English Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 2

English - Essay Example Manalansan IV. He is an Anthropologist specializing in Asian American Studies, Latin American, and Caribbean studies, at the University of Illinois. He is also an author, who has written on topics such as gender, and food. One of his works on food is the â€Å"Prairescapes: Mapping food, loss, and longing.† In this article, Manalansan also depicts food as playing different roles from that of human survival. In this paper, I will use these two works to enforce food as a powerful social tool, with special social functions. Many people overlook the other functions of food due to lack of knowledge. Charles Johnson’s â€Å"Dr. King’s Refrigerator,† is a fictional story of one Martin Luther King, Jr. He is busy looking for a theme for his Sunday sermon when he suddenly feels hungry and heads to his refrigerator for a snack. He finds food that prepared by his wife for her visitors the next morning. Seeing a variety of food, King suddenly starts making all sorts o f connections with this food. The foods are from different world regions, and he is fascinated at how this food connected him to these world regions. The connection he feels is a pure interaction of Buddhism in the ideals of the Baptists. Charles Johnson writes, â€Å"Then he slowly put the apple down, feeling not so much hunger now as a profound indebtedness and thanksgiving- to everyone and everything in Creation† (Johnson 3). This also portrays Charles Johnson’s writing style as unique. He leaves the readers with pictures in the mind. The quote also brings out the fusion of religions, in this case, Buddhism and Baptist. The appreciation of nature and the belief that nature indirectly joins humans is a Buddhism notion that is felt by a Baptist preacher. Charles John has widely employed symbolism to point out the other roles that food plays, He uses food to symbolize the cultures and the people from where they were grown. Johnson writes, â€Å"All of human culture, h istory, and civilization laid unscrolled at his feet, and he had only to step into his kitchen to discover it. He looked around the disheveled room, and he saw in each succulent fruit, each slice of bread, and each grain of rice a fragile, inescapable network of mutuality in which all earthly creatures were codependent, integrated, and tied in a single garment of destiny† (Johnson 3). Here, Johnson tries to emphasize that people should adopt a new way of perceiving at nature as human beings connect through nature. One does not have to be physically present in France in order to experience their culture. We can experience other people’s cultures, innovations, and civilization, by simply owning their products and eating their food. This shows that human beings are closer to each other than they think. Johnson’s work has allowed for philosophy and literature to integrate. His passages are philosophical as well as epistemological. He makes readers curious and to wond er what the story drives to. He infuses his philosophical ideas in the well-developed characters. He incorporates reality with fantasy, under the guidance of philosophy. For instance, he argues,â€Å"When we get up in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap created by a Frenchman. The towel is provided by a Turk. Before we leave for our jobs, we are beholden to more than half the world†