Who would have thought food could play such a significant role in a family? Throughout Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake the character’s diet makes recurring appearances that seemed to me to have been carefully planned by the author. Thus, my “Food: The Hard Work of Separating Families While Keeping It All Together” was born.
In my essay I ventured to analyze the role the food played in the development of the novel. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom’s essay “A Mickey Mouse Approach to Globalization” and Tanveer Ali’s essay “The Subway Falafel Sandwich and the Americanization of Ethnic Food” are used as a lens to my argument. Wasserstrom believes American products have no power to change cultures; Ali says that when adapting products and traditions from other cultures to our own these lose some of their originality. Ultimately, I believe these issues to be more complicated than they appear and the Ganguli family proves them to be so.
MARIA DEL ROSARIO CASTRO DIAZ is a rising sophomore in the College of Communication majoring in Public Relations and minoring in Psychology. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She would like to dedicate her work to her freshmen year teachers Holly Schaaf and Christina Michaud for helping her overcome her writing fears. She would also like to dedicate her work to her friends and family who helped her through the stressful early stages of writing.