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Research Essay 
 
The Rhetoric of Recipes:  Food Pedagogy in the Pandemic 
By: Miriam E. Horne and Zoë Campos 
 
 

Abstract: Food is a powerful tool with which to engage students in critical academic 
work.  This paper describes the work of a professor and her student, and their 
experiences using recipes to study rhetoric.  The paper describes three moments of 
learning:  genre and bread baking, power dynamics and key lime pie, and rhetorical 
appeals in family recipes.  The paper also argues that this learning was successful, in 
part, because food offered a comfortable way into learning after the challenges of the 
COVID-19 lockdown. 
 
Keywords:  rhetoric, recipes, pedagogy, pandemic 

 
Introduction 
Students, like faculty, are emerging from a global pandemic.  They live in a climate of 
political turmoil and face an increasingly daunting future as the effects of climate change 
ravage the world.  While we hope that traditional higher education will engage young 
adults in learning how to be informed citizens of their communities and that their 
coursework will help get them there, students are tired and exhausted (McMurtrie 
2022).   In this paper, general education faculty member Miriam Horne and second-year 
game design student Zoë Campos reflect on the experience of food as a pedagogical tool in 
this challenging time.  While using recipes to teach is not a novel idea, the opportunity to 
use recipes as a pedagogical tool in a vulnerable moment for students and society gave 
both Miriam and Zoë pause for reflection on teaching and learning.  More specifically, we 
consider how a food focused general education class called, “The rhetoric of recipes” 
facilitated students’ critical thinking as they struggled to engage in academic work. 
 
Context 
The Pandemic 
The COVID-19 virus changed the world as we know it.  One of the most profound changes 
came to the education system as students were forced into online learning.  Zoë, a transfer 
student at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, describes what the pandemic was 
like for her learning:  

Not only was my high school experience cut short due to the pandemic, my first 
years of college started in my bedroom. The most stressful part of the pandemic for 
me and those that were my age around me was the education aspect. While the 
world was going up in flames, students were expected to continue to work and learn 
from home. Virtual learning was the biggest learning curve students had to adapt to. 
Many students in my area dropped out of college due to the inability to learn 
through online teaching. It was not a pleasant time for me and those around me. 
However, all this changed once campuses were finally starting to open again, which 
happened for me in my second year of college. It was nerve-wracking to not only 
have to transfer schools due to the pandemic, but the college I wanted to go to also 



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wasn’t worth paying thousands for online classes where I wouldn’t retain much 
information anyway. Upon returning to in-person classes, it was another learning 
curve I had to overcome. Not only did we have to adapt to an online setting, but now 
we were sophomores in college without ever stepping foot on campus. There was no 
way to expect what a real in-person college class would be like. It was hard to adjust 
to campus life post-pandemic, but there was a comfort in knowing at least students 
were feeling similar everywhere, no matter the school. 

 
Echoing Zoë’s account, the Chronicle of Higher Education reflected on the pandemic, 
remarking that “being a college student often comes with a set of struggles, like 
homesickness, poor time-management skills, and impostor syndrome. Add a global 
pandemic to the mix, which has disrupted students’ education, wiped out their finances, 
and upended their social support systems, and the stage is set for them to experience a 
wide range of psychological repercussions” (June 2021: 5). As Zoë’s experience illustrates, 
the pandemic meant that college was no longer a place where students learned to socialize 
and live on their own as they attended classes and worked toward their degrees.  Instead, it 
was a space that many students found difficult to navigate as they transitioned back to the 
classroom. When students emerged from lockdown and returned to in-person learning, 
many of them, including Zoë, were unaware of how to manage these new experiences as 
the first two years of the college had been online in isolation.  
 
