SPRING 2020-PAPER # 2

SPRING 2020-PAPER # 2

Wizards and Prophets and the End of the World (as We Know it)


For the Wizards and Prophets assignment (PAPER #2), consider Michael C Mann’s essay “Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?” concerning some unavoidable questions about our current and future lives as we move towards a population of 10 billion people, including, as Mann asks: How can we provide for everyone without making the planet uninhabitable?
For this project you’ll want to have read, annotated, and discussed these three essays.


• Michael C Mann’s “Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?”
• Michael Pollan’s “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”
• Lizzie Widdicombe “The End of Food”


Your goal is to work with Mann’s essay and one of the other two works (Pollan OR Widdicombe) to shape a discussion. Please bring two essays into a CONVERSATION and help locate yourself inside the tensions and curiosities that emerge when setting Mann against Pollan or Widdicombe.
Craft a thesis that helps unite your two texts. Work to connect important moments in Mann and Pollan or Widdicombe, cite specific compelling passages from the essays you select, back up your claims, and work to massage those ideas into your discussion. Remember: Don’t just gesture, SHOW through a mixture of direct quotation and concrete paraphrasing.


Think: “Pollan shows us that….__________by revealing_______.”
Or “Mann offers a more moving portrait of existential fear…_____________ by______.”


Your analysis on why the passages you place in conversation are compelling will help to advance your ideas.
Some questions to consider:


• How do you see yourself: Voght-ish or Borlaug-ish? And how different situations change your views?
• Thinking about the Prophet/Wizard tension in Mann—is this a kind of lens to look at other tensions in other texts?
• Can one school of thought—Wizard and Prophet—harmonize with the other?
• Do you agree with Pollan’s assertion that cooking made us who we are? And what might we have to become in order to survive?
• Widdicombe points out “how many indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of substance”—can that idea be applied to other things besides food?
• If food is a mirror through which we can better understand ourselves and culture, what does it say if our food is killing us and our planet? And/or that we might exceed the carrying capacity of the planet (consider how little you had to do with your own arrival on the planet and the specific life you were born into—good or bad).
• You’re writing an essay that is focused on problem solving; writing an essay is a problem to solve too, no? Are you more Voght-ish or Borlaug-ish as you solve the problem of your essay (or are you some of both?)
• How does Mann fit with Pollan or Widdicombe, and how do your own ideas counter/extend/complicate/challenge some of these ideas you’ve located and placed in conversation?


Some denser food for thought:
Pollan discusses the good, the bad, and the ugly (Gordon Ramsay?) aspects of our relationship with food and its impact on culture over time, focusing on Julia Child’s revolutionary cooking show in the 1960’s. Of note, in section 6, Pollan includes French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s claim that cooking made us who we are. In essence, by learning to harness the power of fire to cook food, it had “done the most to advance the cause of civilization.” Of course, despite the advances humanity has made cooking food and developing ways of being, if they way we live is bringing about an existential crisis, now what?


Perhaps as a counter to Pollan’s emphasis on the civilizing and culturizing power of food, consider the efficiency and economically driven ideals baked in (food pun!) to Rob Rhinehart’s vision for Soylent, and, of course, the inevitable reality that form takes. As we have already seen in “The End of Food” by Lizzie Widdicombe, she closes with the idea that “The Soylent dream is a strange one: a place where our food-related hopes mingle with our nightmares.” One could imagine the Wizards or Prophets, concepts taken from Mann’s essay, might find an alignment with the way Widdicombe is conveying the polarizing impacts of Soylent.


These are “starter questions” to get you thinking about the bigger concepts possible for discussion in this paper: ways of thinking and the palpable tensions of competing thoughts, American and other cultures, civilizing intentions and destructive forces, commercialism, media, the value of food, and what’s at stake with our decision-making. These aren’t all meant to be answered in this paper. They can’t be.


Hint: This isn’t merely a compare/contrast assignment. Think: How does looking at Mann help us see something important/meaningful/significant/uncomfortable/odd/curious/or new in Pollan or Widdicombe?


Fine print: This paper should be a 1250-1500 words plus a “Works Cited” page. Papers should adhere to MLA conventions. Divide your discussion evenly with each source.


Resources:
SASC
Our Writing Fellow
Me
Your Peers


KEY DATES PAPER 2, SPRING 2020:
3/3: Come to class with 500 words
3/10: Writing lab—work up to 1000 words in class, exchange drafts
3/12: Peer review
3/24: Final draft due

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