How Lockdowns, Isolation, and Social Distancing have Affected Our Food Habits
Background: This assignment’s genre will be similar to the first essay in that you will write about a personal lived experience; however, it will be different because instead of writing about your past, you’ll focus on the present time. It is without doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted and changed all ends of our lives. The social interactions we have with other people have shifted from touching, hugging, handshakes, and conversing closely to virtual Zoom calls, six-feet-apart-meetups, and quick elbow bumps; the education we normally would receive in classrooms moved to online platforms where, for the sake of access, we’ve had to share physical spaces with the outside world; work environments moved online, if we are lucky enough to be able to work remotely, while essential workers must physically face threat of the virus on a daily basis; not least of all, the food we eat, when we eat it, how we consume meals, and who we share our tables with has been upended, disrupted, and dislocated from our normal customs. It is safe to say that food, cooking, and eating is dramatically different than what we knew before lockdown and social distancing.
Assignment: Compose an essay that explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused you to adjust, alter, or transform your eating habits. The essay should focus on the current pandemic and document a change of some kind, whether positive, negative, or neutral, and explain how this new way of eating has affected your relationship with food, other people in your life, or another personal aspect of your world. In addition, you will need to do some research and incorporate sources into your writing for this assignment. Use the outside research to provide context and background.
Prompts and Questions to Consider: This list will help you brainstorm and choose a specific topic that is personal to your individual situation as an eater. Do not merely answer the questions in your essay. Instead, focus on one or more of these questions as a starting point and let that question spark the genesis of your original response, content, and organization.
• How has the current global pandemic changed, disrupted, or influenced your eating?
• Have you stuck to your habits? Did you change some things? Or was there a dramatic transformation that was in (or out of) your control?
• What negative consequences has social distancing caused for your as an eater?
• Did you cook more during the pandemic? Did you rely on others to cook more for you, whether it be friends, family, restaurants, or takeout?
• Has the pandemic limited your access to food? Did you experience any kind of food insecurity, uncertainly, or hunger during this time?
• Are there any foods that you no longer eat? Have you introduced any new foods into your diet?
• Has the pandemic caused any positive changes for you, your family, or those close to you in regards to food?
• Do you feel better about your food choices and are you eating more healthily?
• Have the sources of your food-buying changed in any way? Explore the sources of your food and any shifts you’ve noticed: supermarkets, farmers’ markets, bodegas, restaurant take-out, fast food, Amazon, online, or other.
• What is it like to eat at school? What role does the school cafeteria play in your daily routine? How is this space different during the pandemic?
• What rituals, habits, customs, or routines has the pandemic disrupted and in what ways? If you wrote about a food memory in the first essay that was directly impacted by COVID, you could use this essay as a contrast.
Additional Notes: While drafting this essay, make note of all feedback you received on the last essay. Work on incorporating any ideas, concepts, and suggestions into your writing for this time around. Also, include an original title for your essay (not “Essay #2”).
Include at least two (2) outside sources in this essay. These sources should be credible and strengthen, inform, or bolster your essay by providing context and background. The must have an author and be tied to a credible publication. Be sure to fully integrate these sources into your writing using MLA format (which we will focus on in class) or APA format, whichever you are most familiar with. Use these sources to help look outside your own life for a bigger picture of what’s going on in the world. You can use articles, essays, news sources, studies, credible web sources, and more. Since this assignment is on a current topic, you can use Google to find articles for this assignment. All in all, be sure to fully engage with the sources you use; don’t just make a passing reference to an idea or throw in a quote here and there.
Use Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) as a guide to reference formatting and style when using outside texts in your writing:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_style_introduction.html
Structure of your essay
• Use your sources to provide context on how the global pandemic has affected food, eating, or cuisine. Summarize these sources in your own words and include quotations of passages you want to highlight. Any text that is not entirely your own words or ideas must be put in “quotation marks” and cited properly.
• Write about your experiences eating during the pandemic that are significant to one of the prompts above; or choose your own avenue that explores how the pandemic has affected your life as an eater.
• Be sure to include some kind of thesis, argument, or central point about the significant of this change in your life in relation to the changes the pandemic brought about.
• We’ve read essays in class that combine personal ethos with outside knowledge. Psyche Williams-Forson frames her essay “Suckin’ the Chicken Bone Dry” with a narrative about her experiences eating fried chicken growing up; Michael Pollan discusses his own eating habits and dietary choices in relation to America’s problems with food as a country. Both of these writers look inward, but then move outward to incorporate histories, scholarship, philosophy, sociology, and other areas of study to argue their writing.
• You can frame your essay by starting with the personal, then moving into some of the research you found; or vice versa: give a background from your sources first to contextualize the pandemic, then move into your personal story.
• Whicher setup you choose, be sure to have a logical and coherent organizational strategy that makes sense to your content.
Length: 1000 words