Dani Jewell
Professor Miller
4 February 2019
Soy You Think you have a Favorite Meal
****Come Up with New Title
Introduction:
Your four course dinner is replaced by 1 single protein shake. Your friends and family sitting beside you are replaced by a single 5 by 2” screen. Your dining hall replaced by a cubicle or bedroom. Your social skills replaced by anti social activities and the demise of humanity as we know it. Your meals are replaced by soylent and your life is replaced by non human characteristics too. This is no alternate universe where a typical sit down meal is replaced with Soylent. As discussed in Lizzie Widdicombe’s article “The End of Food” featured in the magazine The New Yorker, Soylent is a meal alternative nutrient enriched shake invented by Rob Rhinehart as well as a few of his other co entrepreneurs that is a leading cause to the downfall of food as we know it. ******Go check list of potential thesis’s
Background info???**** divide it out as you go :
Define what food is (solid, sit down, fast food count??)
-Whats the purpose of soylent
-Summarize Widdicombe’s argument
-What are the different views with replacing the food with Soylent (pleasure vs. utility)
Body 1: Trying New Things
As discussed in my essay, Soul in the Sole, in the conversation with my mother I asked her blank and she said *** use more figurative language, she laughed, she thought for a long while, she scoffed, she pondered this for a bit
“Over time making this meal for our family has changed her views on the meal as she describes making it over the years. “Now it is a labor of love. Before it was about trying something new!’” FROM Fav meal essay
Body 2: Affection For Others
Body 3: Morals and Respect
Body 4: Entertainment
Body 5: Rebuttal:— how would Rhinehart react, although the socialization aspect of food in current society is amazing, this actually is not beneficial for the environment
Conclusion:— summarize your argument but frame it in the new perspective…..maybe compare to cell phones
Works Cited
Widdicombe, Lizzie. “The End of Food.” Annals of Gastronomy May 12, 2014 Print.
Initial/Random thoughts:
-how I spent time in the hospital on the IV
-as the sucralose masks the taste of the vitamins in soylent, soylent masks the taste of bitter loneliness that society would turn into if we didn’t have meals together
-you’re a health nut, completely unhealthy or averager like the rest of us compartmentalizing each other.
Potential Introductions:
- Imagine: your 4 course dinner is replaced by 1 single protein shake. Your friends and family sitting beside you are replaced by a single 5 by 2” screen. Your dining hall replaced by a cubicle or bedroom. Your social skills replaced by anti social activities and the demise of humanity as we know it.
Your meals are replaced by soylent and your life is replaced by non human characteristics too.
- Thing about climate change
- Count how many people around me are on their phones at dinner
Ideas for potential body paragraphs
- Trying new things
- Jasmine and I passport meal
- Embracing other peoples cultures, outgoing, empathy, connecting with other people
- Mom with cook book 30 years ago now its a labor of love but it used to be about trying something new
- Affection for each other
- Family going out of way to make things special for me- Soul with the white wine butter sauce
- First Dates?!?!?!?!
- Morals—respect-the main point is the food, but phones could be used as a metaphor or anaology
- Not going on your phone at dinner
- Home phone ditched when I was 9
- I rarely go on my phone during a meal unless I’m sitting alone
- Many teannagers site mindlessly scrolling
- Waiting for everyone to finish eating
- Even when I’m eating a lot my friends and teammates wait until I’m done for all of us to get up and go
- Waiting to meet up with people for lunch
- Not going on your phone at dinner
- Entertainment–
- How it leads to overall happiness
- Being less lonely
- Inviting people over who are sitting alone….clarify between feeling lonely and eating alone and what makes the difference!?!?!?!?!?
