Sylvie Kim’s: “The End of Spam Shame: On Class, Colonialism, and Canned Meat”
In the essay “The End of Spam Shame: On Class, Colonialism, and Canned Meat,” Sylvie Kim, the author, argues that no culture or person should be judged based on what foods they eat. Kim argues this by using her love for spam to explain the cultural difference and judgement she has experienced being an Asian-American consumer of the “pink gelatinous pork” (3). Sylvie explains personal shame and fear of judgement when eating spam to her audience, Asian-American readers of the blog “hyphenmagazine.com.” She elaborates on her disgust for judgement by using the argumentative writing style of repetition. She continually reuses the word love. This writing style is crucial
to the way Kim presents her argument because her readers are primarily in the same position she was. They feel shame, disgust and judgement over their personal love for spam. Kim lets her Asian-American readers know it is normal to love spam and no one should be judged based on their culture or foods they enjoy. Throughout the article, Kim argues that no culture or person should be judged based on what foods they eat. She repeats the word love eight times to prove to her readers that this is the case. Kim references her family history and cultural enjoyment for the food dating back to World War II, when nearly 100 million pounds of spam was packaged and shipped overseas to feed Allied troops. She explains how her culture would barter with the soldiers for the meat, viewing it as a hard to come by commodity. She also refers to Robert Ji-song Ku, a staple of Asian-American cultural research, portraying him as a “lover of Spam” (3). She references her family history, cultural history and Ku’s open love for spam to verify to her audience that it is ok to love spam and not be ashamed or influenced by cultural or personal judgement. This message is important coming from Kim because she was personally discriminated and afraid to shower her love for the spam as a child. She wrote this article to tell her story about overcoming judgement and being herself; hoping to inspire others to do the same. Love is the term Sylvie Kim repeatedly uses throughout the article to emphasis the feeling of not being judged based on cultural or personal tastes in foods.
“The Onion Field” directed by Harold Becker is a true story, set in the 1960’s, about two men named Greg Powell (James Woods) and Jimmy Smith (Franklyn Seales) who meet through a mutual friend. The two men become close and soon become business partners. They go around together robbing places such as stores to get money. On one excursion to gain some money, they are stopped by two Los Angeles Department police officers named Karl Hettinger (John Savage) and Ian Campbell (Ted Danson). When Campbell asks Powell to step out of the car, he grabs him and puts a gun to his back, pushing him around to the other side of the car. Powell forces the other officer, Hettinger, to hand over his gun to Smith. Without a choice he does so. Powell and Smith take the officers prisoner and drive them out to a middle of nowhere onion field in Bakersfield, California. Powell ends up shooting Campbell once in the mouth, but not before mentioning the Lindbergh Law. He later shoots him four more times while Smith shoots at Hettinger who has escaped. After Smith escapes with the car, Powell is arrested and blames the shooting on Smith. Over several years an investigation and trial goes on to find out the true events of that night. Both men are sentenced to the gas chamber and wait for their time in prison. In the meantime, Hettinger is suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as depression and keeps having nightmares about what occurred that night. He loses his jobs and begins stealing as a coping mechanism. After some time, Powell and Smith get a re-trial and are sentenced to life. After the trial, Hettinger is offered a job in Bakersfield, near the onion field. He and his family move out there. Eventually he learns to deal with the...
“Out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at fast food restaurant, perhaps 2 cents goes to the farmer that grew the potatoes,” (Schlosser 117). Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser brings to light these realities in his bestselling book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Schlosser, a Princeton and Oxford graduate, is known for his inspective pieces for Atlantic Monthly. While working on article, for Rolling Stone Magazine, about immigrant workers in a strawberry field he acquired his inspiration for the aforementioned book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a work examining the country’s fast food industry (Gale).
For instance, Americans know about the horror stories of factory farmed meat and how cruel the slaughterhouses are. Factory farmed meat is the “number one cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flues, and so on” (Foer 606). The author suggests that Americans are already willing to eat animals that had already been abused, so Americans should be willing to eat dogs. Yet Americans still find the idea of eating dogs repulsive, but dogs would go through no more torture than any other animal in a slaughterhouse. Foer plays on the reader’s emotions to show how cruel slaughterhouses are. These emotions make the reader question if he or she should consider eating dog meat. Economically “if [people] let dogs be dogs, and breed without interference, [one] would create a sustainable, local meat supply with low energy inputs” (Foer 606). With population growth, finding enough sustainable food is a worldwide problem. Foer effectively uses emotional appeal to make the reader consider the current situation of how the world struggles to produce enough food to feed everyone. In other words, dogs should be eaten to help the environment and help feed the
Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” gave the most in-depth description of the horrid truths about the way America’s food companies, “the only source of food for people living in the city,” are preparing the food they sell. “The Jungle” describes the terrible
Li, a teenager, is enraptured by this western product, witnessing the duality of lifestyles portrayed by media and reality. Whereas her reality is poor in contrast, describing how “half the people [she] knew cooked in the hallways” because they had no kitchen, Tang glorifies a lifestyle of luxury and wealth. By falling for the persuasive advertisement, Li becomes obsessed with Tang and the lifestyle it represents. Within the Tang advertisement, all individuals had “healthy complexions and toothy, carefree smiles” and a “kitchen [that] was spacious and brightly lighted,” an ideal desired by lower-income families. Because this vision did not fit Li’s reality, Li becomes resentful and jealous, as it is not the lifestyle she has. Li effectively utilizes pathos in this instance by evoking a sympathetic effect. Similar to a baby who wants a candy bar but is given a strawberry instead, Li desires this luxurious lifestyle but is given her current
... 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.
