21W. 012: Food for Thought

Karen Boiko

 

Essay 2  (5 pages)

Option 1: Write an essay in which you develop an idea of your own that grows out of our readings. In the process of developing your idea, draw on and reflect on ideas and evidence from at least one of the following: Berry’s “The Pleasures of Eating,” or our excerpts from In Defense of Food, Why Calories Count, Re-imagining Milk, Stuffed and Starved or Diet for a Small Planet (“Like Driving a Cadillac”).  Further: Use at least one additional reading from our class in your discussion—any of the above, any of our previous readings, or the documentary Food, Inc.

In other words, you are to put ideas from writers whose work we’ve read into a sort of conversation—it’s your conversation, you are setting up the framework and key terms—but you’re bringing in their voices. You may use one of their ideas as the jumping off point for your essay, or you may start with your own idea—but either way, your essay must develop your own idea. We will discuss possible ideas in class.

 

Your goals:

• To develop an argument that explores, expands on, clarifies, questions and/or challenges other writers’ ideas.
• To make your essay as interesting as possible to readers—keeping in mind possible readers outside our class (i.e., explain references to “Pollan” or concepts such as “nutritionism,” etc.—don’t assume your readers know what you’re talking about).
• To demonstrate analytic skill; that is, to work with ideas in a way that is thoughtful, accurate, and powerful.
• To write clear, energetic sentences and to link them in paragraphs that unfold in a graceful, dynamic way.
• To shape your essay so that the whole is greater than the parts.

 

Option 1A: Write your essay in the form of a letter to a (real!) friend

Make it clear in the letter why you are sharing your thoughts on your theme with this particular friend. This letter may be primarily explanatory/exploratory or it may be persuasive. Develop one main idea in your letter, so that the letter is more than a letter, it’s an essay.

 

Option 2: Write a book review of any of the books on the list provided on Stellar (under the heading “General.”) You may aim your book review for a campus, community, metropolitan or national newspaper.  See next page for a fuller description of the Book Review-type essay.

Note: For all options, you may refer to personal experience and observations as well as books, movies, news items, conversations you’ve had, etc.

 

Option 2: Book Review 

In many publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, reviewers use the book they are reviewing as the basis of an essay. That is, at the same time that they inform readers about the book and render some judgments about it, they highlight one or more key ideas and provide an extended discussion of those ideas. That’s the kind of essay you will write if you choose this option.

This essay gives you a chance to enter into an extended discussion with a writer whose work is esteemed by his peers and by the general reading public. It gives you a chance to mingle your words with those of an eminent writer, which is one of the pleasures of this form.

Book reviews are challenging.

• For one thing, you must accurately represent the work you’ve chosen to review. Whether you agree or disagree with the writer’s views and approach, you must present them to readers in a form that the writer would recognize as his or her own.
• But you don’t want to spend the whole review summarizing the book; that’s a précis, not a review. Instead, you want your chosen book to become a springboard for a discussion of one or more issues that you think is due more attention.
• Another challenge will be quoting: you want to quote enough to give the reader the flavor of the book, yet you don’t want your review to be a string of quotes.

You want to engage with both the content of the book—its validity, reasonableness, usefulness—and also with the writing: What are the distinctive rhetorical elements of the book? What are the particular pleasures of this writer’s style? Who should read this book?

Although it is counterintuitive, most book reviews longer than a few paragraphs actually spent relatively little time on judgment, and more time describing the book and discussing issues. Note that judgment may be included in phrases throughout your essay—it needn’t be “saved up” for a section of its own. Readers do, however, expect some kind of summary evaluation, albeit brief.

Key point: Remember that while this is a book review it is also an essay. Therefore you don’t want to write 5 pages of: “ . . . and another thing about this book . . .”—you want your review to develop an idea, to get your readers thinking about something.

 

Working with sources:

For the Book Review: Do not use any published reviews of this book for your essay. Do, however, relate your author’s ideas to at least one other class reading.

For all options:

• Refer to sources in your text, not in parentheses: “According to Pollan, …” “But as Joan Gussow, quoted by Pollan, argues…”
• Do include page numbers in parentheses, just as a temporary reference.
• You must portray sources’ overall purpose and specific ideas accurately.
• Remember that when you are working with other writers’ ideas, you must cite when you paraphrase as well as when you quote.