Ashley M. Beardsley
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Cookbooks “allude to meals and events, people and places, success and failures, joys and sorrows, lives and deaths” representing “the life worlds—past and present—of their creators” (Theophano 83). Through archival research, students explore how cookbooks and recipes are more than instructions that teach people how to cook. Instead, such texts memorialize places and people by mentioning names, restaurants, and locations as they use food to cultivate “a sense of collective memory that in turn shapes communal identity” (Eves 281). This assignment demonstrates how instructors can use food in writing classrooms to engage students in place-based research and writing. The assignment prepares students to use food as a source to start triangulating evidence to “establish validity of findings by consulting multiple accounts of an event obtained from sources” (Gaillet and Rose 133). After creating a collaborative list of foods that students believe define their location based on their experience and brief, informal informational interviews with classmates, friends, and family, they will choose one of the foods to explore further, using digital archives to answer the question, how does this food memorialize our community? Finally, students will use their research to write a short (3-5 page) essay that answers this question.