Marra's Blog

The Comforts of Food

For my food essay, I wanted to talk about a topic that I think a lot of people can connect to. Depression. For a lot of people, this comes with many side effects. One of which is eating. There are many studies that have come out about people who binge eat to cope, and the reason for this being that eating certain foods can increase serotonin in the brain, which makes you happier. This has become a well known issue and has especially shown itself since this pandemic started and everyone is stuck at home dealing with many stresses. There are studies that show how to help curb these needs to binge, or studies that show what foods to eat that will help more so you have to eat less. Like most recently, people discovered the idea of eating an orange in the shower, which is supposedly meant to help boost your mood (I myself was intrigued and tried it, but just found that it was a weird experience and did not necessarily notice a difference in my mental health). With this topic I think that I will be able to easily blend in depth descriptions of experiences with food while also incorporating research on the topic.

In Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me!, the fast food industry is seen as an evil entity that is causing major health risks to high percentages of Americans, all hidden under family-friendly advertising that appeals to all types of people because of the low prices and large sizes. This documentary is meant to draw attention to the fact that many Americans lead busy lives, many needing to support families and uphold payments on homes, apartments, or other places to live on top of other expenses. Because of this, fast food seems like a simple, fast, and cheap option for many people if they need a quick meal. To prove the claims of many law suits against fast food industries for their harmful products and the statistics showing the growing percentages of obese people in the US, Morgan Spurlock created an experiment in which he would only eat from McDonalds for a month to show how it affected his physical appearance and health.

In the beginning of the movie, Spurlock begins to lay out his “essay” with statistics of obese people and the numbers of fast food places across the US, among other already researched facts and statistics that were pertinent to his experiment. Throughout the movie, Spurlock takes viewers on his own personal journey, documenting what he is eating each day. Periodically he shows interviews with everyday people where he asks them how often they eat fast food and their opinions on people who are trying to sue fast food corporations. The end of the movie is when Spurlock allows his personal experiment to show the final proof of the major negative impacts fast food can have on anyone, when he undergoes major heart issues and almost dies. However, there is some criticism to be made for this experiment. Spurlock consumes copious amounts of food from McDonalds for every meal, more than the typical American might eat, and does not choose any of the “healthier” options McDonalds has to offer (like the salads). This could have caused the results of his experiment to be skewed towards the more drastic side.  

This documentary helped to shock people into seeing the dangers of fast food, when not eaten in moderation. These crippling statistics hold water, which is proven by Spurlock’s experiment, however, they are masked by the widespread family-friendly advertisements McDonalds has. With indoor play areas, the ability to host birthday parties, happy meals with toys, the clown used in advertisements: these factors all appeal to children and families, making it more likely that younger children are consuming higher levels of fatty, processed foods which can affect their health even earlier in life. This was compared to the lawsuits on big tobacco that were first criticized, but soon people came to realize the serious dangers smoking has. This documentary and the strong impact good advertising can have on the general public can be related to a similar issue we have today with the marketing of vaping products. These electronic devices provide the exact same ingredients as cigarettes, which are now known to be extremely harmful. But with creative advertising and “fun flavors”, vape companies have been able to cause an entire generation of young adults to become addicted to nicotine.  

This was a magazine cover that was displayed in part of the documentary and shows the correlation between the major health issues these two things provide that many turn a blind eye to or are unaware of. Yet these issues still stand as some of the most pressing concerns for future generations’ health. 

Jenna Gillis and Marrakech Cunliffe

Essay: Snakebit by Alia Volz

Snakebit centers around a young woman who has a severe phobia of snakes or Ophidiophobia. The images of snakes paralyze her, they send her into trances. She links her fear of snakes to a memory. The memory is of her father who was epileptic and took psychedelic drugs. This memory was when her father came home bitten by a snake from a “vision quest” where he would spend weeks alone in the woods. Was she afraid of him never returning? She recalls the memory vividly, yet her family believes it never happened. 

