“What Americans can learn from other food cultures” was written by Amy S. Choi.

This
article was published on December 18, 2014, through IDEAS.TED.com. This is the main
platform for ted talks. This article has a really big audience in my opinion. It could be
anyone from the ages of 16 to 65+. I really feel like this article is more for Americans
who are looking to travel the world or looking into other cultures.Others that my stumble
upon and read this article are chefs or culinary students learning to learn about food.
Amy Choi is really trying to show that there is more to culture than religion and language
and your regular culture identities. She really states and has a great argument that food
is another aspect of culture and where you are from in the world.

In this article it talks about the different way that food can influence people and have an
impact on the culture. The certain ways that food influences culture and people are this,
Identity, survival, status, pleasure, community, and humanity. First she talks about how
food is identity which talks about how different each region of the world is foodwise. For
example mexican food is a type of identity, The next one that I want to bring up is
community. To me this is the most important one that she talks about. Everyone in the
world can truly come together over food. There is nothing like laughing and being
around other people over food. That is key because different cultures have different
foods associated with different events. Another one that she talks about is pleasure. I
think this is the one that everyone can relate to. Everyone can remember times that they
had some comfort food. Whether it was ice cream after a break up or hot chocolate on a
cold winter's night.

Now on to my rhetorical analysis, I felt like this article was really great but missing
something. I am not quite sure what it was missing but I feel like she could have added
more to it or changed the format so it flowed a little bit better. I feel like it was really
blocky. It just started and finished each thought before moving on the next instead of
having a nice cohesive flowing article.However, Amy Choi was able to get some really
good points across and she uses ethos, pathos, and logos extremely well. I will
breakdown each one individually. So starting off I want to talk about Ethos. She uses
ethos extremely well because first of all she traveled all over the world and she was
able to really have a first hand experience with the different food cultures throughout the
world, because she has had those experiences it has built her credibility to talk about
this subject. I really like how she also talks about her korean background because she
brings more knowledge, especially when she is writing about what she knew growing up
and what comfort food means to her.

Now let us talk about pathos which is talking all about emotions which is the main one of
the three she uses. Which is awesome because pathos is the one that people can
completely get behind and can totally fall in love with or hate types of writing. This is
also another one that people really connect with food as well which is why I believe she
used this one the most. Everything from the picture to with the little girl holding the ice
cream cone. It really shines the entire paragraph about how food is pleasure. I really like
the use of italy in this section when it brings up that food is love first. This to me
screams pathos and is a way that people can really connect emotionally to the article
and to the author. This speaked a lot to me because I absolutely love italian food and so
when she said that my heart was like yes, that makes sense. I need to make my food
with the intention of having love be the first focus on my meals more than nutrition or
anything else. Lastly we have logos which are all about logic and reasoning. It is very
easy for people to agree with this article because it is very logical and very based with
the reasons that she brings up. It is very uncontroversial and so that brings out a lot of
reasoning and can help with logos. The format of this article really screams logos to me.
It is very logical going from one point to another without a lot of unneeded words and
she uses that to her advantage. One of the best examples of Logos that she uses in this
article is when she is talking about food as survival. She brings up a lot of examples
from the 1800’s and world war 2. Whenever you can bring up historical events it really
adds to the aesthetic of logos, and can bring a lot of logic because everyone wants to
learn from history instead of letting it be in the past. That is why I chose that as her best
example of logos. That is all the examples that I am going to give for pathos, ethos, and
logos. I hoped this helped you to understand how she was able to use them for her
advantage in her article.

For me the biggest question that I have is why did she write this article. I am still trying
to brainstorm this question because I don’t feel like this is a super necessary article so
being able to understand why she wrote it might bring more to this article. I hope to
have that question answered at some point. I think she wrote it just as an informative
article from her experiences throughout the world but I'm not entirely sure. I know that
there is probably a better explanation that what I just gave but that is what I am going
with.

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