"The Golden Calf" and Three Other Food Stories: A Synopsis
My project focuses on my creative writing. I have developed four short stories for this project: "The Golden Calf," "The First Supper," "An Incomplete Supper," and "Lee Family BBQ Sauce." The obvious theme that ties these stories together is food. I became interested with food as an element of fiction while reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. This created many questions for me about how food functions in literature and how that function relates to culture.
In my critical introduction I explore the process of writing as well as how my writing and the writing of others use food. The sections in the introduction are: "My Inspiration," "Why Have I Written About Food?," "Cultural Feminism and Food," and "The Chinese American Woman: How Religion and Philosophy Act Against the Cultural Feminism Ideal in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." The ideas discussed in each of these sections are at least loosely connected with my stories.
When I started working on this project I understood that food could have a great impact on a person as well as on a people. And one of the things I needed to do for this project was to determine the ways in which food impacts us. My list of the ways food impacts us when I started consisted of psychologically, physically, and sociologically as a representation of culture. I now understand that food impacts us in all those ways, while it also affects us in the ways that we relate to our culture, and the ways our culture relates to us. Food in my stories represents all these things.
The stories I present in this collection are inspired by food, and reading them with this in mind is important. But these stories are also explorations of identity; specifically what are the experiences of men and women in relation to food. All of my stories have some element of this struggle that occurs in individuals when they are part of or are not part of the assigned cultural roles for men and women. The child's memories of the mother in "The Golden Calf" are of her in the kitchen. One of Will's problems, in "The First Supper," is that his wife is dead and he can't cook for himself. Ruth seduces M.T. in part with her BBQ ribs in "Lee Family BBQ Sauce." And the father fondly remembers his mother's cooking in "An Incomplete Supper."
Because of the difficulty of defining what an "American" food is I focused not on particularly "American" dishes but on the innovations in the preparation and consumption of food as well as the eating habits of the average American. We, on average, eat more meat than the rest of the world; and so, two of my stories include meat. We eat out more than other countries; and so, I have written about eating out. And we associate certain foods with the unpleasant atmosphere of hospitals.
In "The Golden Calf" a son recalls an event in which he was responsible for the death of a calf. With the muddled thinking of youth he responds in a shocking way to the calf's death. "The First Supper" was inspired by an Albert Brooks film titled Defending Your Life. During his meal Will struggles with the confusion associated with the ascension to heaven. The pain and turmoil between a father and son is interrupted in "An Incomplete Supper." "Lee Family BBQ Sauce" features a confused cowboy and a strong woman who find each other over a pile of ribs.
From "The First Supper":
"Sir, you seem awfully tired and wore out. You know you can stay here if you want to. All of these people you see here have been here for hundreds of years."
He says, "No, thank you" and turns for the door again. And then he sees that it indeed is dark out. Or is dark now. He begins to wonder just how long he has been there. He feels the urge to get home again, but he stops with his hand on the handle of the door.