Monday, May 13, 2019
LS 20E Finals
Allegory of California
- Lady Calafia
- Nature of California
- Berkeley food culture, farm to table
The Conquest of Bread
- For over a century, A sweeping analysis of California's agrarian history from 1850 to
the present. For over a century, California has been the world's most advanced
agricultural zone, an agrarian juggernaut that not only outproduces every state in
America, but also most countries. California's success, however, has come at
significant costs. Never a family-farm region like the Midwest, California's
landscape and Mediterranean climate have been manipulated and exploited to
serve modern business interests. Home to gargantuan accomplishments such as the
world's largest water storage and transfer network, California also relies on an
army of Mexican farm laborers who live and work under dismal conditions. In
The Conquest of Bread, acclaimed historian Richard A. Walker offers a wide-angle
overview of the agro-industrial system of production in California from farm to table.
He lays bare the long evolution of each link in the food chain, showing how a
persistent emphasis on productivity and growth allowed California to outpace
agriculture elsewhere in the United States. Full of thunder and surprises, The
Conquest of Bread allows the reader to weigh the claims of both boosters and critics
in the debate over the most extraordinary agricultural profusion in the modern world.
The Folklore of Climatology
- Packed With Magnificent Material On Southern California's Galaxy of Person Alities,
This Book Provides Insights Into Subjects Ranging From The Origins Hollywood To
The Flowering of International-Style Architecture. and It Does That By Looking At
Personalities As Diverse As Helen Hunt Jackson To Aimee Semple McPherson,
Huntington The Finan- Cier To Hatfield The Rainmaker.
- "The climate of Southern California is palpable: a commodity that can be labeled,
priced and marketed. […] The climate is the region. It has attracted unlimited
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resources of manpower and wealth, made possible intensive agricultural
development, and located specialized industries, such as motion pictures. […] For
the charm of Southern California is largely to be found in the air and the light. Light
and air are really one element: indivisible, mutually interacting, thoroughly
interpenetrated" (McWilliams, pg.s 6-7).
- "Southern California is man-made, a gigantic improvisation. Virtually everything in
the region has been imported: plants, flowers, shrubs, trees, people, water,
electrical energy, and, to some extent, even the soils. […] Even the weeds of the
region are not native" (McWilliams, pg. 13).
- "Although Southern Californians do not understand the semi-arid environment in
which they live, they are haunted by a vague and nameless fear of future
disaster. […] The belief in some awful fate that will some day engulf the region is
widespread and persistent and has a history […] It is the odd combination of almost
perpetual sunshine with a lush, but not indigenous, vegetation that produces this
impression of impermanence. Even newcomers are vaguely aware that the region is
semi-arid, that the desert is near, and that all the throbbing, bustling life of Southern
California is based on a single shaky premise, namely, that the aqueduct life-lines will
continue to bring an adequate supply of water to the region. The exotic has been
imposed on this semi-arid land; it is not native" (199-200).
Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden
- This innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship
among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export—the
orange. From the 1870s onward, California oranges were packaged in crates
bearing colorful images of an Edenic landscape. This book demystifies those lush
images, revealing the orange as a manufactured product of the state's orange
industry. Orange Empire brings together for the first time the full story of the orange
industry—how growers, scientists, and workers transformed the natural and social
landscape of California, turning it into a factory for the production of millions of
oranges. That industry put up billboards in cities across the nation and placed
enticing pictures of sun-kissed fruits into nearly every American's home. It convinced
Americans that oranges could be consumed as embodiments of pure nature and
talismans of good health. But, as this book shows, the tables were turned during
the Great Depression when Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, Dorothea Lange, and
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John Steinbeck made the Orange Empire into a symbol of what was wrong with
America's relationship to nature.
- Excellent perspective on the history of the orange in Southern California. Sackman
seamlessly weaves in politics, literature, migrant workers, unions and the dust bowl. I
learned that Sunkist "invented" orange juice. A wonderfully researched tale of the
battle between agriculture and industry during the 20th century.