The Course 
Champlain College is a small 2000-student population professionally-focused school in 
Burlington, Vermont. Beginning as a business school in 1878, Champlain College has set 
itself apart from other colleges by providing cutting-edge professional degrees like digital 
forensics and game design.  These professional programs boast what is called an “upside-
down curriculum” with students getting hands-on experience in the program in their first 
year. This professional focus means that the college attracts students who are focused on 
their professional goals and who struggle to find purpose in their liberal arts requirements. 
To this end, with the goal of allowing students increased choice in their liberal arts 
requirement, faculty, the opportunity to highlight their expertise, and, most importantly, 
the development of interdisciplinary thinking, the new curriculum, called Core, sought to 
engage the students in more meaningful ways. All students, regardless of their major or 
professional courses, were required to take a series of liberal arts courses carefully 
designed to introduce interdisciplinarity to traditionally isolated liberal arts subjects.  
Instead of separating history and philosophy classes, Core put students from across 
disciplines into situations in which they had to, for example, draw from history, philosophy, 
and art, to examine questions of an ideal community. In the context of a lockdown and 
worldwide pandemic, Champlain College launched a fresh approach to its interdisciplinary 
liberal arts curriculum in its Core program. The new Core curriculum, introduced in 2020, 
continued to meet general education requirements and mixed classrooms of students from 
multiple majors, but moved away from common subject matter and focused more on the 
production of common interdisciplinary and critical thinking skills. It introduced a 
structure of two classes per semester: foundations and explorations. Each semester, 
students take a common foundational course in interdisciplinary learning and then have 



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the choice of taking a differently-themed class that may align more with their personal 
interests.   
 
For the purposes of this paper, we discuss a second-year, second-semester exploration 
class, “Rhetoric of Recipes,” in which students apply a theory, rhetoric, to a cultural 
phenomenon, recipes.   In this specific case, the class was “The rhetoric of recipes.” The 
general description for this course, labeled Core 204 in the college catalogue, reads: 

In this course, you will explore theoretical perspectives that ask you to interrogate 
systems of power and power relationships.  You will learn the history of those 
perspectives, including how they, too, have been shaped by multiple contexts and 
compare with other viewpoints.  You will use those perspectives to analyze a 
specific topic, collection of texts, or cultural phenomena. 

 
This passage describes every 204 course, of which Rhetoric of Recipes is one. It is up to the 
individual instructor to choose an appropriate theory and the cultural context in which to 
apply it.  The course learning outcomes lend continuity across courses.  Professors teach 
the class such that each student is able to: 

1. Define key terms and concepts associated with certain theoretical perspectives; 
2. Situate the theoretical perspectives within relevant social, geographical, and 

cultural contexts; 
3. Apply theoretical perspectives to a specific topic, collection of texts, or cultural 

phenomena; and 

4. Interrogate systems of power and power relationships using theoretical 
perspectives. 

 
The Rationale 
With Core 204 sections with titles such as Capitalism; Collective Memory and National 
Crisis: Remembering and Forgetting; and Nazis, Emperors, Vampires, and Masochists: The 
Evolution of Racial Ideology in Austria, how did Miriam end up with the Rhetoric of 
Recipes? There are five arguments for teaching a course about the rhetoric of recipes:  
Miriam’s background in Rhetoric, a unifying topic for a disparate student population, 
accessibility of issues around diversity, equity and inclusion, the comfort of food, and the 
opportunity for an engaged pedagogy.   

 
First, with a background in composition and rhetoric, Miriam wanted to bring rhetoric into 
the classroom in meaningful ways because it is a critical skill not only in speaking but also 
in understanding all forms of communication. Rhetoric is a tool for lifelong critical thinking. 
Drawing on the work of modern rhetoricians (Bitzer 1982, McGee 1982, Richards 1965, 
Burke 1969, Lunsford 1979, Lindeman 1983), Miriam teaches rhetoric as a technique of 
persuasion and as a socially constructed communicative act. In other words, she 
communicates to students that to get someone to consider their point of view, they must 
understand the context in which the exchange takes place, which includes appreciating the 
audience and the audience's needs and the best tools for persuading the audience given the 
exigence and particular set of circumstances in which they find themselves. While these 
aims may be achieved in a variety of ways, Miriam wanted something that would engage 
her students and might, in a world full of complex and challenging rhetoric (US politics, 



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climate change, the global pandemic, and more) not lead the students to become angry, 
frustrated, or fed up with the world in which they live and give up on the work. She wanted 
them to appreciate the complexity of the world around them and to engage with it through 
critical eyes. Drawing perhaps from her own love affair with chocolate, but also seeing the 
academic potential in critically thinking around something that is a human need, Miriam 
felt that food would be a soft target and that recipes, in particular, would provide a unique 
framework for looking at food academically. As a result, she drew on the work of scholars 
like Long (2004), Jacob (2005), Dutch (2012) Lowe Swift and Wilk (2015), Cognard-Black 
(2017) and Mastrangelo (2020) who laid a substantial groundwork for looking at recipes 
rhetorically. These writers looked at recipes rhetorically, as stories, as transmission of 
information, and as tools of power. This served as a basis for much of the work that Miriam 
did in working with specific learning outcomes for the course in teaching rhetoric and 
about power differentials through recipes.   

