleasure, there are three essential levels. In the first level, food is primarily work. Cooking food as an occupation is shown in both films, where the characters obtain no pleasure from the food itself directly. For the second level, food is presented as a tool to enhance sensual pleasure, which includes gustatory enjoyment, personal indulgences, sexual pleasure, and mental relaxation. In the third level, food can be seen as both work and pleasure at the same time; it is a balance between the two extremes. Reflected in the movie Tampopo and Eat Drink Man Woman, food can be seen as work and also a tool to enhance sensual pleasure, depending on different characters’ individual interpretation of food’s function. In the following paper, specific examples from the movie Tampopo and Eat Drink Man Woman will be discussed. In the film Tampopo, the concept of food as work is depicted in the story of Tampopo attempting to create the best ramen noodle restaurant and in the story of a group of older businessmen attempting to negotiate a business deal through dining in an upscale French restaurant. Food as both work and pleasure is depicted in the story of the young man accompanying the older businessmen as he orders the fanciest French dishes despite being the lowest level worker in the group. Contrastingly, the concept of food as pleasure is discussed in the story of a group of women learning to eat spaghetti properly, the story of a man suffering from a severe toothache because of excessive enjoyment of food, and the story of the man in white suit who uses food as a method to stimulate sexual pleasure. In the movie Eat Drink Man Woman, food for Old Chu is work since he is a chef for his entire life. Differently, food for the second daughter, Jia-Chien, is pleasure as she revels in the process of cooking. These examples display how food can be regarded as work, pleasure, or both in multiple ways.
In the main narrative story of Tampopo, developing
In the second chapter of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster discusses the intimacy of eating throughout literature and how readers should draw important information from a scene at the table. This chapter quickly establishes that “whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion” (8). While the word communion is often associated with religious practices, Foster determines that in literary context, communion frequently refers to the close exchanging of intimate thoughts, feelings or actions. As the chapter progresses Foster begins to provide several reasons for why readers should pay attention to meal scenes, such as, “writing a meal scene is so difficult, and so inherently uninteresting that there really
Anthony Bourdain, world renowned chef and television personality, in his autobiography Kitchen Confidential (2000), conveys his experiences working in the restaurant business-high tension and new stressors at just about every corner. More specifically in the chapter “Food is Pain,” he convinces his audience that the abilities to maintain concentration, handle stress, and keep pace with the quick movement of a high-pressure environment are extremely important. Bourdain shapes this through an anecdote of his past experience working under boiler man (Tyrone) at the Dreadnaught, with his development of ethos, use of imagery, and manipulation of syntax to not only draw in but appeal to a wider audience.
This week materials are mainly focusing on food. The readings are about how food, especially dinner, has an important role in the family, how the way we live affects the way we eat and the regional of our food. As in Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he was explaining how corn is in all of our diets. How it moved from the farm to the feeding lot, to the food lab and into our food. Further analysis of food, and of the sources that describes the food we eat, suggests that it requires a lot of work in the agriculture farm before our ingredients can come together and that mealtime is a great time for a family bonding but the bonding varies with each family due to the different in every families’ culture.
Food is used in different circumstances in life represents a culture, but can also reflect one's personality, lifestyle, and socio-economic
In Jessica Harris’s “The Culinary Season of my Childhood” she peels away at the layers of how food and a food based atmosphere affected her life in a positive way. Food to her represented an extension of culture along with gatherings of family which built the basis for her cultural identity throughout her life. Harris shares various anecdotes that exemplify how certain memories regarding food as well as the varied characteristics of her cultures’ cuisine left a lasting imprint on how she began to view food and continued to proceeding forward. she stats “My family, like many others long separated from the south, raised me in ways that continued their eating traditions, so now I can head south and sop biscuits in gravy, suck chewy bits of fat from a pigs foot spattered with hot sauce, and yes’m and no’m with the best of ‘em,.” (Pg. 109 Para). Similarly, since I am Jamaican, food remains something that holds high importance in my life due to how my family prepared, flavored, and built a food-based atmosphere. They extended the same traditions from their country of origin within the new society they were thrusted into. The impact of food and how it has factors to comfort, heal, and bring people together holds high relevance in how my self-identity was shaped regarding food.
