The last two essays we’ve read have been about food. Both Danny Chau’s Burning Desire for Hot Chicken and Johnathan Gold’s What Is A Burrito?: A Primer explore the ways in which, as Chau puts it, food “challenges sensory norms and forces you to reckon with food’s capacity to change you in the moment- not just emotionally, but physically.” Each writer has a different object behind their veil of an obsessive pursuit of food. Using what we’ve discussed in class and your own reflections of these essays, compare and contrast each writer’s piece.
First Steps of Assignment
Analyze the texts. In order to effectively answer these questions, you may need to reread your texts..
Who is the author? How may the author’s identity relate to the text they created?
What is the author’s central idea? How do they use food to make an argument?
How does each author use food to make a larger point about the world around them?
How did the author organize the text? Think about the beginning, middle, and end. What effect does this organization have?
What style and tone does the author use and why? What diction does the author use? What does that tell you about the author and situation?
Take each text and make an argument. This must go beyond “X piece was better than Y.” What does one writer do better than another? Give specific examples in your essay, not only how one writer does something better but how the other falls short. This is a piece comparing and contrasting.
Next, make an argument about something specific you think one writer accomplished in their piece that the other does not. For example, you could argue “Gold’s language is more effective even in a smaller space at giving the gastronomic context of the burrito, where Chau’s style falls short of expressing Hot Chicken’s place not only in Nashville, but America.
Organize your body paragraphs by strategies that the authors use.
Body paragraphs can either contrast the same point or you may split arguments by paragraph. (ie, a paragraph could express “blue is a cooler color where red is abrasive, it’s warmth jarring. OR one paragraph could read “blue is proven to be the color of happiness by scientists.
Your body paragraphs must contain both description and analysis. You must bring in specific evidence and examples from the text and then discuss how this evidence proves what you are arguing.
