Master Chef without a taste

A real family comedy drama "Tortilla soup" is a story about an old chef, living with three beautiful grownup daughters, all of who have chosen their own way of living life. The oldest is Letitia, a prim schoolteacher who is also presented as being religious. The middle daughter Carmen shares the taste of cooking just like her father, but has her own plan of achieving something big in a corporate world. Maribel, the youngest, is presented as a confused teenager who is not sure of her ambitions. There are some other supporting characters; like Gomez, a friend chef; Yolanda, a neighbor; Hortensia, Yolanda’s mom, that spice up the movie. Out of all the characters, the one that got my consideration was Martin (dad).

A retired chef, Martin is presented as a responsible character that cares for his family. His care and love can be identified from the delicious foods that he prepares for his family. He is, by far, the most complicated character in the movie too. After his wife’s death, he takes on the responsibility of raising his daughters. He gives up the second marriage because he gets so involved in raising his kids and his work. He makes sure that they get a good life. Despite that, Carmen, his middle daughter, thinks that her dad doesn’t really care about what she is doing in her life. But the reality is that Martin doesn’t want Carmen to go far from him because he loves her very much. He can also be spotted as being a man with the rules, as he orders his daughters to live according to his will under his roof. He makes sure that nobody messes up his traditional Sunday evening dinner. Along the movie, it is shown that Carmen forces her father to start thinking about himself and stop caring a lot for his family.

Martin, at the beginning of the movie, is shown as if he is not experiencing joy in his life. He even talks about the tensions related to his daughter with his chef friend Gomez. His loss of joy can be depicted in the movie as him not being able to taste and smell. He can prepare the food just right but cannot even taste himself. At the end of the movie, when he gets through with his life’s stresses, he finally becomes able to taste the food. This happens in the movie when his daughter Carmen cancels her trip to Barcelona and prepares her version of his dad’s recipe. This incident marks the return of his joy in his family. Now, he not only can give other people joy but can also feel himself. After this incident, he finally realizes the importance of joy in his life and manages to express his suppressed desire for Yolanda.

All in all, tortilla soup is the movie about discovering the joy in life as seen in the life of each character presented in the movie. The movie gives us all, the message that there is so much joy in the life, but all we do is live without even tasting it.

Food Got Magic

We eat, we drink, we sleep, and we work. We do a lot of crazy stuff in our life, but how are we able to do so many fatiguing tasks? Where does the magic happen? From where do we get all the magical powers to do what we do every second? It’s very unfathomable, the idea that various foods have their own peculiar influence in the living body. Food is one of the life essential elements, and also the one whose broad effects are not wary to us. Food is used as a form of communication, could be used as a means to show culture, or can also have a magical effects that might not make sense straightaway but might have a very strong meaning hidden behind it.

Laura Esquivel’s “like water for chocolate,” presents the story of a Mexican girl, named Tita De LaGarza, who possesses an ability to transport her emotion through the food she prepares. She believes that the food has that power to relate one’s emotion to another. Thus if prepared with love will spark off feeling of love in other people or if prepared with a broken heart will generate feeling of hate among people who feed on it. In the story, Tita, while making a wedding cake for her sister’s wedding with a watery eye, pours her sorrow in the cake and thus as a result everyone in the wedding gets a bad stomach. On the different context food is also shown as an element that can evoke sexuality in living body. As in story, after eating the “Quail in Rose Petal Sauce,” everyone starts acting like an aphrodisiac. The rose petal that is used in the dish is of the same rose that Pedro hands it to her. It seems the idea that everyone acting crazy as being Tita’s own sexual desires that she wants to gratify with Pedro but can’t as being watched by Mama Elena. Also, to make her relation healthy with Pedro she prepares the food for him. Thus, In the story, Tita conveys her emotions with the help of the foods she makes.

The tale of food and magic continues in the Homer’s epic poem “ The Odyssey.” The poem starts with the protagonist “Odysseus” having a feast in the palace of Phaeacians. They come across many life and death situations, and in between all those situations they are depicted as feasting, feeding, or killing another form of life which signals that food has to do a lot with the consequences presented in the Odyssey. In the poem, the Odysseus reaches a land of lotus-eaters where his comrades eats the strange plant and fails to report back. It can be coated as “but whoever ate that sweet fruit lost the will to report back, preferring instead to stay there, munching lotus, oblivious of home” (Homer 9.94-96). In another setting, when the Odysseus is in Circes’ palace, Odysseus’ man are fed with the potion that works its magical power and make them forget of their homeland. In the same setting, Hermes gives Odysseus, a magical herb that cuts the effects of the potion later to be given by Circe. In yet another backdrop, Odysseus is depicted as pouring libation to all the deads and sacrificing ram, ewe and heifer. This shows yet another magical power of the food that even causes the souls of the dead to come out of their underground caverns. Food in the form of wine is also shown to have a magical effect in the poem. While being inside Cyclopes’ cave, Odysseus feeds him with wine causing him to sleep. Thus, foods in the odyssey are described to have magical, bizarre and hallucinogenic effects. It is shown as if it is the food that turns the impossible into possible.

