Lucid Food: Cooking For An Eco-Conscious Life

A Brief Introduction

Lucid Food is about how to make healthy, high-quality, and organic meals. Stated and mentioned consistently throughout the first 24 pages of the book, the author goes into great detail discussing how she grew up green, focusing on trying to reduce her carbon footprint, and making sure that everything she prepared would nourish her body and those she fed. 

Background on the Author

• Lousia Shafia is a chef, caterer, educator, and food writer with Lucid Food, her eco-friendly food consultancy based in New York. 

• As she is a graduate from the Natural Gourmet Institute, she has worked at Millennium Restaurant and Roxanne’s in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Aquavit and Pure Food and Wine in New York. Louisa also has her own website, which receives a lot of attention.

Relevant Era

The cookbook was published in 2009, around the time of the election of Barack Obama. This was also when Michelle Obama was beginning the Let’s Move movement, trying to get the entire country to move to a more healthy and beneficial lifestyle. 

The Audience

• The intended target audience of this would be anyone that is looking to move towards a healthier lifestyle involving more organic food or may be trying to change their figure by eating better. 
• The skill level of the intended target audience would not be particularly high as most of the required utensils, cooking knowledge, and recipes are not complex in any capacity. 
• The wording of the processes and requirements found on page 31 and 32 are great examples of how the author does not require heavy knowledge in the area of cooking. 
• The types of ingredients, utensils, and other aspects required for cooking can be acquired and used by any one person willing to apply themselves to this style of cooking.
• As previously mentioned, the era that this would have been in would be one of focusing or reducing the obese population and of environmentalism, trying to benefit the world so to speak. 

Audinence: In Depth

What else can be said is that the people that would use this cookbook could range in any aspect, from race and gender to social class and orientation. 

• This cookbook also helps talk about the identity of the reader and the author by showing the multiple quick, easy, and healthier ways, a lifestyle of someone or people that are focused on trying to better themselves, the people that indulge in their food, and the people that are affected by the choices they make about the food they use. 
• Gender roles are ignored in this book, as they are not mentioned in any way throughout the entirety of the book. The rest of the categories that are brought up in the guidelines do not appear in this book in any way, shape, or form. 

Rhetoric and Ideologies

• The rhetoric used by this book about health would be to focus on using organic ingredients and to focus on trying to constantly prepare healthy meals in order to live a healthy lifestyle. Some particular foodways that are brought about throughout this book is the consistent use of familiar sounding food recipes such as Apple Pomegranate Sangria and Nutty Banana Shake, food items we hear in advertisements and see at many restaurants we attend on a daily basis. 

• The author contextualizes some of the recipes by offering a backstory or giving information about herself and how it could relate to whomever is reading the cookbook. –
• The author does typically include the rhetoric previously mentioned and does include other rhetorics such as the importance of traveling, family, and knowing your roots and not being ashamed of them. 
• Some concepts and themes that have come up in class that were mentioned in the textbook other than healthy eating would be remembering identity, mainly the personal aspect, food and tradition (more so trying to adopt this process of using organic and healthy food and trying to have a sphere of influence on people around you in order for it to continue spreading), and social constructionism by showing that there is a option that could potentially help the environment and other aspects of this world around us. 

 

Works Cited 

 

Shafia, L., & Martiné Jennifer. (2010). Lucid food: cooking for an eco-conscious life. Ten Speed Press. 

About Louisa. Louisa Shafia. (2017, August 29). http://louisashafia.com/about-louisa/.