 
A second reason for choosing to apply rhetoric to recipes was the challenge of having 
students from across campus and across different majors with varied backgrounds. As all 
students take Core classes, these courses enlist a variety of majors from education to 
international business to digital forensics to game design, like Zoë.  Bringing these diverse 
identities together can be a challenge.   Part of Miriam’s hope in using food as subject 
matter was to find common ground across disparate groups.  Vester (2015), who writes 
about food and identities, supports this line of reasoning, maintaining, “[e]xamining how 
food advice interacts with gender, class, national and ethnic identity allows a glimpse into 
how knowledge creates privilege, tastes can marginalize, and how we endorse what we are, 
or are expected to be, in the act of eating and talking about food” (2).  In other words, the 
complexity of food allows for rich and problematic discussions from multiple perspectives 
and presents multiple entry points. 

 
Miriam posited that teaching students how to use rhetoric to understand recipes would 
equip the students to use and understand rhetoric as a tool for communication with a 
specific audience in a specific context. She also felt that, for a variety of reasons, recipes 
would be an appropriate cultural artifact to which rhetoric could be applied.  That is, while 
recipes serve a variety of functions including, but not limited to, storytelling (Bosman 
2009), building community (Bower 1997), political activism (Mastrangelo 2020), and 
personal promotion (Denveater 2009), at their most basic function, recipes describe a 
process for (in most cases) preparing food (though we also explored the ways recipes can 
be used for medicinal purposes).  Even those who do not cook understand that the 
preparation of food usually has steps and procedures.  Using food recipes, therefore, 
reaches a broad audience in a population with a diverse student body.  Therefore, taking a 
step back and looking at food as a common interest serves to unite even the most disparate 
group.   

 
A third reason for the choice of rhetoric and recipes is that using food recipes as a subject 
affords students the depth to address complex learning outcomes that include diversity, 
equity, and inclusion, inherent in which are systems and structures of power—specific 
mandates of the course learning outcomes.  Vester (2015) explains how this range of 
outcomes is possible, writing: 



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Discourses produce experts, people invested with the power to decide what is right 
or not… Knowledge, privilege, and power intersect in food discourses, pronouncing 
who belongs by performing appropriately and marginalizing and excluding those 
who do not from equal access to cultural, political, and financial 
resources.  Conversely, food discourses have (albeit limited) democratizing 
potential: being raised in a culinary culture leaves everyone with a vast treasury of 
knowledge about the gender, race, and class implications of foodways as well as 
table manners (of some kind), preparation procedures, regional and national food 
habits, and diverse clusters of information that may include botanical, zoological, 
nutritional, chemical, and historical fragments. (2–3) 

Because food impacts everyone, it levels the playing field while exposing students to 
multiple ways of seeing and thinking.   

 
A fourth reason for studying rhetoric and recipes, and perhaps most relevant during a 
worldwide pandemic, food has a clear connection to comfort and well-being. Gregory and 
Wayne (2020), for example, examine the role that food had in boosting the morale of the 
United States Army Air Force during World War II, suggesting that the quality of food 
soldiers received impacted their morale.  Ziegelman (2010) details the lives of five 
immigrant families who took on their new American identities in work, fashion, and 
lifestyle but carefully held on to their traditional ways of preparing food to ease their 
transition to the new world.  We also know that stress often leads to increased food 
consumption, especially in women (Klatzkin, et al. 2019).  It is no surprise, then, that food 
was important to students during the pandemic.  They faced unprecedented stress as they 
dealt with depression, anxiety, and insomnia while their frustration and boredom grew 
with the lockdown (De Pasquale, et al. 2021). Miriam and Zoë both learned that food—
more specifically, recipes, provided an engaging and safe entry into critical thinking, 
language use, power differentials, and individual perspectives. 
  