Throughout the essay, the author finds self discovery. It’s obvious she blames snakes for her father’s behavior and afflictions. She admits she has nightmares of snakes which in a sense, is a sort of comfort to her. She goes on to tell a story about the time her chicken coup was raided by a snake. The snake did terrible things to the chicks and left one alive which her father had to kill. She realized she blamed a snake for something only a fox could have done. She likes to use the imagery of a snake stuffed with chicks to reason with her own thoughts. She’s not afraid of being bitten or the venom and yet, she hyperventilates when she sees snakes and she couldn’t even eat a snake dumpling. It all circles back to her father, she attached an animal to her fear of the unknown, of losing her father. A deadly animal must be scarier. Snakes comforted her as a scapegoat. In the end, she empathizes with a snake, a female and understands the animal. In this moment of self reflection was she meeting the snake half way in an effort to recognize her real fears? Why does the fact that the snake is female matter to her? Could the snake represent herself? 

A bit of background on the author of Snakebit, Alia Volz:

Alia Volz was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. Some of Volz’s most notable achievements in her career are receiving the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship twice and was named “Best Writers Without a Book in San Francisco” by SF Weekly along with being awarded other notable fellowships. “Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, the Threepenny Review, Nowhere Magazine, Utne Reader, the New England Review, and the recent anthologies Dig If You Will the Picture: Remembering Prince and Golden State: Best New Writing from California,” (Jamison 827). She has written a memoir and is currently working on completing her first book. 

Works Cited

“About Alia.” Alia Volz, 15 Feb. 2020, aliavolz.com/bio/.

Leslie Jamison. “The Best American Essays 2017.” Apple Books. 

Originally, I had had the idea to talk about different stories of emotional abuse. How it is something that can take several forms and isn’t only something you see in a relationship with a significant other. It can be from your family and friends too. However, after further thought, I have decided to change my topic to another thing that affects lots of people around the world, just in a different way. The idea of true love. I want to discuss different experiences people have had and whether or not they believe in true love. Does it actually exist or not? I will also look at psychological and other scientific studies that could help decide whether or not true love actually exists.

By talking about this topic in a podcast format, the ability to hear different people’s stories through their voices will allow for an added layer of depth to these examples. The viewers/readers/listeners will be able to connect with each of these stories on a personal level which will help them relate to the overall topic (whether or not true love actually exists). I plan on making my podcast have a relaxed, conversational yet educational tone.

Updated proposal: Using Your Friend/My Friend, Ted by Beth Uznis Johnson as a template for my own memoir, I plan to include my grandmother in the piece as well. Using the memoir to explore the relationship not only between me and my mother, but between my mother and grandmother, and me and my grandmother. It is our similarities that bring me and my grandmother closer together, but what pull me and my mother further apart. Moreover, the relationship between me and my mother bears a strong resemblance to the relationship between my mother and grandmother. My memoir will (hopefully) explore the differences in relationships between generations.

Current Issues: With this topic, I’m having difficulty finding good enough stories that give me the ability to go into detail, while providing a substantial point to the larger purpose of the piece. With mother daughter relationships, it will be easy to find the relatability within the stories I choose, but it will be connecting those stories to a clear point that I think are going to be most difficult.

For my borrowed memoir, I will focus on the complex relationships of mothers and their children and how they change and mold each others personalities. More specifically, the relationship between me and my mother. I will examine the differences between me and my mother that cause friction in our relationship as well as the similarities in our personalities that draw us closer together. 

By using my mother as the topic of this piece, it will allow Lopate’s advice to “…Get in the basic orienting facts — the who, what, where, when and why — as close to the top of every story as possible,” (Lopate 41). Telling little, detailed anecdotes throughout the piece will give the reader the basic information they need about the subject in order to paint a good picture of who my mother actually is. Including myself in the piece but not using myself as the focal point will allow me to go into depth in certain story lines that will be able to show many different sides to my mother’s personality. And shed light on any differences in how she is as a person versus how other people see her (through my point of view).

The vignette at the beginning of Hampl’s essay is used to connect the reader with the author. People are intrigued by stories that they themselves can relate to. Like Hampl, everyone has random splotches of memories from their childhood. Hampl’s essay helps readers realize that just like Hampl, they too may havre mis-remembered these memories they believed formed their childhood. “We store in memory only images of value… This, we say somewhere within us, is something I’m hanging on to,” (Hampl 29). By providing the vignette at the beginning of the story, it allows the reader to form their own interpretation in their mind of the scene that is being drawn out in front of them. Then for the rest of the essay the readers come to understand that many details of the story are fabricated. That Hampl used this vignette to explore the deep recesses of her memories, to write “in order to find out what [she] knows,” (Hampl 27).