Sources for Paper

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/gfc.2002.2.1.80.pdf?acceptTC=true
Pho - the Vietnamese Addiction - article from Gastronomica, so from the same source as other articles we've read in class.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Pho-Scene-in-the-United-States---Part-1&id=2223803
Series based off the scene in Pho in United States - relevant to topic of SE

Unit 1 - P4

P4: Read Cate and 
O’Donnell. What roles does food play in the communities that they studied?
 Compare how Cate and O’Donnell relate food to communities. What part of their
studies did you find most interesting and why?

O'Donnell first talks about the role food plays in the Chinese community based on politics. Some examples of that are how Mao took special attention to the production and distribution of rice in the Chinese socialist economy. Deng Xiaoping, Mao's sucessor, equated food and egalitarian distribution of it to the signs of good government. Central to the article is Wang Jin's parallelism of beef eaters representing socialists and seafood eaters (the sneaky ones) as the rising capitalists. For Old Shenzheners, food's role was to rekindle nostalgic spirit of the older generation and reaffirm their identity. Food was linked to rustication was when they worked in brigades in Mao's era and where food distribution was based off whether your residence was rural or urban. Thus, food for the Old Shenzheners is a reminder of the poor work conditions and malnourishment that one suffered for the sake of their country. When the new migrants came over to Shenzhen to develop the New Shenzhen era, they brought over their hometown foods and different preparation styles whose role served to displace the old Shezheners tradition. This is why Old Shenzheners feel nostalgic and reaffirm their identities through food in the midst of a growingcosmopolitan society. For the people who did not live in the times that defined the Old Shenzheners, they were able to experience what it would be like through the old fsahioned recipes in order to have greater appreciation for their roots.

In "Breaking Bread with a Spread" by Sandra Cate, the role food played in the prison community was to bring more excitement to the monotony in jail and their bland dishes. For the inmates, spread is something that is enjoyable for them and something that unites them together as it takes teamwork to gather the ingredients to make or invent a great-tasting spread. Thus, food spread gives the inmates a reason to engage in social activity despite the extenuating circumstances of being in jail. Another interesting aspect of spread is that it is a status marker. That is, those who are able to afford spread ingredients are most likely being taken care of by someone or "richer" relative to other inmates. Conversely, the food given off by the institution lacks the identity that spread provides because it is so general, colorlless, and bland to fit the needs of everyone.

Both communities contain different groups of people. In O'Donnell's article, the "factions" are the Old Shenzhen and the New Shenzhener + migrants. In Cate's article, the factions can be determined by race or by status markers. The authors similarly talk about how food has affect on outsiders who do not understand the community. Zhang Tsao did not understand why her mother liked corn bread and the role it played in reminding of her of rustication just like the daughters of a released inmate did not understand why they were being served spread for dinner. Both Cate and O'Donnell discuss the role that food plays on a diverse community but in different ways. O'Donnell focuses on the division that food creates by the mentioning of Wang Jin's parable of the sneaky fish eaters and the dumb meat eaters whereas Cate focuses on how prison spread has brought an identity to the people in jail. The food for the Old Shenzheners was a symbol of reaffirming their identity and their history under Mao rule which isolated them from the growing diversity following the change in the economy and the migrants that started to infiltrate their community. For Cate, prison spread was a way of making the inmates more personalized and a source of innovation and stimulation in the drab environment.

The part of the study that I found the most interesting was how the role of food transitioned for the prison inmates. Even once they were released from jail, some continued to make spread at home and even took advantage of the resources available to them to make spread that they could not make with the constraint in jail. Food's role had become so ingrained in their community that it had become a part of the community member's identity so that the practice was still continued even when they had become separated from the community later on. It supports the idea that through food, an individual alone is capable of representing their community even if they are not physically together. This ties in to how O'Donnell concludes her article of how New Shenzheners were able to re-experience a part of their family history through food to better understand a community that they are a part of but really know little about. Food's role in both communities was the transferrance of their culture.