In this 3-part series, I give an overview of how to work with recipes in the writing classroom. In part 1 we discussed genre: how we navigate recipes and how their structures have changed over time. My students had a blast researching and sharing different recipes and even playing around and collaboratively making a few of their own. If you missed that blog post, you can follow this link to original post. In part 2 of this series, we dive deeper into the ethics of recipe development by exploring the question, “Who owns a recipe?” And yall, this is a longer post because this is a very complicated question. So as a note, this is the first week students are introduced to the question, but it’s one we tackle all semester long. The goal of this question is to get students to consider how they can move beyond the bare minimum of citations and instead consider the relationships between recipes and their history, culture, and authors. Because recipes themselves cannot be copyrighted, they present us with a unique writing artifact for studying questions like citation, reinvention, and reciprocity. This week will set the groundwork for later conversations in class around race, community, and ethics. It will also help students during their unit projects, in which they’ll be asked to write or adapt their own recipe.
In terms of course structure, placing this at week 2 or 3 is ideal because students have been introduced to recipes, gotten familiar with their classmates, and are more primed for the challenging questions that come with recipe ownership. Because many recipes are instructional, students may get the impression that they are neutral writing artifacts—the major goal of this week is to push back on that idea. To prep students for these conversations, we begin with reading During Food Media’s Time of Reckoning, Let’s Not Forget the Recipes by Dan Q. Dao. What I really enjoy about this essay is that it is from the viewpoint of a professional food writer and places recipe writing within the context of larger movements of racial justice, structural racism, and publishing. Dao’s writing really demonstrates the complicated nature of recipe writing in the digital age and also humanizes the issue, because he presents both general information and his own personal experiences. This was my first-time teaching with this essay, but I expected to get a bit of pushback or to be met with some discomfort. To better prepare my class for discussion, we spent some time discussing generally how to talk about race in class. Together, our class took assessment of how we were feeling, how comfortable we were with talking about subjects like race, identity, and politics, and how we could strategize for productive conversations in class (I like to use an anonymous polling software for these types of convos like Poll EV). Next, students reflected on how much they think about where food or recipes come from and what might encourage them to learn more. Last, we map out some key terms we’ll define in the next class period:
Dilution
Appropriation
Appreciation
Colonization
Authenticity
I find these terms to be helpful because they shift the conversation around Dao’s essay from whether they agree or disagree with his argument towards understanding the different issues he’s pointing out. The task of finding and defining is familiar to students and will also help us to be on the same page.
To help my students put these terms to practice, we’ll be looking at these readings over the next week:
Listen to “No Longer Gentle Indians” by Toasted Sister Podcast
The Ethics of Recipe Writing, Publishing and Blogging, posted by Barbara of Tigers & Strawberry (read blog post + comments)
Mentor texts which contextualize recipes culturally. I used the oral history project El Paso Food Voices but it may be helpful to find examples that are geographically or culturally significant to your institution.
Like Dao, “No Longer Gentle Indians” introduces students to the longer history of recipe appropriation from the perspective of indigenous food writers and chefs. Paired with Barbara’s blogpost it also offers practical advice for the question of, “well how are people supposed to write about foods that don’t belong to their communities?” which is reciprocity and relationality (two ideas very close to my heart as a Cultural Rhetorics scholar). On the opposite side, the mentor text of El Paso Food Voices, shows students what recipe development from within a community can look like. This project incorporates video and recipes from within the El Paso community with many of the author’s explaining who taught them to make the recipe. I find the videos to be a more achievable example for students of what an ethical recipe can look like, because they are not created by professional food writers, but instead or written by and for the El Paso community. This helps move us towards week 3 of recipe writing, which will explore how recipes tell stories (blog forthcoming).
What are your thoughts on recipe adaptation? How have you navigated the idea of “ownership” in your writing classroom? I’d love to hear more! Share your experience in the comments below or consider contributing to our resource page (CFP below). And stay tuned for part 3 of this series of Working with Recipes in the Writing Classroom where I’ll be covering: Recipes as Story: How Recipes Connect us to Others.
Call for Pedagogy Resources:
One goal of this website is to build community resources for teaching at the intersection of food and rhet/comp. Have you incorporated food into your rhetoric and composition class? Consider contributing your materials to this website. Syllabi, assignments, examples, and readings are all welcome. You can submit resources via this Google Form.