- Sackman begins Part I, "Fabricating Eden," by looking at the role of science and
technology in developing the varieties of fruit that made the citrus industry
possible. Selective breeding and pesticides profoundly altered the orange itself in
order to create a product that could withstand shipping and handling. He points out
that the very presence of citrus agriculture in Southern California is in fact based
more on massive irrigation and an alliance between growers and boosters than on
any natural advantages. Sackman does an excellent job grounding the early industry
in the larger development of nineteenth-century "scientific" agriculture. He also
explores how the growing industry displaced Native Americans and Mexican
Americans from the landscape, while it increasingly focused on the latter as a source
of labor.
- Part II, "Work in the Garden," deals with the key role that advertising and
promotion played in the industry's development. Citrus growers realized that they
needed to create a market for oranges, lemons, and other citrus products among an
American public that historically had looked at such fruits as a special occasion
treat. The key player in this was the California Fruit Grower's Exchange (the
forerunner of Sunkist), created in 1893. The exchange became a powerful tool for
growers who wanted to employ cooperative marketing techniques. From billboards
to mass magazines, citrus boosters bombarded American and international markets
with advertising. Although their claims were at times spurious, these campaigns were
unquestionably successful in creating and expanding the market. The key to this
success, Sackman's innovative analysis reveals, was that the advertisements
presented citrus not as a product already fundamentally altered by human hands but
as the very essence of nature itself. By associating oranges with California, with
sunlight, and with health, the citrus industry successfully removed itself from the
equation in the minds of consumers. As far as the average American knew (or
knows), consuming an orange is consuming nature.
- The growers, boosters, and advertisers insisted the citrus industry was good for
California and for the nation. However, in Part III, "Reclaiming Eden," Sackman
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introduces us to those who attempted to challenge the growers' hegemony.
Reformers such as Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange, and the fiction of John
Steinbeck, portrayed the citrus business as a serpent in the garden. Sackman makes
a convincing case that citrus farmers, who claimed a sort of small farmer,
agrarian [End Page 217] rhetoric for themselves, had long been exploiting their labor
force. In fact, he suggests, the citrus industry has played a profound role in the
formation of racial ideology in the state by suggesting that some races (particularly
Mexicans and Mexican Americans) were uniquely suited for agricultural work but did
not need the protection of unions. Taylor, Lange and, to a lesser degree, Steinbeck
turned citrus's image on its head by arguing that the industry had in fact stolen away
the dreams of small farmers when it created enormous factory farms dependent on
an underpaid workforce. The exploited worker thus "seemed to jeopardize
something vital in American mythology—that its genesis and strength came from the
soil and expansion westward" (p. 236). Sadly, neither the state nor the federal
government chose to intervene in the often hostile...
Jennifer Raab, “Wrapped Oranges,”
- Sexual desire
- Fruit
Judith Pact, “Recipe for S&M Marmalade”
- Sexual desire
- “naked” “blushing”
- Fruit
Gary Soto, “Oranges”
- Oranges is a poem that focuses on the feelings and thoughts of an adolescent
boy about to meet up with a girl. It's a first date so he is full of nerves and
apprehension, but the two oranges he has in his pocket help offset the winter
cold and inner fear.
- Gary Soto uses a range of poetic device to get his message over - simile, metaphor,
personification and lots of figurative language help keep the reader interested. Add
vivid imagery to the pot and it is plain that Oranges appeals greatly to the senses.
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- The speaker is looking back to his first date, back to winter time cold. It is a
bittersweet thrill. The weather doesn't help his cause but to the rescue so to speak
come the oranges, full of warmth and color. They are the symbols of hope and
confidence.
- Oranges become a symbol of warmth, confidence, love and passion. Newly
planted trees represent the growth of what could be a first love, fresh and full of
potential. The bell in the shop and the aisle might be the echo of church - a wedding
ceremony?