When we are sad, we eat. When we are happy, we eat. We celebrate birth, life, and death with food. Our emotions are bonded with food. A simple bite of food can remind us of happier and safer times or it can make you wallow in sadness, for those happier and safer times are long gone. You can taste the love prepaid in food; it fills you up with glee. However, you can also taste the oppression in food, each morsel sautéed with anger and anguished. Food and humans have an influence, over the other; the two are emotional bound. The food in Like water for Chocolate was more than just for nourishment, it was an outlet for concealing emotions of the characters. The food expressed heartache and joy. It brought out both good and bad memories. Whether they were cooking or eating it, food was more than just, dinner to the characters.
According to McAllister (2006) food and drink “must be viewed as part of a broader social and cultural context” (p. 281) in order to understand the anthropological and sociological meanings of food and drink within society. This essay will apply an anthropological and sociological lens to explore the relationship between food, sex and gender. It utilises examples from anthropological and sociological literature to further explain the relationship between food, sex and gender. This essay will focus how food and can be a marker of identity, and how food and drink express gender roles.
Eating and drinking is not only a necessity, but also a pleasure. Humans have known and experienced this since the beginning of man. Food plays a very important part in everybody’s daily life. However, the role of food in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath vary immensely. The complexity and need for sustenance differ between the books, but both reflect the events, viewpoints, and attitudes of the time periods they are set in.
“"This is going to be a bit of a shock to you, I'm afraid," he
Sleep, sex, and food are the three most important aspect of a human life. Each of them represents resting, reproducing, and surviving – essential elements that form the foundation of human culture and society. The status of these elements always represents the social stature and cultural ideology, of the desire or dislike of people. Some standards are universal, while some are uniquely formed through generations of different cultural traditions. Food in this case might be the most simple and yet the hardest ideology of desire for anthropologists to catch. Its meaning is never as plain as a recipe of a cooking book, but always attached with the cultural and psychological ideology that is connected with individual and cultural identities.
How could food, such an inanimate object, have so much value in many different cultures? I am going to write about Tampopo because food has a strong presence in it. I want to show that food in Tampopo has cultural value and demonstrates the blending of different cultures through the food. Others have written about the obsession of food that is shown in the film and the aesthetics of preparing and capturing the beauty of ramen. But, I want to continue proving that the food in Tampopo has cultural values tied to them. Tampopo displays a wide variety of food that mirrors the culture of modern Japan. Tampopo especially shows the different cultural food that is eaten: Japanese, Chinese, and European. While traditional Japanese culture has been
The book “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel is a story that is connected by the importance of food and family tradition within a Mexican family. Within the novel, the family is impacted by the importance of these aspects. However the youngest daughter Tita is the one who mostly relates to them. The ways these aspects influence her family consequently end up affecting her personal life. Therefore, food and family tradition have an important role within this novel, since through these Tita is able to express herself as well as to show how these impacts her personal life.
Food is very much a part of pop culture, and the beliefs, practices, and trends in a culture affect its eating practices. Pop culture includes the ideas and objects generated by a society, including foods, and other systems, as well as the impact of these ideas and objects on society. For example, Mcdonald's is another of the thousands of fast food chains that populate our cities though they often use the term “popular culture” only to refer to media forms. Their popularity has also increased internationally. Although all humans need food to survive, people's food habits and how they obtain, prepare, and consume food, are the result of learned behaviors. Mcdonald’s, like other food chains, has made an effort to ‘localize’ its products so that they will be more successful in each different cultural context. These collective behaviors, as well as the values and attitudes they reflect, come to represent a group’s pop culture.
Scientific and technological advances are the products of man's inherent desire to improve the society in which he lives. Such progress often accompanies an expansion of intellectual boundaries. As one acquires knowledge, one also encounters new opportunities to be explored. This is true in the area of human genome research. The implications of The Human Genome Project and other attempts to further understand the human genetic code clearly demonstrate the basic principles of social benefit versus social cost. The desired effect is obviously one in which the benefits significantly outweigh the costs. The actual impact of such technology, however, remains only an estimate until this scientific advancement becomes a reality. It is out
One day as I was researching something for my project, I stumbled across an experiment about cooking food with only sunlight. At the moment I wasn’t interested but then I thought to myself. If an egg can be cooked on a rock just using sunlight can a cookie? Then I started going in and then I can up with a question for the experiment. How much solar energy does a cookie need to cook?