Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

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My Unit 2 paper

Identity according to appetite In the article If you are what you eat, then what am I? by Geeta Kothari, the author explores her own issues of personal identity which is a result of her lack of relation with the culture she lives in in America, and also the culture of her parents from India. The author could have probably used many different aspects of any culture to write about her struggle, but the thing she chooses to focus on is the eating habits of the two cultures, and how she falls somewhere in between. In her childhood she is unable to eat many “American” foods such as hot dogs, because as an Indian she finds it disgusting, but she is also unable to find identity in Indian food. As a child merely trying to fit in with her schoolmates, she wishes that she could just eat normal American food, and blames her parents for this. She states that “Although she had never been able to tolerate the smell of fish, my mother buys tuna, hoping to satisfy my longing for American food. Indians, of course, do not eat such things.” This is Kothari's introduction to her struggle with identity through the food she eats. Though she is frustrated with her mother as a child, her relationship and feelings towards her mother changes and becomes more complicated throughout her life, and this becomes the most important part of her life to help define her identity. Throughout this article the author sets up her point and article through well-described experiences of her own life. She is able to tie in specific events with shifts in her own identity, or lack of one, quite efficiently. Her hook to the audience to get them to relate to her own struggle is her constant use of food as a metaphor. This is a simple strategy, but put into affect very well, since everybody on the Earth eats. Everyone has not, however, considered how what they eat relates to their identity, but it is easy to relate too. The use of such a basic thing as food for protraying her struggles with identity gets the audience into the story, because it protrays her struggles very well. The reader begins to think that if she cannot even eat without considering who she is, and struggling with it, she must indeed be having quite a stressful search for identity. Her own personal struggle is between her Indian heritage, her parents immigrated directly from India, and the life she has in America. This may seem very uninteresting for many American readers, but the food metaphor is what keeps the readers interested, and what related the author to her audience. From the first sentence to the last, the presence of food is apparent as a use of pathos by Geeta Kothari. From “The first time my mother and I open a can of tuna, I am nine years old.” to “I want to believe that recipes never change.” This is an effective use of pathos since all readers can relate to eating food, and most know what it is like to crinkle their nose at foreign food. For American readers, they are sure to empathize with her struggle to find an identity as an American, for how can she be American if she is unable to eat a hotdog? From her fear of not being accepted by her childhood friends because of the food she eats, to her fear that her husband will leave her for a “meat-eater,” she is using food as her rhetorical strategy of pathos. To prove that she is, in fact, having this struggle with defining herself as either an American or and Indian, or both, she provides life experiences as examples to prove both sides of her identity. Her ethos is her descriptions of the experiences she has had throughout her entire life, either with British schoolmates, or her family in India. Since she breaks up the article into many different sections of a few paragraphs, it is easier for her to switch off between experiences she had with her Indian parents and family, and her American friends and husband. A description of life in India, “We drink boiled water only, no ice. No sweets except for jalebi, thin fried twists of dough in dripping hot sugar syrup.” is followed directly by “In New York, at the first Indian restaurant in our neighborhood, my father orders with confidence, and my sister and I play with the silverware until the steaming plates of lamb briyani arrive.” With her format of many small sections, she is able to put her experiences of Indian and American life right next to each other. This effectively proves her inner conflict within herself between the two cultures. The information she has to put into the article that the reader may not know about is mainly her Indian culture, since it seems that she is writing to a primarily American audience. She provides us with vocabulary of the Indian language, along with the eating habits of Indians. Basic information about her family and house in America is also present to help paint the portrait of the life she is living, but the category with the most informational value is when she writes about the culture of India. Many readers could have guessed the layout of her middle class apartment in the city may have looked like, but not many could tell you that the Indian word for hot is “garam.” She cleverly works in Indian culture in relation to American culture in this passage, to keep the reader interested. “I am in my twenties, moving to a city far away from my parents, before it occurs to me that jeera, the spice my sister aviods, must have an English name. I have to learn that haldi=turmeric, methi=fenugreek.” The most interesting issue of this paper within the constant metaphor of food to culture to identity, however, is the relationship she describes with her mother and father throughout the article. Though she is constantly comparing her identity to the food she is able or unable to eat, her mother is always there in the background. Just as with almost anyone else on this world, the people you know and love are more important than the types of food you eat. Though the title of the piece is If you are what you eat, then what am I?, her feelings about her parents are what truly defines her identity throughout the paper. In the beginning when she is describing the “normal” American food her mother is unwilling or unable to make, she is frustrated and annoyed with her mother. These are the feelings that every child experiences of wanting to fit in with the rest of their schoolmates and friends. The lack of American food is what is keeping her from fitting in, and she is upset by this. When she is in India she is also unable to fit in with her cousins, because she is unable to stomach true Indian food, which also upsets her. While her mother is trying to comfort her, she describes her mother's lack of understanding of her struggle. “I cry over the frustration of being singled out, not from the pain my mother assumes I'm feeling as she holds my hair back from my face.” As she grows older, however, Kothari comes to see that her mother does not need to understand her, Kothari needs to understand her relationship with her mother. As she grows up she no longer wants to fit in with the crowd, but preserve her Indian heritage. She worries that since she is unable to cook Indian food exactly like her mother used to, she will be unable to keep her memories of her childhood, and her identity as an Indian. As she is attempting to begin cooking Indian food, her mother has shifted to cooking more and more non-Indian food, including pasta , and serving brie cheese. She at first worries about her lack of Indain-ness, but as she talks more and more to her mother about her childhood, and her future, she comes to the conclusion that while she is neither Indian or American, she is indeed her mother's daughter. While she may never be able to cook the same Indian recipe's that her mother did, and may be able to eat meat on occasion, her most important traits will be the ones that were passed down to her by her parents. “I am my parents' daughter. Like them, I expect knowledge to pass from me to my husband without one word of explanation or translation. I want him to know what I know, see what I see, without having to tell him exactly what it is. I want to believe that recipes never change.” While Kothari does make one last relation to food in the last sentence, it is no longer the focus or the point of the paragraph. The food she ate and how it related to her culture may have been what she thought was important in her youth, but her relationship with her family was always what was most important in making her the woman she is today. While she probably only believed that what she ate was really important as a child, she continued to discuss food as a metaphor for her identity throughout the later portions of her paper as well. While this provides a good tool for keeping the reader interested and able to relate to her struggles, it had become merely the surface of what she was truly dealing with in her life at that point. The last five short sections of the article deal with her relationship with her parents, primarily her mother, almost as much as it does with food. First she is worried she will be unable to replicate her mother's indian recipes. Once she sees her mother making more and more non-Indian meals, however, she comes to the conclusion that being Indian or not may not be the key issue of her own personal identity. In the last section she is reflecting upon her life, and her mother. After thinking about how her mother saw American life, and how she had already affected her in a huge way, even if she could not copy her recipes. Her final conclusion is that she is indeed her parents' daughter, and nothing else. While her parents weren't always the prominent subject of the article, they were always the key to her discovering her identity.