Harvest Gypsies
- Dust Bowl, Migrant workers, immigrants, poor living condition, corporate farming, he
system of oppression that large farms
- The Harvest Gypsies is a series of articles by John Steinbeck written on commission
for The San Francisco News focusing on the lives and times of migrant workers in
California's Central Valley.[1] Published daily from October 5–12, 1936, Steinbeck
delves into the hardships and triumphs of American migrant workers during the
Great Depression, tracing their paths and stories from crop to crop as they eked out
a stark existence.
- From 1931 to 1939, drought and soil erosion across the Midwestern and Southern
Plains created one of the lasting images of the Great Depression: the Dust Bowl.
[5]During this time, over one million Americans emigrated from their native states
to California. The number of emigrants was equal to more than twenty percent of the
total population of California at the time.[6] The abundance of workers desperate for
employment led to extraordinarily low wages, which in turn created
widespread underemployment and poverty amongst the migrant workers. Resultant
of these conditions were the worker camps, labor strife, and horrific living
arrangements described by Steinbeck in The Harvest Gypsies. Steinbeck, a
California native himself, sought to capture these new developments and their
impact on California culture.[7] He first addressed the issue with his novel In Dubious
Battle (1936), which took a harvesters’ strike as its subject.[8] Impressed by the
novel, San Francisco News editor George West commissioned Steinbeck to report
on the situation with a series of articles in the fall of 1936.[9]
Charles Bukowski, “dinner, 1933”
- Funny
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- Family
- Focus on labor, building sympathy
- Thinly veiled racism
- Henry Charles Bukowski (born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski) was a German-born
American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the
social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles.It is marked
by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol,
relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of
poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty
books
The Grapes of Wrath
- Gap between affluence and complacency
- Great Depression, dust bowl
- The Grapes of Wrath is a 1940 American drama film directed by John Ford. It was
based on John Steinbeck's 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The
screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and the executive producer was Darryl
F. Zanuck.[3]
- The film tells the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma family, who, after losing their
farm during the Great Depression in the 1930s, become migrant workers and
end up in California. The motion picture details their arduous journey across the
United States as they travel to California in search of work and opportunities for the
family members.
- The film is widely considered to be one of the greatest American films of all time. In
1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the
United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally,
historically, or aesthetically significant."
- Tom is moved to work for change by what he has witnessed in the various camps.
He tells his family that he plans to carry on Casy's mission in the world by fighting for
social reform. He leaves to seek a new world and to join the movement
committed to social justice.
- Tom Joad says:
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- I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever
there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin'
up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way
kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people
are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build, I'll be there, too.
- As the family moves on again, they discuss the fear and difficulties they have had.
Ma Joad concludes the film, saying:
- I ain't never gonna be scared no more. I was, though. For a while it looked as though
we was beat. Good and beat. Looked like we didn't have nobody in the whole wide
world but enemies. Like nobody was friendly no more. Made me feel kinda bad and
scared too, like we was lost and nobody cared.... Rich fellas come up and they die,
and their kids ain't no good and they die out, but we keep a-coming. We're the
people that live. They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa,
cos we're the people.
How to Cook a Wolf
- Hunger, wartime, optimism
- M.F.K. Fisher's guide to living happily even in trying times, which was first published
during the Second World War in the days of ration cards; includes more than seventy
recipes based on food staples and features sections such as "How to Keep Alive"
and "How to Comfort Sorrow.”.
- How to Cook a Wolf is M.F.K. Fisher's chatty, scatterbrained wartime guide for
citizens hampered by food shortages or just lack of discretionary income generally.
There's no actual wolf-cooking, which disappointed me: the wolf is just a metaphor
for hunger.
Lizzie Collingham, “The Taste of War,”
- Post War
- Propganda
- Shows how control of food and its production is crucial to total war. Tracing the
interaction between food and strategy, on both the military and home fronts, this title
demonstrates how the issue of access to food was a driving force within Nazi policy
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and contributed to the decision to murder hundreds of thousands of 'useless eaters'
in Europe.