Thus, merging the use of rhetoric and food/recipes provided a framework and rationale for 
this course.  It also introduced the value of food as a pedagogical tool.  As a fifth rationale 
for the rhetoric of recipes, we look at food as a pedagogical tool. 

 
Experts in education were quick to comment on the challenges for students coming into the 
classroom both during and after the lockdown.  Newsletters, conference papers, and 
disciplinary communities began offering advice.  From Zoë’s perspective, the most 
important advice encouraged student engagement. In one collective advice article, for 
example, Glazier et al. (2022), admonished faculty to “Ensure that students ‘do’ in every 
session—write, speak, solve problems, create graphs, etc. Design lessons and activities that 
have students interact and collaborate frequently” (np). In other words, faculty were told to 
give students opportunities to participate so that the learning they did was meaningful. 
However, despite widespread attempts to engage students, in a report published in the 
April 2022 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Beth McMurtrie details an 
unprecedented level of disengagement among students.  Language like “defeated, 
exhausted, and overwhelmed” characterized student descriptions of their 
experiences.  While Miriam’s class was far from perfect—and she saw plenty of stressed 
and exhausted students, for the most part—students appeared engaged and were able to 



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participate in class activities in meaningful ways. For example, they made bread, asked 
questions about power differentials in key lime pie recipes, and were able to use the critical 
rhetorical strategies they had learned to analyze family recipes. What was the difference 
between the experiences of students nationwide and those of students in Miriam’s 
classroom? Food. 

 
While food can be a disruptor (particularly in its absence), it can also be a unifier. The late 
chef James Beard is credited with saying, “Food is our common ground, a universal 
experience.” As such, institutions of education are leaning into food not just as a subject, as 
seen in food studies that embrace interdisciplinary approaches to food, but also as a 
pedagogical tool. For example, New York City’s Tenement Museum has used food tours of 
the neighborhood to teach the local history of immigration, integration, assimilation, and 
urban development (Steinberg 2012). Through exposure to Jewish, Italian, and Irish 
cooking, and more, participants come to understand how immigrants became “American” 
through food choices. In a sociology classroom, students were exposed to the food of rural 
communities in the Midwestern United States as they developed civic agriculture (Wright 
2006).  They learned about the food habits of communities in which they were working in 
order to facilitate sustainable agricultural practices and helped students understand the 
people with whom they were working in more complex ways than had they simply 
imposed their agricultural knowledge. Natural sciences have also found a place for 
food.  Rowat et al. (2014) used recipes to teach students about chemistry and physics. And 
in world politics, Ariel (2019) followed Hirsch and Tene’s work (2013) and used a simple 
dish of hummus to help students understand the complexities of the Arab-Israeli 
conflict.  An exploration of hummus elucidated concepts of borders, culture, and 
identity.  In short, food is not just subject matter but a medium through which to teach 
theory and (inter)disciplinary understanding.   
  
However, while food may be a unifier, it is not a placebo for solving problems.  As Joy 
Harjo’s poem “The World Begins at the Kitchen Table” describes it, food leads to both love 
and loss, war and peace, life and death—the good and the bad events and experiences that 
bring people together.  Miriam never intended the class to be a comfort or a way of easing 
students gently back into college pursuits. She designed it as a way to teach rhetoric that 
would cross disciplinary boundaries and might draw some student interest.  What she 
found, however, was that talking about food—more specifically, recipes—allowed students 
to engage in intellectual thinking in ways that connected them to home and family, to their 
identities, to their histories, and, at times, to process some of the struggles of the pandemic. 
 
Learning Moments 
Bread 

Learning outcomes one and three of the course provide guidance for what students 
should learn about the theory that they need to apply.  

● Define key terms and concepts associated with certain theoretical perspectives; and  

● Apply theoretical perspectives to a specific topic, collection of texts, or cultural 
phenomena. 

