21W.730: FOOD for THOUGHT                                                    Fall 2009

Essay 2  (5 pages)
Write an essay in which you analyze and reflect on ideas from In Defense of Food, developing your own idea as you do so. Use at least one additional reading from our class in your discussion.

Your goals:

• To develop an argument that explores, expands on, clarifies, questions and/or challenges other writers’ ideas.

• To make your essay as interesting as possible to readers—keeping in mind possible readers outside our class.
• To demonstrate analytic skill; that is, to work with ideas in a way that is thoughtful, accurate, and powerful.
• To write muscular, energetic sentences and to link them in paragraphs that unfold in a graceful, dynamic way.
• To shape your essay so that the whole is greater than the parts.

Options
Please choose one of the following prompts for Essay 2:
1)  Write a letter
a)  To Michael Pollan
Tell Pollan what you found new, interesting, unexpected, and/or important in this book. Ask questions, share your own thoughts.

            b)  To a friend
Tell your friend what you found new, unexpected, important, etc. about this book. Make it clear in the letter why you are sharing your thoughts on this book with this particular friend. This letter may be primarily explanatory/exploratory or it may be persuasive.

2)  Write a Book Review of In Defense of Food
You may aim your book review for a campus, community, metropolitan or national newspaper.

• See next page for a description of the Book Review-type essay.

3)  Write an essay that explores the role of science in helping us be wise and healthy eaters, drawing on the evidence and arguments of In Defense of Food.

4)  Write an essay that explores the role of culture in helping us be wise and healthy eaters, drawing on the evidence and arguments of In Defense of Food.

Note: For options 2, 3 and 4 you may refer to personal experience and observations as well as books, movies, news items, conversations you’ve had, etc.  For all options, you must portray the overall purpose and specific ideas of Pollan’s book accurately.
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Option 2: Book Review

In many publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, reviewers use the book they are reviewing as the basis of an essay. That is, at the same time that they inform readers about the book and render some judgments about it, they highlight one or more key ideas and provide an extended discussion of those ideas. That’s the kind of essay you will write if you choose this option.

This essay should be enjoyable; it gives you a chance to enter into an extended discussion with a writer whose work is esteemed by his peers and by the general reading public. It gives you a chance to mingle your words with those of an eminent writer, which is one of the pleasures of critiquing work that has literary merit.

Book reviews are challenging.

• For one thing, you must accurately represent the work you’ve chosen to review. Whether you agree or disagree with the writer’s views and approach, you must present them to readers in a form that the writer would recognize as his or her own.
• But you don’t want to spend the whole review summarizing the book; that’s a précis, not a review. Instead, you want your chosen book to become a springboard for a discussion of one or more issues that you think is due more attention.
• Another challenge will be quoting: you want to quote enough to give the reader the flavor of the book, yet you don’t want your review to be a string of quotes.

You want to engage with both the content of the book—its validity, reasonableness, usefulness, originality—and also with the writing: Is the writing vivid? Are examples abundant and well chosen? Is the writer a master of metaphor? Does he rely heavily on analogies? What audience does the book seem to be addressing? Who should read this book? What are the particular pleasures of this writer’s style? (You don’t need to answer all these questions; they’re just prods for your thinking.)

Although it is counterintuitive, most longer book reviews actually spent relatively little time on judgment, and more time describing the book and discussing issues. Note that judgment may be included in phrases throughout your essay—it needn’t be “saved up” for a section of its own. Readers do, however, expect some kind of summary evaluation, albeit brief.

Remember, too, that while this is a book review it is also an essay. Therefore you don’t want to write 5 pages of: “ . . . and another thing about this book . . .”—you want your review to develop an idea, to get your readers thinking about something.