My last chapter will focus on the rhetoric of Slow Food’s recipes. At first glance they appear warm and welcoming and, indeed, they are. However, a second look reveals them to be somewhat dichotomous. The ways recipes are written have been discussed by other authors usually portrays them as belletristic nonfiction, able to “[cut] across gender, class, religion, age, education, and background” (Bloom, Consuming Prose, 347). These authors suggest that recipes are one of the few instances of utopia, a genre of text that can unite all people regardless of how they identify themselves. Susan Leonardi in her essay Recipes for Reading notes that recipes act as a literary discourse that reproduces a social context of recipe sharing and embraces communal relations (342).
Leonardi is correct is her idea that a recipe acts as a social context and encouraging social relations. However, Slow Food’s rhetoric is always, even if not stated implicitly, politically charged. Local California farmers from a wide variety of backgrounds write the recipes in the book Come to the Table. Through Slow Food these recipes offer a social connection to the farmer, an intercultural exchange, by recreating the farmer’s recipe in question the cook is assured that they are politically and culturally aware. By looking at a few recipes in particular utilizing Bloom’s and Leonardi’s theories I hope to demonstrate my theories on how Slow Food utilizes the recipe as a tangible means of communicating their rhetoric advocating the Slow Food lifestyle.
In addition to this aspect of recipes, one must realize that the ethos of a recipe relies on abundance, appetite and indulgence according to Bloom (351). If this be the case then this only furthers the argument that the recipes Slow Food prints are divisive; those with no access to education, who are lower class, or in urban areas are unable to participate in the making of these recipes. California Cloverleaf Farms organic cheesecake, roast pig on a spit, and sweet pumpkin leaf soup do not cut across boundaries but rather enforces them, only the select may have positive dialogue with the recipe which undercuts Slow Food’s utopian, all-inclusive rhetoric. I plan to analyze this division and how Slow Food’s rhetoric in the recipe functions to exclude parts of society (intentionally and otherwise) as well as how it embodies some of Bloom’s more hopeful ideas.