My Year of Meats (Ozeki) tells the story of two women in two very different parts of the world, and their tumultuous, life-changing journey with meat over the course of a year. Both characters come face to face with situations that test their beliefs and morals, as well as their resolve. There are many themes and lessons that come out of the two women’s’ journey regarding the media, meat products and capitalism, but one of the majors themes that is present in all aspects of the story is the idea of how ideals are carried through society. At one point or another, both women are faced with a choice to either continue on the path their life is currently on, or go against society and change their course. Ruth Ozeki supports the idea in her book that in order to be truly happy and have a less stereotypical society, each individual member of society must be willing to look at their own lives and change it themselves; otherwise, true change will never happen, and society will never be able to move past its limiting views.
“Food as thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating,” is an article written by Mary Maxfield in response or reaction to Michael Pollan’s “Escape from the Western Diet”. Michael Pollan tried to enlighten the readers about what they should eat or not in order to stay healthy by offering and proposing a simple theory: “the elimination of processed foods” (443).
David Foster Wallace, and award winning novelist, student of Harvard University, essayist, and professor, is the author of “Consider the Lobster,” which is an essay that was posted in Gourmet Magazine in 2004. This essay observes the yearly Maine Lobster Festival and explains how it can and possibly is a violation of animal rights, but more specifically , lobster rights. The article has a very broad audience, which can include animal right activists, gourmet food eaters, lobster hunters, chefs, scientists, tourists who want to know about the festival, magazine readers, and even people who eat food. This is because of the fact that all of these people tie in together with eating or cooking lobster, which is the main idea of the annual festival. The class can be lower or middle class, for the people who catch and cook lobster, as well as upper class for the scientists and gourmet eaters who may eat lobster daily without knowing how they are killed. As Wallace goes more in depth with his thoughts and findings, he grasps the readers attention by mostly using footnotes, pathos, and makes the readers think about the questions he asks order to keep them informed and thinking to help process his thoughts about the Maine Lobster festival, lobster killing, and animal rights as a whole.
Woman qua meat is a reiterated conceit”. There is a great deal of truth to Cornyetz’s criticism of women being metaphors for meat and vice versa. Jane herself pitched the “Wife of the Week” featured in the show as “appetizing…the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never hard to digest” (Ozeki, 8.2). The show’s goal is to promote masculine American beef to female Japanese consumers (Chiu). In My American Wife, women are relentlessly being linked to meat and Cornyetz also goes further to suggest that they are being linked to “capital – as objects for (male) sexual consumption”. This expansion of Cornyetz’s argument is important since it highlights the depiction of both meat and women in a pornographic light and represents the insinuation of a fractured America (Chiu, 112.1); as “appetizing” (Ozeki, 8.2).
In The Hungry Soul we find an interesting blend of subjects, methods, and traditions. This book is a fascinating exploration of the cultural and natural act of eating. Kass intensely reveals how the various aspects of this phenomenon, restrictions, customs, and rituals surrounding it, relate to collective and philosophical truths about the human being and its deepest pleasures. Kass argues throughout the book that eating (dining) is something that can either cultivate us or moralize us. My question is, does Kass succeed in arguing for the fact that eating is something that can moralize us as human beings? Although I agree with some of the things that Kass discussed in the book, in this paper I will argue mainly against some of his claims.
My reading prioritizes theories of the body, subjectivity, consumption, gender and difference, refusing to see these works, or the practice of anorexia, as simply a testament to pressures on the contemporary female body or the demonstration of a cardinal relationship between the feminine and food. Instead, it locates these practices as a site of complex and, at times, resistant subjectivities. At the heart of my reading is recent sociological and anthropological theories on food’s role in the construction and signification of the subject and its relationship to the social and cultural order. My reading also incorporates psychoanalytic theories addressing the formation of subjectivity through pre-libidinal encounters with sustenance. This breadth of theories is essential, as the most complex discourses around food and anorexia resist reducing these concepts to matters of nature/culture, interior/exterior, or self/social.
As one of the many axes on which humans make social distinctions, gender can become closely entwined with interpreting the social meaning of particular foods and food practices. As such, not just particular foods become gendered, but food production and processes of the development of cuisines and the heritage of culinary traditions can also become highly gendered. Attempting to draw the connection between these different planes, this essay will focus first on the Carol J Adam’s understanding of how meat-eating is increasingly painted as masculine in Euro-American societies through commercialism, before moving on discuss Cynthia Enloe’s analysis of how both agricultural production and removed consumption of the banana, among other foods,
“Don’t Blame the Eater” is an article by David Zinczenko that explains to Americans, specifically overweight young Americans, about the risks eating at fast food restaurants and its cause of affecting one’s health. In his article, he tries to address the issue about America’s food industries by using literal devices such as tone, logos, ethos, diction, and organization in order to spread his message. He begins his article by addressing the topic and as he continues writing, he supports his topic by writing about personal experience and moves onto the reasons why his topic in a serious issue. Although he shows an overall clear progress, he does tend to have a few problems with his writing that could be improved.
Gianoulis, Tina. "Foodies." St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Ed. Thomas Riggs. 2nded. Vol. 2. Detroit: St. James Press, 2013. 351-352. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web.22 Apr. 2014.