- The new-found prosperity of American workers allowed them to buy goods which
had previously been out of their reach. Peggy Terry overheard ‘a woman saying on
the bus that she hoped the war didn’t end until she got her refrigerator paid for. An
old man hit her over the head with an umbrella.’
- But the desires generated by wealth were thwarted by shortages of every
imaginable consumable as industry focused its energies on armaments.
Instead, consumers were urged to save and, to encourage them, a vision of a postwar world of plenty was disseminated through advertising campaigns which spread
the government’s propaganda messages while maintaining a brand presence in
the eyes of potential consumers.
- After such living conditions, a detached suburban home with its own yard and, most
importantly, a sense of privacy, seemed very appealing, as did numerous laboursaving appliances such as washing machines. A vital element in this new world was
not only a new refrigerator standing proudly in the kitchen of the ideal suburban
home but one that was filled to the brim with food. A public service advertisement for
Macy’s in the New York Daily News in September 1943 listed ‘defending Democracy’
and ‘a better world’ as things Americans were fighting for, but it also included ‘a
steak for every frying pan’.
- What most Americans wanted was their own home. Given the overcrowding in the
cities and the state of disrepair of both urban and rural housing stock, it was hardly
surprising.
- In May 1943 an opinion poll found that rationing and wartime food shortages had
barely made any impact on American meals. Two-thirds of the women surveyed
asserted that their diet had changed very little since the introduction of rationing, and
three-quarters of the women acknowledged that the size of their meals had stayed
the same. The minimal impact that rationing had on American eating habits is
revealed by the passing comment of a woman from New York, who noted that coffee
rationing, which cut consumption from three cups to one a day, was ‘the wartime
measure to have affected one the most’. The food privations inflicted on American
civilians by the war were minimal compared to those suffered by civilians in all other
combatant nations. As one US soldier acknowledged to his English hostess: ‘if
American women had had to put up with half as much as we have they would have
made a terrific fuss’. As it was they still complained a great deal.
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The Harvey Girls
- Postwar California Foodways Sunshine and Noir
- In the 1880s, a group of "Harvey Girls" – new waitresses for Fred Harvey's
pioneering chain of Harvey House restaurants – travels on the Atchison, Topeka &
Santa Fe Railway to the western town of Sandrock, Arizona. On the trip they meet
Susan Bradley (Judy Garland), who travels to the same town to marry the man
whose beautiful letters she received when she answered a "lonely-hearts" ad.
Unfortunately, when she arrives, the man turns out to be an "old coot" who does not
at all meet her expectations – and he also wants not to get married as much as she
wants not to marry him, so they agree to call it off. When she learns that someone
else, the owner of the local saloon, Ned Trent (John Hodiak), wrote the letters as a
joke, she confronts him and tells him off, in the process endearing herself to him.
- Then Susan joins the Harvey Girls, and she soon becomes their leader in fighting
against the attempts by Trent's business associate, Judge Sam Purvis (Preston
Foster), to scare them off – and against the animosity of the perhaps euphemistically
called "dance-hall girls" led by Em (Angela Lansbury), who is in love with Trent, and
who sees Susan as a rival. Trent visits to see the value of the Harvey House and
other trappings of civilization, then he tells Purvis to leave them alone, but Purvis
continues with his campaign of intimidation, finally burning down the restaurant.
Trent offers his saloon as a replacement, and Em and the dance-hall girls leave town.
Susan, thinking that Trent too is leaving, gets on the train, but Em, seeing that Susan
loves Trent so much that she is willing to give up everything for him, stops the train
and points out Trent, riding toward them on his horse. Ultimately, they are wedded in
the desert, surrounded by the Harvey Girls.
Thieves’ Highway
- Postwar California Foodways Sunshine and Noir
- Post war homecoming
- A war-veteran-turned-truck driver Nico "Nick" Garcos (Richard Conte) arrives at
home to find that his foreign-born father, a California fruit farmer, has lost his legs
and was forced to sell his truck. He learns that his father was crippled at the hands
of an unscrupulous produce dealer in San Francisco, Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb).
