Food for Thought

Think, pasta and grains, fruits and vegetables, fish, poultry and lean meats, and of course dessert. Hungry? Now think mystery, biographies, fantasies, poetry, myths, fairy tales, realistic, historical, and science fiction and of course non-fiction. Confused? In Translating Literature into Life written by Arnold Bennett, he made the statement. ““…we”- will sit down to a great book as though we were sitting down to a ham sandwich.” (53) This is a most interesting analogy. I have thought about the analogy in two ways. I hope you’ve eaten before reading this paper. However, if the paper is missing a chunk out of it by the end I will understand, because I am about to relate food and reading in the most “tasteful” way, so literally it’s going to be food for thought. Firstly, in younger grades most teachers really focused on different writing methods, one in particular was identified as the “sandwich method,” which really meant a paragraph writing strategy that utilized a concrete graphic organizer that helped make learning to create a complete paragraph easy. It included a topic sentence, details, and a closing sentence. The sandwich organizer is used to help visualize thoughts. Looking at the bigger picture, you could also relate it to any type of good literature, a beginning and end (the bread) and details, which could be, the climax or the best part of the writing (the meat in the middle), which ties in with another method of writing, called the “hamburger method,” which was taught to us when learning to write expository and persuasive essays. This organizer helps students see how each paragraph in the Five-Paragraph Essay relates with the other paragraphs. These two examples of food relate to writing. I am taking this reflection of the analogy a “ham sandwich” to a whole other level though. The second way I looked at this analogy was actually comparing any type of food to any type of book or piece of writing. I know when I was younger, if I completed a good