- College kids sometimes eating alone
- Look back at lined paper from class on 2/4 Jesse’s comments 2nd page on the back
- Everyone eats in their clicks Teams start their seasons by pushing 3 tables together to eat 20 people at a tim
TOP Quotes to add and from where? You need 2 from Widdecomb and 2 from Favorite Meal Essay
| Quote | From where +page # | Potential Lead ins, why they’re important | Other/ central idea its around (potential bodies) |
| “Now it is a labor of love. Before it was about trying something new!” | Mom interview | “Over time making this meal for our family has changed her views on the meal as she describes making it over the years. “Now it is a labor of love. Before it was about trying something new!’” FROM Fav meal essay | Trying New Things |
| “well I mean it’s always hard to cook for a busy family. This is not a meal that can wait around for someone to have as leftovers. It’s one that everyone has to sit down and eat at the same time.” | Mom interview | Affection-time commitment for family | |
| “Nearby ten students sat around a table surrounded by laptops and problem sets, ignoring the dinnertime commotion: Soylent drinkers” | (Page 15, 3rd to last paragraph, Widdecomb). | By drinking Soylent to be efficient, the students are missing a key social piece of college which is the interactions with other people. | Entertainment |
| “How do you feel about the fact that, after a lot of people eat Soylent, Soylent becomes people?” | (Widdecomb page 17 second to last paragraph). | At the end Rhineheart interprets this question to be about his physique when this can be taken as replacing people in the social aspect. I think this can be said about cell phone use a during meal time with others. When people text during meal times, essentially they are replacing friends and family and the table next to them with a 5 by 2 and a half inch screen. | Morals and Respect
REBUTTAL…he doesnt understand the social aspect of humanity… |
Other Potential Quotes
| Quote | From where + Page # | Potential Lead ins, why they’re important | Other/ central idea its around (potential bodies) |
| “One of Silicon Valley’s cultural exports in the past ten years has been the concept of “lifehacking”: devising tricks to streamline the obligations of family life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing. | Widdecomb, page 2 bottom paragraph | ||
| “But, Rhineheart says, that’s not exactly his vision. ‘Most people’s meals are forgotten,’ he told me. He imagines that, in the future, ‘we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.’ Soylent isn’t coming for our Sunday potlucks. It’s coming for our frozen quesadillas.” | Widdecomb bottom paragraph on page 3 | ||
| “A recent U.N. report warned that climate change is threatening the global food supply, and that its impact will worsen in ways that aren’t confined to poor.” | Widdecomb Page 5 last paragraph | Conclusion | |
| “Time Gore, the head of food policy and climate change for Oxfam, has noted, ‘The main way that most people will experience climate change is through the impact of food: the food they eat, the price they pay for it, and the availability and choice that they have.’” | Widdecomb pages 5-6 | Conclusion or maybe intro | |
| “Rhinehart took me on a tour of the Soylent headquarters, which doubles as the men’s living space and resembles the slightly dated home of a drug kingpin on ‘Miami Vice’.” | Widdecomb page 6 2nd paragraph | ||
| “Rhinehart is reluctant to associate Soylent with any flavor, so for now it just contains a small amount of sucralose, to mask the taste of the vitamins. That seems to fit his belief that Soylent should be a utility.” | Widdecomb page 6 bottom pargraph |
| Quote | From where+page # | Potential Lead ins, why they’re important | Other/ central idea its around (potential bodies) |
| “Bucky thinks of the body as a hydroelectric machine.” | Widdecomb page 7 2nd paragraph | Taking away aspects of humans, comparing us to machines | |
| “‘I think we look handsome,’Rhinehart said.” | Widdecomb page 7 bottom sentence | ||
Possible working towards a thesis
-eating food together holds a society together. It is one of the essentials of humanity.
Without eating together, there is a loss of humanity.
-Cutting out these essential human interactions makes us antisocial, exclusive as a society and not as empathetic, bubbly and directly impacts our happiness
Cutting out meals cuts out pieces of humanity including our affection for others, trying new things and blank. It takes away our identities.
-Carving out a full down meal takes out the pleasure piece, therefore eating away parts of our humanity and what makes us human.
-Pleasure vs utility
Dani Jewell
Professor Miller
31 January 2019
Soul in the Sole
On December 28th every single year my friends and family hate me. All 364 other days in the year, the gasses escaping my body are minimized and I am not nearly as high maintenance. This is the special day that my favorite meal is made yearly. Sole with white wine butter sauce, green noodles and a side of broccoli has one of the utmost salty and savory tastes. Delectable and creamy, the sauce is as satisfying to taste as it is to watch a wave wash up on soft sand under your toes standing next to a lake at sunset. But oh the pungent aromas it causes! Aside from the methane gases burning their eyes the entire day after we eat the meal for dinner, this meal causes an inconvenience to the people I love in nearly every way you can imagine. First off, the fish itself isn’t in the market during winter. Next, to get the salty and savory taste of the sauce takes hours of time commitment. Not to mention the fact we are picky eaters. These are among many of the reasons this meal is only made once a year. Through all the inconveniences this meal makes for my family, my favorite meal shows my family’s love for each other as a priority in all of our lives.