 



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An important part of understanding rhetoric is understanding genre. Genre, according to 
Paré and Smart (1994), is “a broad rhetorical strategy enacted within the community in 
order to regularize writer/reader transactions in ways that allow for the creation of 
particular knowledge” (146).  Thus, in the context of rhetoric, genre “seeks to explicate the 
knowledge that practice creates” (Miller 1984: 27).  In other words, genre provides a way 
to understand the social context that drives the creation and structure of a text.  It also 
shows how the text is a response to the situation in which it occurs.  To that end, Miriam 
wanted students to understand genre as a key term and concept of rhetoric as per learning 
outcome one, and to begin to see how it impacts the ways that we read texts (i.e., recipes) 
as per learning outcome three. 

 
To teach students about genre, and to help them understand why texts assume different 
forms in different situations, Miriam had students bake bread early in the semester.  This 
assignment may seem ambitious, as many students have never cooked for themselves, but 
she chose Mark Bittman’s no-knead bread recipe (2018), which makes bread-making 
accessible to even the most novice bakers. She discussed genre in general terms in class 
and wanted this hands-on experience to help students understand how genre works.  In 
addition to providing a set of ingredients for each student (a lively experience for some 
who had never cooked or used flour or had never seen yeast), Miriam provided the recipe 
in three formats: a handwritten notecard aged to look like it was well used with only the 
simplest of instructions, the fully typed instructions that Bittman provides on his website, 
and a four-minute video that Miriam created in which she went through the steps of 
making the recipe complete with the recipe in floating word bubbles beside her 
head.  Students were given hard copies of these recipes including a QR code to access the 
video and electronic versions in their homework on Canvas, the learning management 
system.  The goal of the assignment was to get students to think about genre and how genre 
impacts the way they interact with a text.  Why did they choose to use the form that they 
did? 

 
When students reported back on their bread-making homework, Miriam was surprised 
that, of the students who actually made the bread, only about one-third used the video for 
guidance.  She had assumed that the TikTok generation would be video dependent.  The 
handful of students who used the recipe card said they wanted a “challenge” and wanted an 
“authentic” experience.  The card appeared to be the “original” recipe and therefore the 
most accurate.  Those who used the typed text did so because they thought it was the 
easiest to follow.  The video, they explained, had to be paused.  The typed form, they 
argued, allowed them to easily go back and review the instructions.  Those who watched 
the video and used the video for guidance talked about the importance of seeing what they 
were doing. Zoë described the experience as follows: 

The written recipe didn’t persuade me to want to try this recipe since it was hard to 
read and used more traditional language. The typed recipe used language that was 
easy to digest and easy to follow even if it was your first time making bread. The 
video recipe was the most effective recipe for myself, it used easy language to 
follow, the visual of actually seeing someone bake the bread made it easier for me, 
the audience, to believe that I too could bake this bread and it comes out looking 
good.  



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Zoë further explained that: 

The real meat to this assignment was more focused on being introduced to the 
different forms of rhetoric found on each of the recipe formats and how even if you 
follow the same set of ingredients, there is still a different style of persuasion 
happening within each recipe resulting in a different outcome. 

 
Although Zoë admits that, at the time, she did not really understand what Miriam was 
trying to teach them with the three different forms of recipes, in hindsight, with the benefit 
of a semester studying rhetoric, she was able to appreciate how the different formats or 
genres of the bread recipe had different ways of persuading the user to act.  This was a 
powerful lesson for Zoë because it helped her to understand the complexity of genre and 
the importance of employing the right genre for the right audience.  In rhetoric, we make 
assumptions about audience (ideally, based on careful observation, research, and 
experience).  Zoë learned that form matters—that recipes, like other fields, can have 
multiple formats and that she does better with some formats than others.   
  
After making bread, students were asked to choose a recipe and analyze the context in 
which it occurred (this was part of a continued effort to teach students that genre has a 
particular exigence).  Many students chose family recipes that their parents had emailed 
them, recipes their grandmothers used to make, recipes that came from the country of their 
cultural heritage, and so on.  Although the assignment was challenging, students were 
willing to engage with it because the recipe had personal meaning for them.  One student, 
who was late returning for the semester because he had just lost his grandmother to 
COVID, wrote about a recipe to which he had an emotional connection and explained how it 
became a way to process her death.  Another student used the opportunity to dig into his 
family history and ask more questions about life for his great-grandparents.  Zoë explored a 
particular time in Nicaragua and some of the ingredients that would have been available to 
her ancestors during WWII.  The bread and genre assignment introduced the importance of 
considering the context in which a recipe occurs so that students were able to transfer that 
frame of thought to a recipe of their choosing. 
  
