Food, Fabulous Food

Bertha made some wonderful cake for breakfast. How great is life when you eat cake for breakfast? I feel so decadent now. My life is posher than I realized

I do a writing exercise in class that involves food. Students brainstorm their favorite foods for two to three minutes, listing them in their notebooks. Then we go around the room, sharing one or two favorite foods from our list. I tell students to pick one food and create another list, a list of memories associated with that food. I model the activity first on the board.

Quesadillas

• trying them the first time at El Toreo with Wes and Jeff
• figuring out the recipe and making them for Wes
• making them for my parents back when we used to bake them in the oven
• making them for Wes's family at the beach every year on vacation; I tried to get out of it this year and make something else, buy they insisted

Students take some time to jot down memories. A few people share one or two, and we look for specific memories that might be good for writing. For example, I don't really remember the first time I ate them. I don't remember the details, and there's nothing particularly significant about that experience, so I don't want to write about that moment. Figuring out the recipe has a bit more significance for me because I'm no cook. That's the moment I choose to write about. Students pick one memory and take ten minutes to write as much of it as they can.

We add one more strand to the exercise: sensory details. Students pick that moments and try to generate as many details related to sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound as possible. Then they rewrite the memory to include those details.

Often, this exercise leads to a text for them. We read a text that was generated several years ago by a student who is now a teacher. The text is called "Late Night Flapjacks." It overflows with wonderful details about a moment the child woke up her grandmother at 3:00 a.m. because she was hungry and the grandmother made the child flapjacks.

The writing exercise actually came from "Late Night Flapjacks." Now that exercise has helped several students create texts, especially female students who write about spending time in the kitchen with mothers or grandmothers. It has also led to texts about good food gone bad. Those stories usually make me laugh. A student wrote one last semester about making red velvet cake and leaving out two sticks of butter. She read that text for her final exam and read it very well. The text used the story of the failed recipe to underscore the value of her relationship with her boyfriend.

Perhaps that's why food can be such a powerful prompt. It pulls people together; it helps create community. I think the Summer Institute would be radically different without the shared meal. Other SIs keep people together for lunch as well, asking people to bring their lunch every day and work through lunch. That may be a little too much togetherness. I like the relationships that form through breaking off into smaller subsets to eat lunch together.

Okay, I'm drifting again, so I'll call it quits.