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Family values in modern society
The importance of family dinners
Family values in modern society
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I chose to watch the Taiwanese film Eat Drink, Man Woman to learn about the roles food plays in peoples’ lives. Eat Drink, Man Woman is a movie about a father known as Master Chef Chu and his three daughters. The basic plot involves Master Chef Chu and his daughter’s love lives. Every Sunday night, the family gathers at an elaborate family dinner and life topics are often discussed.
Food has a significant role throughout the movie. The family dinners are quite elaborate and often have intricate food dishes. The large Sunday dinners with the vast choices of food place a ritual sense on the meal. Throughout the movie, food serves as a catalyst for conversations. For example, many family conversations occur during Sunday dinners. The conversations at dinner can either by positive or negative. During the first Sunday dinner, Master Chef Chu’s second daughter Jia-Chien was critical of Chu’s cooking, she expressed that her father may be loosing his tasting skills to which he does not respond to happily. In other situations the Sunday dinners allows for discussion of big family topics such...
Chang- Rae Lee's Magical Dinners includes many personal stories regarding his everyday life, but especially capitalizes on the many struggles with food his mother faces on a daily basis. Lee expresses his family’s drastic lifestyle change as foreigners moving to a new country by using preparation and consumption of food to symbolize those challenges and changes. Lee’s mother is the most affected by the move to New York, and that can be shown through her cooking. The only thing that Lee's mother has power over is cooking for her family, but she is unable to take control over that task due to her difficulties reading the instructions for recipes or cannot find the right ingredients.
The meal, and more specifically the concept of the family meal, has traditional connotations of comfort and togetherness. As shown in three of Faulkner’s short stories in “The Country”, disruptions in the life of the family are often reinforced in the plot of the story by disruptions in the meal.
Originally the narrator admired her father greatly, mirroring his every move: “I walked proudly, stretching my legs to match his steps. I was overjoyed when my feet kept time with his, right, then left, then right, and we walked like a single unit”(329). The narrator’s love for her father and admiration for him was described mainly through their experiences together in the kitchen. Food was a way that the father was able to maintain Malaysian culture that he loved so dearly, while also passing some of those traits on to his daughter. It is a major theme of the story. The afternoon cooking show, “Wok with Yan” (329) provided a showed the close relationship father and daughter had because of food. Her father doing tricks with orange peels was yet another example of the power that food had in keeping them so close, in a foreign country. Rice was the feature food that was given the most attention by the narrator. The narrator’s father washed and rinsed the rice thoroughly, dealing with any imperfection to create a pure authentic dish. He used time in the kitchen as a way to teach his daughter about the culture. Although the narrator paid close attention to her father’s tendencies, she was never able to prepare the rice with the patience and care that her father
A meal is sometimes not just a meal. Sometimes it hold deeper meaning. A meal could signify characters getting along or not.
... Nestle’s quote, Bittman makes his editorial plea to ethos, by proposing proof that a woman of reliable mental power of this issue come to an agreement with Bittman's thesis statement. Bittman also develops pathos in this article because he grabs a widely held matter that to many individuals is elaborate with: "...giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.” (Mark Bittman) Bittman gives the reader the actions to think about the last time they had a family dinner and further imposes how these family dinners are altogether important for family time. Therefore, Bittman did a magnificent job in pointing into the morals of his targeted audience and developing a critical point of view about fast food to his intended audience leaving them with a thought on less fast food and more home prepared meals.
...ighted by the director’s choices in cinematic elements. Although food and cooking are often associated with the oppression and generalization of Hispanic women, Like Water for Chocolate captivates an empowering view of women using intimate elements such editing, lighting, and setting in order to bring focus to the power of the food. The editing constantly brings attention back to the food. The setting reminds the viewer that the food impacts every aspect of the film. The lighting highlights the importance of the food over every other element. Every aspect of this film is aimed to show that the Hispanic woman, even in her typical role is a strong and central figure in the Hispanic culture. There is power in her life and everyday jobs that has a great impact on everyone around her, which is the precise thought that this film conveys and makes apparent to each viewer.
In Chang Rae Lee’s essay “Coming Home Again," he uses food as a way to remember the connection he had with his mother. Food was their bond. As a child, he always wanted to spend time in the kitchen with his mother and learn how to cook. Much later, when his mother became sick, he became the cook for the family. “My mother would gently set herself down in her customary chair near the stove. I sat across from her, my father and sister to my left and right, and crammed in the center was all the food I had made - a spicy codfish stew, say, or a casserole of gingery beef, dishes that in my youth she had prepared for us a hundred times” (164). He made the food like his mother did and it was the lessons that his mother was able to pass onto him. These lessons of cooking were like lesson he learned in life. He recalls the times where growing up, he rejected the Korean food that his mother made for American food that was provided for him, which his father later told him, hurt his mother. After that experience, he then remembers how he came back to Korean food and how he loved it so much that he was willing to get sick from eating it, establishing a reconnection to who he was before he became a rebellious teenager. Kalbi, a dish he describes that includes various phases to make, was like his bond with his mother, and like the kalbi needs the bones nearby to borrow its richness, Lee borrowed his mother’s richness to develop a stronger bond with her.