Key lime pie 
Learning outcome four in Core 204 says: 

●  Interrogate systems of power and power relationships using theoretical 
perspectives.  

Miriam needed to use rhetoric to help students understand and challenge power.  Rhetoric 
exercises power or authority, and learning to recognize that power is critical for active and 
engaged citizens.  During early classes in the semester, Miriam encouraged students to see 
this link, but she approached it too broadly and theoretically and needed a specific recipe 
that could help students see the power being wielded. To that end, in one class period, 
Miriam asked students to think about power and in small groups to define what they 
thought the word meant.  They came up with definitions that reflected control of one thing 
over another. The class then reviewed the meaning of rhetoric and then discussed the 
relationship between power and rhetoric so that they were not passive listeners, but had to 
create a joint understanding of that relationship.  Finally, Miriam asked them to generate a 



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list of questions that could interrogate the power relationships they saw in the rhetoric of 
recipes. They asked about the context, the author, the intended audience, and the goal.  Zoë 
reflected that these introductory steps were useful because they helped focus later 
discussions and drive questions about key lime pie. She was able to understand, as shown 
below, that deceptive advertising may act as a form of power over the recipient.   
 

 
Image 1: Scanned from McCall's Magazine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 

 
To critique the power or influence inherent in a recipe, Miriam started with what students 
knew about key lime pie.  For Zoë, prior to this class, key lime was just another flavor of pie 



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that she could get at her local diner.  Miriam asked the students to look at the context in 
which the recipe was created.  The pie's earliest known record comes from 1931. It was 
promoted by Jane Ellison, spokesperson for Eagle Brand Borden condensed milk, and had 
been adapted from “Aunt Sally’s lemon pie” (Parks 2017).  Miriam showed images of Jane 
Ellison taken from McCall’s Magazine (1930).  She went on to explain, however, that Jane 
Ellison did not, in fact, exist; she was a fictional character designed by Borden to increase 
the use and sales of sweetened condensed milk.  Furthermore, key limes, are not, in fact, 
native to the Florida Keys and were largely wiped out in a hurricane in 1926 and replaced 
by a type of Persian limes.  Few key limes actually exist in Florida (Parks 2017). 
  
With this background—and the relatively simple recipe calling for eggs, sweetened 
condensed milk, and lime juice—students returned to the discussion of power and their 
questions about audience and purpose.  Understanding the context of the recipe shaped 
how they understood the power differentials.   Students had not thought about the recipe 
for food as being an advertising tactic put in place to persuade them to particular action.  At 
first glance, one would not think of key lime pie as being an exertion of power, and yet the 
experience of the students says otherwise.  First, their reaction to the fact that key lime pie 
is a relatively recent recipe not made with key limes made them feel deceived.  Second, the 
idea that a canned milk company would create a fictional character just to find ways to sell 
more milk seemed somehow to be a violation of the simple and tasty dish they thought was 
emblematic of the Florida Keys.  They had never connected this food to capitalism.  It was 
this connection that helped them to understand the myriad ways that rhetoric can exert 
power in subtle ways. 

 
Learning the origin of key lime pie was a key moment in how students like Zoë understood 
just how powerful rhetoric is. This realization led her to question the ethics of those behind 
the key lime pie recipe.  She found a strong connection to The Essential Guide to Rhetoric, 
the class textbook, in which Keith and Lundberg argue that “the power to use rhetoric 
implies the power to misuse rhetoric” (2008: 22). Rhetoric wields a double-edged sword; 
speakers must treat their audience as they want to be treated. The text further concludes 
that deception is “a strategic mistake; in the long run, people find out and then don’t trust 
the speaker” (22). Discovering the background of the key lime pie recipe allowed many 
students to realize just how present rhetoric is—even in a seemingly innocuous recipe.  

  
The context of key lime pie includes history, advertising, and politics, all of which work 
together to frame a piece of Americana.  Even students who have not had key lime pie will 
likely have heard of it.  The commonality of the food brings them together and the context 
of the creation of the recipe helps them see that recipes are political and powerful. If 
something so innocuous as key lime pie can be manipulated, what else is being engineered 
to influence the students? 
  