Garcos vows revenge.
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- Garcos goes into business with Ed Kinney, who bought the Garcos truck, and drives
a truckload of apples to San Francisco, where he runs into Figlia when his truck is
immobilized with a suspiciously cut tire, blocking Figlia's busy wholesale stand, and
cannot be towed. Figlia hires a streetwalker, Rica (Valentina Cortese), to seduce and
preoccupy Figlia in her room while his men unload the apples without Nick's
permission. Figlia later pays Nick for his fruit, but that night his goons waylay and rob
Nick of the cash. Meanwhile, Kinney is killed when his own truck mechanically fails,
veers off the road, and burns after speeding out of control down a long hill. Foul play
is suspected. Polly, Nick's hometown sweetheart, then arrives in the city ready to
marry him, but leaves disillusioned after she finds him recovering from his beating in
Rica's apartment and with no money. Nick and a friend finally confront the cowed
bully Figlia at a tavern, and have him arrested, restoring Nick's family honor.
The Feminine Mystique
- The problem that cannot be named: the widespread unhappiness of women in the
1950s and early 1960s. It discusses the lives of several housewives from around the
United States who were unhappy despite living in material comfort and being
married with children.
- Underemployment
- Furthermore, Friedan questioned the women's magazine, women's education
system and advertisers for creating this widespread image of women. The
detrimental effects induced by this image was that it narrowed women into the
domestic sphere and led many women to lose their own identities.
- Friedan points out that the average age of marriage was dropping, the portion of
women attending college was decreasing and the birthrate was increasing for
women throughout the 1950s, yet the widespread trend of unhappy women
persisted, although American culture insisted that fulfillment for women could be
found in marriage and housewifery.
- Friedan shows that advertisers tried to encourage housewives to think of
themselves as professionals who needed many specialized products in order to
do their jobs, while discouraging housewives from having actual careers, since that
would mean they would not spend as much time and effort on housework and
therefore would not buy as many household products, cutting into advertisers'
profits.
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- Friedan discusses Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and notes that women
have been trapped at the basic, physiological level, expected to find their identity
through their sexual role alone. Friedan says that women need meaningful work just
as men do to achieve self-actualization, the highest level on the hierarchy of needs.
- In the final chapter of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan discusses several case
studies of women who have begun to go against the feminine mystique. She also
advocates a new life plan for her women readers, including not viewing housework
as a career, not trying to find total fulfillment through marriage and motherhood
alone, and finding meaningful work that uses their full mental capacity. She
discusses the conflicts that some women may face in this journey to selfactualization, including their own fears and resistance from others. For each conflict,
Friedan offers examples of women who have overcome it. Friedan ends her book by
promoting education and meaningful work as the ultimate method by which
American women can avoid becoming trapped in the feminine mystique, calling for a
drastic rethinking of what it means to be feminine, and offering several educational
and occupational suggestions.
Populox: The Suburban Cuisine of the 1950s
- Suburban
“The Rage for Order,” Popular Culture and White Flight
- Standardization, social paradigm, shift from food, paleo symbolic
- The "rage for order" that Richard Schickel recognized in the park's landscape also
extended to its visual presentation. "Disneyland was the first to use visually
compatible elements working as a coordinated theme," boasted a corporate
publicity brochure about the park's visual clarity. By organizing the park around a
series of themes, park designers could avoid "the contra the park around a series of
themes, park designers could avoid "the contradictory 'hodge-podge' of World's
Fairs and amusement parks."' To eliminate any distractions from the contrived vistas
within the park, Disney buried all water, power, and sewer lines beneath street level.
To fully immerse visitors in each of the themes of Disneyland, each land appeared
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A Supermarket in California
- "A Supermarket in California" is a poem by American poet Allen Ginsberg first
published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956. In the poem, the narrator visits
a supermarket in California and imagines finding Federico García Lorca and Walt
Whitman shopping.[1] Whitman, who is also discussed in "Howl", is a character
common in Ginsberg's poems, and is often referred to as Ginsberg's poetic model.