Within the notion of feminism, the main question is whether gender is of certain significance. When viewing food activism through the lens of feminism, gender is a controversial topic. Gender is defined as the social construction of the differences in sex. Biology determines the physiological and reproductive differences of men and women, whereas culture and society defines their value or significance through gender codes and discrepancies. For many years now, our culture has appropriated gender into food through stereotypes and advertising, as well as cultural norms in food production and distribution. Years of categorized gender norms influence everyone’s relationship with food, whether it be through stereotypes of what we are supposed to eat or how we are expected to behave with consuming or producing food. However, these stereotypes and targeted advertisements have negative effects on our foodways, as it uses this as an incentive or vehicle to divide men and women into two isolated categories. By enforcing gender stereotypes onto food products, it does not further positive action towards gender equality and in fact, harms the progression of
Sexuality is defined in many ways, for the sake of this papers clarity sexuality will be defined as, sexual feelings and interactions that are defining features of romantic intimacy. (Fering 2009) Child sexual abuse (CSA) is defined in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences as "any [sexual] action that is inflicted upon or must be tolerated by a child against their own will or any [sexual] action about which the child cannot make a decision due to their physical, emotional, mental, and verbal inferiority." Statistics for the prevalence of CSA range from anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of women to 5 to 10 percent of men according to Deegener. (2002)
When considering gender and sex, a layman’s idea of these terms might be very different than a sociologist’s. There is an important distinction: sex, in terms of being “male” or “female,” is purely the physical biological characteristic differences – primarily anatomical differences. (There are also rare cases of “intersexual” individuals as outlined in the Navarro article, “When Gender Isn’t a Given”.) Gender, on the other hand, is an often misconstrued concept that is commonly mistaken as synonymous with sex. A non-sociologist might surmise the following, “men act masculine and women act feminine, therefore, it must follow that gender is inherent to sex,” however, this is not necessarily the case.
Sitting in Mass on Sunday, looking out at our fellow worshippers in the congregation and I wonder if it is possible that about half of the men there and 1 in 6 of the women are struggling with addiction to pornography. After all these are good Catholics. They come to Mass every Sunday, receive communion and act charitably toward each other. Could they be leaving church and sitting on the internet searching for porn? A survey from techadvisors shows Sunday is the busiest day of the week for porn ‘activity’. About 40 million people view porn regularly or a little over 28,000 every second. It would be foolish to believe that some of that number are not in our community leading one life in public and another in private. Some may not even realize that they have an addiction and just think of it as a pastime that doesn’t harm anybody.
...important impact in Diana's life. However, for Diana the relationship with food is different from that of her father's. For Bud, food is a way to relate to the way he used to live, “… he cooks and croons in Arabic to the frying liver and onions songs about missing the one you love.” For her family, food was always a reason to make them feel better, and to relief life pressures. For Diana, it is a way to find herself. Moreover, for Diana, and despite all of the challenges that she encountered, food and cooking are used as a tool in which she expressed herself. A tool to share her good times, and bad times. She used food as comfort, a peace offering, and a way to find herself. Therefore, her simple and enjoyable to read stories came to be a wonderful mix between her life story, and food recipes. Especially for those who consider food to be more than something to eat.
Faust, Aaron. "Happy Meals: Boy or Girl?" Women's Studies. Appalachian State University, 2003. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
The Internet may have a positive effect on the American society in ways that it helps people access many different kinds of information, but a different kind of information can be regarded as useful or even destructive to our society: sexual content. In this paper, I want to discuss how the online world of sexually explicit content has affected society. I want to search into whether or not sex on the Internet has increased sexuality in society and whether or not is has made more people encouraged more to lose sight of the importance and emotionality of sex. I also want to touch on the positive and informative forms of sexual content on the Internet and what positive effects they have in our society. In conclusion, I will discuss what could be done to help keep young kids away from harmful sexual content that they should not be viewing at young ages that might harm them in various forms (that are introduced in this paper) later in life.
The Internet came with an abundant amount of benefits for our civilization as a whole. People became more connected and had the ability to access information they would have otherwise never seen. Yet, there is another side to this connectivity a much more malicious side: pornography. Pornography, typically abbreviated as porn, dominates the internet- as many as 12% of all websites are pornographic and the industry is worth nearly $97 billion . With regards to acceptance, some supported pornographic consumption while others rejected it due to religious or moral beliefs. Porn was considered as something that was not very dangerous. This has all changed, however, within the last decade as piles of research highlights the crude effects of pornography, not just on adults, but also adolescents. Porn harms adolescents through obscenity and early exposure to sexual images, this in turn promotes less progressive gender roles and sexual behavior .