Please read the entire OP before offering suggestions.
As I discussed in another thread, I teach a “food in film” class where we discuss the cultural, familial and personal meanings of food in a variety of films (Eat Drink Man Woman, Big Night, etc). I’m looking to increase (or actually just change) the reading list for this class, and want ideas.
I’m looking for short narratives (or excerpts from books, provided the scene is comprehensible read by itself or with a short introduction) in which food or cooking or eating plays some sort of significant role.
THIS IS NOT A CLASS FOR DOPERS. It is a class for non-academic students who think that reading fiction is stupid, that talking about fiction is stupider, and that writing about fiction is the biggest waste of time on God’s green earth. I have three weeks to try to convince them otherwise. Some of my students are mature, intelligent adults, but many of them are 18-25 year old males who are intellectually uncurious. Six pages is “way too long” of a reading assignment. Shakespeare is right out; Laura Esquivel or MFK Fisher is very much pushing the limit.
With that in mind … suggestions?
For a short story, if you can find it, there is Robert McNear’s Edgar-nominated mystery short story, “The Salad Maker.” It would be perfect for people who don’t read much fiction: packs quite a whallop. I guarantee you’ll never look upon capers the same way again.
For an excerpt, how about the hilarious 3-page “British candy” scene in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”? It ends with the characters in bed, so I suppose it would be interesting to your audience.
I was going to recommend Fisher until I carefully re-read the OP and saw that you already mentioned her. Hemingway has some small bits in A Moveable Feast about cafe life and cuisine in Paris, though I couldn’t quote you any particular passages. Paul Theroux says some rather nasty things about the local food in The Great Railway Bazaar (I recall a pail of eels next to the lav on the train) and on a Turkish ship in The Pillars of Hercules, and his traveloguing is in such a stream-of-consciousness style that it shouldn’t be too hard to find a short passage.
I think the best bet, though, might be Orwell’s Down And Out In Paris And London, where he describes the conditions and preparation (heh) of food in a Paris hotel kitchen. There are some neatly contained anecdotes (and being Orwell, quite readable without any discernable literary pretentiousness) that you could excerpt.
There’s plenty more, I’m sure. Wodehouse comes to mind, but of course nothing he writes is short or direct, and probably wouldn’t be favored by your class of nonliterate Phillistines. I don’t envy your of your burden–trying to teach something to students who are apathetic or actively unamenable is a Sisyphean task.
I didn’t catch your movie thread, but have you seen the German film Bella Martha?
Oh, how about “Lamb To The Slaughter” by Roald Dahl? Short, straight, amusing. Just don’t let your students get any ideas about cooking your dinner after class. There was an Alfred Hitchcock Presents presentation of this as well, if you can find it.
Watched it with the class last night, will be explicating/discussing it tonight. Terrific film. We watch it last because it ties together so many of the course’s themes: food as cultural identifier, food as family-bonding, food as source of power, food as erotic, food as personal expression, etc.
Once they get past the “aw, crap, we have to read this movie” stuff, it’s actually fairly decently recieved by most students. At least they don’t try to beat me up the way they do when I show Babbette’s Feast.
Thanks for the suggestions, all. Keep 'em coming.
Truman Capote wrote a good autobiographical short story called A Christmas Memory. In it, he remembers how he and a distant elderly cousin would gather wild pecans and bake fruitcakes, which she would give to destitute people. I particularly liked his description of how they would timidly visit a moonshiner to buy the quart of whiskey to sprinkle on the cakes. The moonshiner would look at the slightly batty old lady and the little boy, laugh, and ask “Which one’s the drinkin’ man?”. They would get schnockered together on the last two fingers of whiskey in the bottle.
I could read this story again. I’ll have to start looking for it.
I just partially read one of Alan Dean Foster’s latest books, The Light-Years Beneath My Feet. I really enjoy his books but this one started to lose me and it was overdue so I returned it unfinished, but I might go back to it later. It just seems a little overwrought, IMHO.
But anyways, regardless of my opinion of the book, there are some really great and imaginative takes on food and the culinary arts with a sci-fi twist throughout this book (or at least the first quarter that I read.). The main character is a kidnapped, contemporary Earthman stranded on the other side of the galaxy. He is a Stockbroker by trade and finding no use or demand for his occupation he decides to become a master intergalactic chef to earn passage home. He trains in the bizarre and ultra-techno art of intergalactic cooking with force fields, plasma, etc. all facilitated with a special “cooking wand”.
It’s a pretty interesting take on what cooking could become with advanced technology. Foster goes into great detail and description, should be exactly what you are looking for.
Just a couple of additions, although this book might not be profound in its take on culinary culture (but then again, I’m not entirely sure jow far he takes it, as I have only read about a quarter of the book.) it is a very short book and could hold the attention of your students without being too serious. Sci-fi has a way of making 18-24 yr. old males more intellectually curious.
