User:10000BL/Balthrope

Annotation:

• Cooking can be described as a 'labor of love' and a quick perusal of cooking experiences can prove the truth of this statement. Just think of the ways in which the process of cooking involves work -the physical tasks of cleaning and chopping foods, the possibility of injury from sharp knives or other instruments, the chance of burns from hot grease or ovens. Doing a turn in the kitchen can also involve emotional work, worrying over the quantity and/or quality of your meal, feeling joy when everything turns out perfectly, and disappointment when the reverse occurs. There is also the work of buying and/or growing one's own food, as well as presenting the dishes one has slaved over.
• The families in the movies demonstrate their love for one another, laboring in (and out of) the kitchen to provide nourishment for both body and spirit ---> taking care of each other with food (e.g. what do you like to eat?).
• My particular interest is in the way these films use food to represent ethnicity and culture in African American and Latino families.
• The movies all celebrate the power of families to sustain their members through life's sorrows as well as embrace life's joys, using food as ametaphor for many emotional experiences.
• Place family meals in their broader contexts.
• Each film participates in a borad exploration of how food exists within a culture, giving viewers meaningful glimpses into ethnic foodways; here I accept the definition of foodways as 'the pattern of what is eaten, when, how and what it means'.
• Part of my task in this essay will be to delve briefly into the history of various foods within these two heritages, and discuss how the 1960s and 1970s helped produce a more hospitable climate for ethnic foods so that films like Soul Food and Tortilla Soup could one day be made.
• Tortilla soup equals Eat Drink Man Woman.
• Tortilla Soup captures some of the very things that make Latino families strong, such as their emphasis on communications at meals.