Nutritional Literature

For all these analogies of mine about food, I find it funny that I have yet to consider how a very important aspect of food applies to literature.

(http://nutritiondata.self.com/images/home/nutritionIndex.gif)

What is literary nutrition? What is it about literature that nourishes the soul? Well, what is it that makes society better? It is a message, a view about the world that is expressed through the literature. Hey, wait a second, that sounds a lot like theme.

Theme is how literature changes a soul as nutrition changes a body. It refreshes it, maintains it, keeps it alive. What's really cool is how this analogy doesn't break down right away. I mean, what happens if you only eat one kind of food? Let's say that you only eat doughnuts. Is that going to be very nutritious? Nope. And in much the same way commercial fiction is the McDonald's of literature. Basically not theme, and what there is is something that isn't novel, it isn't anything that isn't already in excess like sodium or fat.

But what about the rest of it? Nutrition is a very complicated thing, there's an entire pyramid of different kinds of foods that give different nutrition. One must balance this; more than that, every person's balance is different. Every person enjoys a slightly different balance of food either because there isn't one healthy; after all, who is to say that you can't get your protein from peanut butter and instead must eat steak? And there are different kinds of books to, many, many kinds - horror and adventure, action and mystery, historical and futuristic. So many kinds of books, so many books in each kind. Which to read? Which to explore? So many options, just like looking at a restaurant menu - which I think is where this analogy starts to break. That is now like saying that a restaurant is like a library. Yet is that a break or a bud?

But I digress. Too much food isn't exactly a good thing; let this food for thought digest. Library menus are for another day.

Culture's Food

I tend to not get much sleep at night. I have a bad habit of watching Netflix while I do my homework, and thus get to bed somewhat late, so I and my favorite thing to do in the morning is hit the snooze button.

(https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=lOBrMDkOV9GQDM&tbnid=SP_5N3qx1LwexM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.doctorsolve.com%2Fblog%2F2010%2F03%2Fstop-hitting-the-snooze-button.html&ei=RgM9Us6gNa2r4AP05oCYAQ&psig=AFQjCNHEVOwwxm-h6MKB9fGkeRFdhwMDqw&ust=1379816589192274)

Me every single morning. About 10 times.

So of course by the time third block comes around this is me:

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Now, I fight it. I fight it so hard that I don't think my teachers know when I'm asleep half the time because I'm taking notes in my sleep, I'm answering questions, my head is upright. But even though it only takes me one second to wake up it takes me half that time to fall asleep again once the note's been jotted, once the question's answered, once my head's been lifted. I fight, but to no avail.

But there's one thing that does manage to wake me up.

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Me Gusta

Food always wakes me up. Food makes me happy happy alert. Food wakes me up at research, it wakes me up in Linear Algebra, and if I tried bringing candy one day, it'd probably wake me up in independent study.

So what does this have to do with literature?

Culture can fall asleep. Sometimes it fights, sometimes it doesn't. And guess what feeds it when it needs a bit of a stimulus? Literature.

Books all across history have been responsible for waking up culture; for shocking it into action. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin shocked the Union; it was responsible for a significant increase in antislavery sentiment in the North. Thomas Paine's Common Sense made people think differently; it changed a culture from one of British loyalty to one of American independence; a few years later, his The American Crisis helped keep this feeling alive and gave further fuel to the revolution.

What does this all mean? It means that literature is a culture's food. Literature sustains a culture; it keeps it from starving itself into eternal sleep of stagnancy cultural death. Literature is vital to a culture's change; without it, progress stops and civilization withers.

Story Dough

Cookie dough is surprisingly a lot like stories. How are they? Well, they start out like this:


(http://food4thought21.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/cookie_dough.jpg)

Just a massive mass of unfinished, mixed stuff. Just like a pile of ideas: any good writer, like any good cookie maker, has a lot of dough that is unfinished. Like dough, ideas can be consumed as is - just finished there, and often times that is sweet because the idea will never finish as well as it is just as a pure idea. Many stories can sound good on the surface, but then when you try to write them out, work out the nitty gritty, it just doesn't work. But what of the ones you do finish?


(http://barfblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/raw-cookie-dough__59353_zoom.jpg)

Now look carefully at these hunks of cookie dough - none of them are of the right shape, they don't have the chocolate chips in the same spots. All stories are different; every idea shapes out differently. Sure, you can cookie cutter a story, but why? As good as all cookies are, not every cookie is as good as other cookies. Store bought, perfectly matched cookies just aren't nearly as good as homemade goodness.
You've made your delicious cookies. Not what?


(http://tryityoumightlikeit.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/chocolate-almond-cookies.jpg)

Stories always need a good proofread. It may be less common with cookies, but you know what? It is still always possible to add more ideas to it. Great idea.


(http://dinnersdishesanddesserts.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Cookie-Dough-Sandwich-Cookies-3_.jpg)

I just wish I didn't cook all my cookie dough earlier. I want to do this. So I guess I'll just need to do what any good story writer does - get some new ideas, and get working.

Burritology

Build-your-own burrito places like Qdoba and Moes are generally regarded as being bad at giving you back burritos well mixed. The burrito below shows the layers within the burrito - there is rice on the bottom, pico de gallo covering the rice, a blanket of guacamole on the pico and beneath a tasty mix of steak and beans.

(http://dqk458w0nf3mo.cloudfront.net/assets/hero/whole-wheat-tortilla-d8a665d5026a83d690c10760d18cf944.jpg)

Generally, most burritos are too big around to take a bite that encompasses all the burrito. So you must choose where to bite of the edge - this is the science that is burritology.  You may eat your rice and vegetables by biting off the bottom, and then take a big bite of meat and beans from the top. Or you can approach the epic task of eating from a slightly different angle (quite literally), and get some meat, pico, and guac in one bite, but then get rice, pico and guac in another. Generally, big burritos have more layers that wrap around and mix and make this an even more complicated task.

Burritology can basically be summarized in that there is more than one way to eat the same burrito, and each way gives a different gustatory experience. This can be said of writing too. There are many ways of writing literature, but each may lead to a different literary experience for the reader. On the one hand, a writer can discuss the "outrageously ginormous burrito" they ate the other day. Or they can say the same thing by writing about  the "very large burrito" they ate. Yes, both refer to a burrito that is big in a big way, but the former refers to a burrito that may be more crudely big, as outrageous has more of a crude connotation than very does. And the latter does not make the burrito sound quite as awesome - ginormous is more of an awe-inspiring word than large is. This is how an author's diction, or word choice, can be used by a writer to make the reader feel one thing versus the other without changing what they are conveying.

Thus, the same principles apply to eating a burrito as they do to writing literature. You can do the same thing, but by approaching things at a slightly different angle you can change the experience very, very much.