Cooking and Writing

I know Peter Elbow has covered the similarities between cooking and writing, but I'm compelled to recite my personal experience.

I love looking at the recipes in the NY Times but when it comes to transforming recipes into food, I see the ingredient list and realize all my shortcomings: my lack of ingredients and tools and my lack of motivation to spend three hours prepping, cooking, and plating elaborate dishes. These recipes require some serious economic resources and some real dedication to becoming a foodie. As a cook, I've come to revel in simplicity and develop an appreciation for good weekly planning.

Likewise, I've come to value clear writing over the opaque rhetoric often used by contemporary theorists. As much as I enjoy reading Zizek, Deleuze, and Butler, their complex, unclear writing cannot make complex issues more interesting. They are NY Times recipes, accessible to readers with the resources and know-how to decipher and use their opaque writing. And reading their books, I can't help but get discouraged: I simply don't have the ingredients and motivation to write like postmodern theorists.

Instead, I draw from Maya Angelou's memoir cookbook, The Welcome Table, which provides relatively simple recipes that connect to taste, culture, and tradition in complex ways. The recipes are simple but the resulting taste is complex, drawing from Angelou's heritage and personal experience. Her prose also expresses clarity without sacrificing complexity. The key to her clear writing, I think, is her capacity to create images, which are made from basic ingredients--good, though not necessarily standard, syntax and grammar. She plays with images at many levels, ranging from a cohesive picture of her whole book to individual metaphor used by her grandmother. Writing and cooking weave together, the clarity and simplicity of each practice producing complex images and tastes.

I may observe complex spectacles, but my sustenance starts with simplicity.

Revision

A few tips I've picked up.

1) Change the font. This practice can spice up routine reading, especially at the sentence level.

2) Read aloud, either by yourself or get someone to read for you. Hearing writing can help you hear unclear sentences.

3) Read backwards, from last sentence to first. The idea here is to get rid of the cohesive picture of your writing that you have in your head, and read for sentence-level clarity.

4) Highlight key sentences in each paragraph and put it into an outline. The best advice I have read from Tara Gray, using key sentences helps to provide a more global picture of your essay and makes you look for coherence. Be sure to organize everything with your working thesis.

What to Drink When Writing

As a food studies researcher, I can be highly conscious of what I eat and drink when I write. And typically iced coffee is my drink of choice. The taste of the coffee as much as the caffeine induces focus. At a subconscious level, it tells me "it is time to write." Coffee brings together the experience of writing, folding my ideas into my environment, the computer screen, and, eventually, into language.

I tend to drink coffee for this specific purpose. My "writing drink" introduces a specific pattern of information, affording me certain connections with my environment. I become a rhizome, an assemblage of different things that are given cohesion through coffee. I become an embodied subject, fusing with my material environment.

Where to Write

There is an article by Benedict Carey published in the NYTimes on study habits, "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," which cited research on study locations that runs counter to traditional thought: studying in different locations can be good. We make subconscious connections with our environment, helping us think through the same problems in different ways.

I assume the same research findings might apply to writing. Perhaps use novel locations for free writing, which I already practice when I write more experimental blog entries. For now, I am trying to keep consistent hours at the desk in my home. But I'll try to keep track of any variations in my writing when I write in coffee shops, in other people's houses, at the library, in the outdoors, etc. I'll try to supply updates here.

Oct. 6 - So far: writing at coffee shops presents a host of distractions & writing in the morning may not be any more productive but it leaves me in a better mood the rest of the day.

Oct. 12 - blogging offers a site to digress a bit more than I feel is appropriate in Microsoft Word. Even creating a "swimming" doc of loose ideas are better described through my blogs. However, blogging does border on rabbit holing, taking long tangential breaks.

Defining My Project in 25 Words

Got some good advice from a professor, who recommended that I work on summarizing my dissertation project in twenty-five words or less. This advice became relevant after I tried to explain my project to my dentist. I oscillated between vague generalities and hyper-specialized research findings. Needless to say, I would make a horrible CNN contributor. So here are some dissertation soundbites. (I'll keep revising as my writing progresses).

Hopefully practicing this condensing method will help during job interviews, grant and fellowship applications, and most importantly help me explain to friends and family why I'm not an inane, overspecialized academic.

My dissertation project is about:

-the role that food images play in shaping our image of political, social, and economic systems that affect food production and consumption.

-the way food images can spice up the way we eat and grow food.

-cross-cultural food images that can provide new relationships among cultures, foodways, and vision.

-the way writers, communities, and nations visualize the role of food in social, political, and economic systems.

-how food images function as efficient statements about individual and collective identity

1/16/10
My dissertation, "Complex Foodscapes: Visualizing Cross-Cultural Networks through Food Images," studies the complex system of food images that help define our relationships with food. Food might be succulent, as in a juicy piece of meat. It might be exotic, as Thai food and Mexican food are often presented. Or, food might be comforting, like a hearty bowl of chili. The types and combinations of relationships with food are endless, but they remained constrained by our economic, political, and social relations. Putting food images from literature, cookbooks, and social movements in a broader cross-cultural context characteristic of today's global food system, I describe the way images both constrain our ways of perceiving food and liberate our vision to perceive new food worlds. In Chapter One, using the concept of emergence--a process in which novel food images emerge, or self-organize, from simple rules--I demonstrate how John Dryden's efforts to control the interpretation of his historical poem, Annus Mirabilis, as a type of advertisement for free trade and English nationalism unintentionally produces an image of a decentralized economic system based on the early modern spice trade. Against assumptions that Annus Mirabilis univocally reflects an imperialist politics, I draw attention to the images of decentralized systems that emerge out of Dryden's poem. Chapter Two...