[2] "A Supermarket in California", written in Berkeley[3] and published in 1956, was
intended to be a tribute to Whitman in the centennial year of the first edition
of Leaves of Grass.[4]
- "A Supermarket in California" is a prose poem with an irregular format that does not
adhere to traditional poetic form including stanza and rhyme scheme. The format is a
resemblance of the long-winded aspect of speech. The long-line style is attributed to
Whitman and "as with Whitman, by the time we have traversed the stretch of one of
these long lines, we have experienced a rapid set of transformations." [7] This is
shown within the poem’s location, the metaphorical supermarket and its symbolism
of Ginsberg’s America. The form of Ginsberg's poem comes from "his knowledge of
Walt Whitman's long-line style" [8] which was an experiment for Ginsberg before he
adapted it to all his works later on.
Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
- Japanese immigrants’ treatment, family, last orchards in San Jose
- Down to the earth. Intimate/personal feeling of the food, selfless
- Grow food naturally
- Narrative
- A lyrical, sensuous and thoroughly engrossing memoir of one critical year in the life
of an organic peach farmer, Epitaph for a Peach is "a delightful narrative . . . with
poetic flair and a sense of humor" (Library Journal). Line drawings.
Alice Waters, Coming to my Senses
- Alice Louise Waters is an American chef, restaurateur, activist and author. She is the
owner of Chez Panisse, a Berkeley, California restaurant famous for its organic,
locally grown ingredients and for pioneering California cuisine, which she opened in
1971.
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- Organic, France, how food should be
- Aloof, elitist
Reading Ads Socially
- This book provides a guide to understanding advertising culture. It shows how the
logic of commodities permeates the ways we think about ourselves, our
relationships and our desires.
- Mortise, tenon
- Manipulative
Food Photography and Inverted Narratives of Desire
- Food photography is widely viewed but little studied field of visual culture, and this
brief essay offers a welcome opportunity to revisit a topic I broached fifteen years
ago in the photo journal Exposure.1 By the term “food photography,” I mean
commercially produced photographs and photo essays that contain mini-narratives
that appear in the editorial matter of popular food magazines, such as Bon
Appetit (and many cookbooks), as distinct from both advertisements for food
products and from photographs of food by art photographers.2 Analyzing the
rhetorics of food photography in popular magazines, we can begin to understand the
genre as a genre, identify the audience for these images, and investigate some
provocative bleed-over from the worlds of technology and fine art into this enduring
form of popular culture.
- Food photography, and the food and travel magazines that package it for a ready
audience, is useful. It serves up an ever-various but predictable set of images ready
to transport its target reader to a place outside the home, hair salon, commuter bus,
or dentist’s office in which it is read. Its plot is always the same—beautiful food
enjoyed in sociable and interesting contexts—where the labor of meal production
and the facts of the biological food cycle are carefully suppressed. Only secondarily
about the pleasures of cooking, what these photographs and photo essays underline
is yearning for ideal companionship, leisure, and aesthetic experience.
Anne E. McBride, “Food Porn,”
- Not doing it but get excited watching it
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- Since the term first appeared, food porn has typically referred to watching
others cook on television or gazing at unattainable dishes in glossy magazines
without actually cooking oneself. This forum seeks to revisit this notion of food
porn that is mostly taken for granted in both popular and scholarly literature. It offers
a brief perspective of the appearance and use of the term food porn to examine how
it came to be a term used mostly by commentators rather than by people actively
engaged in the world of cooking. Practitioners (chefs and a food television producer)
and academics address whether or not food porn exists, what shape it might take,
what purpose it might serve, and/or what usefulness it might have, showing that
these contentious issues are more complex than the ease with which the term is
used might let on.
