TOW #26: "Hunger Games" by Sophie Brinkman

Reading goals: correctly identify author's purpose

Writing goals: keep everything concise and coherent

     Our society is infatuated with all the latest fads: social networking sites, impossible iPhone games, and chia seeds. Sophie Brickman, editor, reporter for San Francisco Chronicle, and food enthusiast explores our country's obsession with food fads. She opens her article talking about the Cronut–"the croissant-doughnut hybrid, trademarked, to distinguish it from copycat Singaporean 'crodos,' British 'dosants,' and Venezuelan 'Mister Cronuts.'" As she continues her article, she mentions more recent fads, like cupcakes and Greek yogurt. She also mentions David Sax, another food enthusiast and journalist, who argues that successful food trends are a result of social conditions. Brickman's purpose is to explain our society's interest in food trends through involved tone. However, she fails to achieve her purpose as the use of specific examples would have been more effective and appropriate for her piece.
     "Hunger Games," meant for an audience of curious adults, is written with involved diction as Brickman clearly showed interest in her topic. She does not only include Sax's opinions on food trends–she comments on them and adds her own ideas. Sax concludes that America's addiction to cupcakes stems from a "desire for comfort and childhood simplicity after 9/11" and that fondue became popular in the sixties "when people were moving out to the suburbs and wanted something that could make this living room in suburban New Jersey a little more sophisticated than...a Jell-O salad would." Brickman then follows this up by writing, "Of course, Jell-O salads and boxed cake mixes...were all the rage in [Sax's] grandmother's postwar kitchen." Through her involved diction, Brickman portrays her clear interest in food trends, but she does not exactly explain to her audience what kind of social conditions are explaining the sudden public demand for Greek yogurt. If she used specific current examples of food trends, Brickman would have more effectively achieved her purpose of explaining our society's interest in food trends.