So, food in our life has a very vital meaning. It is the one to make our day go bright and it is the one to make it hateful. Perhaps that is the reason behind people saying you are the direct representation of what you eat. If it weren’t about the magic in food, how would a small living body grow into a giant one feeding upon the bit of grain or a crumb of bread? It is the question to ponder on.

Work Cited:

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. New York: Double Day, 1989.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Indiana: HacketPublishing, 2000.

Turkey and Thanksgiving

Food! These four letters making a word, believe it or not, symbolizes and means more than any other things combined in this world. For rich, food may mean something to satisfy the craving coming from within one’s body. For poor, it may mean a living done for survival. For other animals, it may also mean survival along with instinct. For insects it may mean a monotonous task that guides their instinct. But, for us humans, food symbolizes a much greater deal than any other species in this world. We not only use food to eat, but rather also use for celebrations, grieving, meetings, and for religious purposes along with many other things. One such celebration in which we enjoy our food is “Thanksgiving.”

Thanksgiving, which is celebrated on 25 November, is a festival where we not only celebrate the harvest season, but also share the concept of sharing and helping each other out. There are no definite origins of thanksgiving, but historians assume thanksgiving to predate 16^th century. It is believed that thanksgiving originated from England. When the colonists founded America, they brought this culture with them. However, the name was particularly given in America. There were many foods that were consumed on this festival. But, what better to justify a festivity than to share a fat and juicy turkey where the main moral is the concept of sharing.

Turkeys were initially a game bird, because of its speed, which were hunted by the Aztecs. They became domesticated in the late 1600’s. There are many breeds of Turkeys, including domesticated and wild ones. These days’ turkeys are specially bred for their meaty breasts. When the pilgrims arrived in America, they liked turkey so much that they took some with them to Spain. But today, America is the only country that eats more turkey than any other nation. In fact, Sir George Washington Loved it so much that he wanted turkey to be the national bird of our country. It has also been the case that turkeys were eaten along with tortillas among Hopi Indians. So, when the first thanksgiving was done in 1620’s, there were many other foods that were feasted upon. For example, lobsters, deer, goose, seal and many others. Then, why did turkey become so attached with the modern Thanksgiving? Was it the size or the taste? Or perhaps other foods became scarce?

So, the answer is that not only other food became more scarce and the turkeys were big enough to feed a whole family, but also that they were massively being domesticated, which led to a substantial supply of turkey in modern America. As thanksgiving is a holiday where people share and give their thanks to other people and to god, what better meal can there be to share than a big turkey? It is also believed that when the pilgrims came to America, they could only find turkey to go around among many people for harvest festival. Nonetheless, there are many other stories relating turkey and thanksgiving.

But no matter how many stories we have for thanks giving, in the end, it really doesn’t matter whether you share a turkey, a lobster, a cow or a broccoli in thanksgiving or any other festival. What really matters is that we are sharing, which may very well, one day, lead to a better world- a world where people not only share food, but also share love, kindness and hope.

Ideas: Like Water For chocolate

Laura Esquivel’s “like water for chocolate,” presents the story of a Mexican girl and boy who are deeply in love with one another. Through out the story Laura has presented Tita De La Garza, the youngest daughter of De La Garza family, as a character who constantly fight with the society and especially her mother Elena to set her free from the family’s tradition of abandoning the youngest daughter to marry. The story is presented in period of twelve months with some kind of dish prepared each month, probably to site the importance of certain kind of food at certain month. Apart from deeply engaging story, Laura also gives us idea about how food affects different kind of activities we do in our everyday life.

The versatility that the food has on human activity is the power of the story itself. For instance, there is a place in the story where everyone starts acting aphrodisiac after eating “Quail in Rose Petal Sauce.” By that author is trying to give a reader the idea that certain kinds of food, probably because of the flavor, arouse sexual excitements. Also, in the story Tita tries to cook new and delicious food in order to make her and Pedro’s relation better. So, It won’t be wrong to say that food is also presented as a whole new language of communicating human emotions.

The other idea that the story delivers is the different shades of femaleness. There are several women characters in the story each distinctly different from one another. For example, Tita is portrayed to be a loving and caring girl, where as Mama Elena is shown rather strict and merciless women. Gertrudis, one of the sisters, is rebellious, and Rasaoura seems envious of Tita and see her as a competition regarding Pedro.

Therefore, this book seems to be delivering a lot of messages to the readers. It also seems like the story has a feminine flavor to it. Maybe because there are a lot of female characters and kitchen scenes. But whatever message the story might have for its reader, at the end its all about the love story of a girl who fights her way through the unsupportive crowd to lay in the arms of her man.