Both financially and to our olfactory senses, sole is not cheap. Sole, is a filleted fish that is the first part of my favorite meal. Its soft white flaky inside compliment the buttery crunchy layer on the outside.These wonderful tastes come at a cost however. In fact, it’s not even an “in season fish” in late December at local grocery stores; my mom special orders it at a local seafood restaurant. In addition the monetary costs the smell inconveniences everyone. In order to avoid World War III of when the house smells and no one can figure out why my Dad has to boil off cinnamon for days to follow December 28th each year in order to see his four happy girls not cringing their noses. The hoops my family goes through for the fish itself is enough to drive my family to only do this once a year, yet they tolerate the troubles to make me happy.
The next nuisance my family puts up with for me is their time commitment to sit down to eat together for my favorite meal. Sitting down to eat as a family has always been very important to us despite our busy schedules. In our kitchen, past the full Jewell art gallery of handmade artwork on every cabinet from elementary school and middle school artwork, lies our two and a half foot tall calendar.There’s ink and highlights on every single day for at least one person until about five months out with every member of the household having their own separate column. In just the summer alone between the five of us there’s ten jobs, two sports, one neighbor’s cat to feed, and so much more, making eating dinner as “one big happy family” nearly impossible to juggle as well. Even if that means moving dinner to 4:30 or to 8pm for everyone or most of us to eat at the same time was crucial. During December around the holidays everyone’s schedules are blocked out to be home for my favorite meal. As my mom puts it, “well I mean it’s always hard to cook for a busy family. This is not a meal that can wait around for someone to have as leftovers. It’s one that everyone has to sit down and eat at the same time.” Any time we couldn’t sit down as a family we would leave the last person leftovers for the next day, but it never felt the same as eating a fresh meal next to everyone. Just blocking out the time in everyone’s schedules for my favorite meal is prioritizing how much we mean to each other.
In addition to the difficulties of getting my family all together at once, sole with white wine butter sauce flavors another hardship to our family of picky eaters. It’s hard enough to get us all to eat at the same time, let alone find something we all like, however sole with white wine butter sauce and green noodles with the side of broccoli is the harmony my family needs. A meal everyone at least partially likes. My mother herself can never fully remember each individual’s preferences when I asked her why she thinks I like the meal and responded, “I don’t really know! Do you like the fish or the sauce? Ginny basically just eats the sauce and the noodles. Or does she eat the fish? No. Wait. Or is it Kate? One of you just eats it without the fish.” My favorite meal is one of the only dishes everyone enjoys a part of which is as rare as finding an old mismatched socks mate in my house. With a family of such picky eaters, another challenge to add, sole goes to show how much commitment my family is putting into making me happy.
My favorite meal unites my family more and more each December 28th. November 1st begins the countdown of anticipation. Soon to follow it’s T minus thirty one days. My heart begins to race with excitement as the candles and nutcrackers begin to sparkle in each window. 14 to go and I can feel the crunch between my teeth of the warm sole. Seven to go and I’m nearly drooling on myself thinking of the buttery sauce on top of the noodles. Yet the anticipation of my favorite meal is not just about the flavors. It’s the fact that this day is about me, myself and I. No Dani “clean this”. No “drive me here”. No “cover this shift”. There is no “Dani Do This List” the day of my favorite meal. Because my family goes through every hoop to make sure I have no work that day and that the meal is perfect, I know how much I mean to them.
Sole with white wine butter sauce, green noodles and a side of broccoli used to be just a meal that tasted good. I now know it means so much more to my family. My mom first got the cook book 30 years ago to try as a beginner to cooking with her maiden name still written in the cover. Over time making this meal for our family has changed her views on the meal as she describes making it over the years. “Now it is a labor of love. Before it was about trying something new!” For her, this meal used to be about going against the ordinary. Now it shows our daily selfless acts of love for one another with this one special occasion each year. They all put their hearts and souls into being at my birthday dinner on time, with everything prepped starting at 6:00am. Since my older sister moved out, me I went to college and my little sister Kate got her license, it’s been rare we all eat together anymore. The white fish and green noodles I used to despise as a kid now are heartwarming reminders of how loved I am through all the inconveniences I cause my family and their willingness to look past them to make me happy. There’s 331 days to go until the next bite and this time around I can’t wait to smell the fish.
