Assignment 1 food

1. Assignment #1: Objective Correlative through Food DUE: Monday, Jan. 21
“The way you make an omelet reveals your character.”
“Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat
in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbones and Pernod.”
– Anthony Bourdain
Write a scene centered around food. This could be a scene of cooking, eating, or preparing
food. Use at least one detail from each of the five senses: taste, smell, touch, sound, and sight. Be
precise, specific, and concrete with your details—choose details that you think are revelatory in some
way. We learn something about a person based on the particulars: do they drink wine or liquor? Red
or white wine? How expensive is it? Is it paired with fish or wild game? The person who drinks
$8/jug Carlo Rossi white blend with venison is very different from the person who pairs a 2012
pinot noir from Willamette County with their venison. And then there’s the person who drinks skim
milk with dinner. By adding up all sorts of specific details, we learn about people, situations, and
relationships.
Never move inside a person’s mind—do not say how anyone feels or thinks; every detail must be
external, observable by one of the five senses. Every detail should be contemporary—meaning,
there is no flashback, and everything takes place during the same time frame—not more than one
hour, but preferably within a five-minute period.
The purpose here is not to describe food in a scientific way, but rather to describe a food-
centered scene in a way that reveals characters and relationships. Avoid simply recounting details that
are more or less universal, or can be assumed; for example, there’s no need to give all of the details
of how a person boils water, unless there is something unusual about it. Otherwise, we assume they
fill a pot with water from the tap, set it on the stovetop, turn the stove on, etc. Keep things focused;
you don’t have space to describe an entire banquet.
Submit on BbLearn as a “.docx” file, so I can leave comments on the text itself.
REQUIREMENTS:
(1) No interiority
Some off-limit words: think, feel, know, wonder, believe, consider, wish, want, desire, fear…
(2) 250-300 words
Include a word count at the bottom
(3) At least one concrete detail from each of the five senses
Sight; Touch; Smell; Sound; Taste
(4) Scene takes place within a one-hour timeframe
Preferably within five minutes
(5) No more than 5 adjectives/adverbs combined (underlined)—and you can’t just turn
adjectives into abstract nouns, because:
(6) No abstract nouns
Some off-limit words: happiness, intelligence, loneliness, joy, misery, beauty, compassion, evil…
(7) No passive voice
“Mom grilled the zucchini;” not “The zucchini was grilled by Mom.”
Grading: You are ineligible for a B if you do not meet all of the above requirements.