Novella Carpenter, Farm City
- Oakland family farms
- Community
- Novella Carpenter loves cities-the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same
time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land
hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about
repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard selfsufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways: a
homegrown vegetable plot as well as museums, bars, concerts, and a twenty-fourhour convenience mart mere minutes away. Especially when she moved to a
ramshackle house in inner city Oakland and discovered a weed-choked, garbagestrewn abandoned lot next door. She closed her eyes and pictured heirloom
tomatoes, a beehive, and a chicken coop.
- What started out as a few egg-laying chickens led to turkeys, geese, and ducks.
Soon, some rabbits joined the fun, then two three-hundred-pound pigs. And no,
these charming and eccentric animals weren't pets; she was a farmer, not a
zookeeper. Novella was raising these animals for dinner. Novella Carpenter's corner
of downtown Oakland is populated by unforgettable characters. Lana (anal spelled
backward, she reminds us) runs a speakeasy across the street and refuses to hurt
even a fly, let alone condone raising turkeys for Thanksgiving. Bobby, the homeless
man who collects cars and car parts just outside the farm, is an invaluable
neighborhood concierge. The turkeys, Harold and Maude, tend to escape on a daily
basis to cavort with the prostitutes hanging around just off the highway nearby. Every
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day on this strange and beautiful farm, urban meets rural in the most surprising
ways.
- For anyone who has ever grown herbs on their windowsill, tomatoes on their fire
escape, or obsessed over the offerings at the local farmers' market, Carpenter's
story will capture your heart. And if you've ever considered leaving it all behind to
become a farmer outside the city limits, or looked at the abandoned lot next door
with a gleam in your eye, consider this both a cautionary tale and a full-throated call
to action. Farm City is an unforgettably charming memoir, full of hilarious moments,
fascinating farmers' tips, and a great deal of heart. It is also a moving meditation on
urban life versus the natural world and what we have given up to live the way we do.
Fallen fruit
- aesthetics, opinions on how food should be
- Sex and desire
Domesticating cuisine
- A part analyzing food representation on TV
- Aesthetics, cultural norms
Farmer in chief
- Solve social problems
- Write a letter to American president about food problems
- Food as kept to 3 major social problems, energy independence, healthcare,
sovereignty
- Industrial scale
- Political tool
Apple Cake
- Begin from death bed of a woman
- Proxy for disagreements between the sisters
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- unhappiness, drama
Appleless
- About a woman who refuses to eat apples
- Scape-goating
Blue Jelly
- Recovering journey
- lifestyle guide
- Therapy healing
- Coping mechanism
Feel Good Reel Food; A Taste of the Cultural Kedgeree in Gurinder
Chadha’s What’s Cooking
- This is the first book devoted to food as a vibrant and evocative element of film. It
reads various films through their uses of Food - from major "food films" like
Babette's Feast andBig Night - to less obvious choices including TheGodfather
trilogy and The Matrix.
- "Anne Bower's Reel Food is an intellectual feast, where each essay serves a
delicious new course filled with meaty morsels and delightful aromas. It provides
thoughtful lenses in which to view the culinary dimensions of all films, but be
prepared to reexamine the taste sensations of traditional food movies, such as
Chocolat, Babette's Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, and Tortilla Soup. I ignored the
incessant urge to put the book down and head to out to the video rental store to pick
up the films devoured in this book. I'll never look at a movie without seeing its
culinary dimensions in new ways. So, make some popcorn and settle down in your
easy chair--you're headed for a great read." -- Andrew F. Smith, editor-in-chief,
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
- "From sci-fi to horror, from romance to adventure, the films discussed in this
collection are enriched by cogent analyses of the ways food is used to signal issues
of cultural identity, assimilation, and conflict. With Reel Food, you won't need
popcorn." -- Darra Goldstein, Editor, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture
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Monday, May 13, 2019
- "Reel Food is the go-to book for anyone interested in the rich intersections between
food and film studies. The compelling, wide-ranging essays gathered here
demonstrate that if you are interested in film, then you can't ignore food, and vice
versa
- ." -- Doris Witt, author of Black Hunger: Soul Food and America
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