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Project Completion Report


Exploring the Breadth of Food Writing on My Blog


I wanted to try, practice, and possibly perfect various types of writing that a food writer might engage in on my blog. There are a lot subjects involved in the production, processing, and distribution of food and food systems that I think should be translated to the layperson. Over the course of a year I wrote at thirty posts about food. These posts look at food history and culture focused primarily on the food traditions, habits, and ingredients of certain groups of people. I explored many aspects of the political and historical impact of food on the concept of self and the formation of culture. I attempted to translate the very technical languages of food into popular and approachable language as a  goal of the experience. 

My EDGE project took a longer time than I originally proposed. I completed my project over ten months instead of the three months I originally planned for. The longer completion time was the result of unexpected life changes combined with a new vision for the intention on the project. Especially focusing more on the connection between food and folklore and traditional practices. This focused emerged through a mixture of my own interests and by classroom exposure to new concepts.

Project Goal:
The main goal of my EDGE project was to create thirty blog posts over the course of ninety days that
translate a food fact or experience with food.
I used many books and online articles to develop a background in food and even expand my knowledge of ingredients. While I came into this project with a significant amount of research already completed, I found it challenging to reframe the information with a new audience in mind. Shortly after I started my EDGE project I realized that it would be necessary to expand my timeline in order to include all the types of information I wanted to explore.
I used different methods of writing for various blog posts. For some I focused on free writing various ideas I was having about food and the way that it holds a challenging place in our life as humans and how that might be unique to our life as Americans. I also used the writing of a few other authors as a way to examine how they wrote about food in the hopes of replicating it in some way. After I wrote the posts, I decided I wanted to reformat my blog and have it be more pleasing. I started reformatting some of the posts and added new pictures and label. I also worked on adding appropriate tags to many blog posts.
Outcomes:

  1. I have had many interests throughout my life, and my interest in food is a fairly new one. Expressing myself clearly has always been very important to me. I have found it surprising how technical some aspects of food can be. I took on the challenges I faced coming to this new topic and translated them to language that can be more broadly approachable.  
  2. Also I developed a set of terminologies that will be key to my future sociological and anthropological research.
  3. My blog serves as both a portfolio of past work and reminder of both topics and memories.
The experience of writing the Forkways blog post series really pushed me into new places of thinking about food. This is exactly what I hoped would happen. Not only did I develop terminologies for connecting food and social science, but I also explored and developed organization systems and categorization techniques. I am also particularly happy with the new changes I made to my blog layout and changes to my header and post graphics which was not originally planned. Another unexpected outcome was some of the topics that I chose to look explore. I have been deeply entrenched on the cuisine of the Gullah people and African American foodways, but with the added time that I took to do this project I was able to explore the food traditions of local Native Americans and read about the practices of tribes across the country.