A Recipe 
Learning outcome two, which we have not yet discussed, asks students to 

●  Situate theoretical perspectives within social, geographical, and cultural contexts.  
While Miriam addressed this step throughout the course in various lessons, it was not 
assessed in an assignment in terms of situating the concept of rhetoric socially, 



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geographically, and culturally.  She had a class period in which she showed the history and 
ongoing development of the theory, but no assignment for grades was given.  Instead, 
Miriam asked students to use rhetorical theory to situate a recipe socially, geographically, 
and culturally.  For example, one assignment was a rhetorical analysis of a recipe.  Students 
were able to choose whatever recipe they wanted and then analyze it.  Those who grasped 
the situatedness of texts were able to analyze the context in which the text emerged, what 
the author was trying to do, and how the author went about achieving their purpose. 
  
Zoë’s rhetorical analysis showed how she was able to dig into an unusually written recipe 
and learn more about the time period in which it was created as well as the strategies the 
author used.  She chose a recipe called Mozzarella in Carrozza (literally meaning 
mozzarella in a carriage).  This recipe came from a 1950s collection by British author 
Elizabeth David (1954) who was influential in raising the profile of home cooking in 
England.  So strong was her influence that she published eight different cookbooks over 
thirty-year career that remain in print.  Her focus was on simple food that tasted 
delicious—food that she experienced during her years abroad in Europe.  On her return to 
England, she found the food distasteful and wanted to share what she had learned.     

 
In choosing this recipe, Zoë explored food from 1950s Britain.  She learned that this 
postwar period saw food shortages, little interest in international foods, and difficulty 
finding specialized ingredients like parmesan cheese.  This close study helped Zoë 
understand the challenges that David faced as she tried to compile her work and situated 
the work in a struggling post-war rebuilding period. 
  
Zoë was also struck by the structure of the work.  A common recipe format presents a list of 
ingredients followed by a list of instructions.  Although this recipe still follows a sequential 
order, it does so in prose form with limited specific guidance. This departure from the 
modern conventional form caught Zoë’s attention. For example, rather than give a specific 
cooking time, David (1987) writes, “Fry them quickly in hot oil” (180).  In her analysis, Zoë 
explained that “David thought that part of the experience of this recipe is to do what each  
individual person seems right”—encouraging individual action and ownership. Zoë also 
noted that this style of writing allowed David to appeal to the rhetorical strategy of pathos. 
To support this assertion, Zoë quotes David explaining the need to change the cloth for 
stewed snails frequently or it will become “smelly and dirty beyond endurance” (246). She 
suggested that the allusion to yucky snails would resonate with wrinkling readers’ noses 
and therefore their emotional connection with the writer.  In her analysis, Zoë connects this 
remark to the class textbook, The Essential Guide to Rhetoric (Keith and Lundberg 2017), 
and its description of pathos, which she then uses to justify her claim about stinky snail 
cloth being an appeal to pathos. 
  
Though Zoë is a busy student with multiple demands on her time, she so enjoyed exploring 
the David recipe that she took the time to talk about it with Miriam during office hours and 
to revise and resubmit her original analysis.  Having gone through the process of 
contextualizing the recipe socially, geographically, and culturally, and examining the 
purposes and strategies within those contexts, Zoë learned to dive deeper into a text, no 
matter how common it may seem, or, in Zoë’s words, how “normal” it might 



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appear.   Before taking Rhetoric of Recipes, Zoë felt that a recipe with a different writing 
style would not have caught her attention. Yet, Zoë notes that there is a special moment 
when a student is able to grasp concepts and dive deeper into what exactly an author is 
trying to portray. In this case, with Mozzarella in Carozzo, she saw persuasion happening 
with the style of writing and language that David used to convince her reader to make the 
recipe.  Rather than simply writing a step-by-step recipe, David made the recipes more 
enjoyable and interesting by writing in a tone that pushes readers to take more risks in 
following her recipes. Writing in a more open-ended way persuades recipe users to take a 
chance and try something new.  However, it was not only the engaging recipes, but also the 
rhetorical analysis of David’s writing taught Zoë how versatile rhetoric can be.  

 
Through her work in rhetorical analysis, Zoë realized that rhetorical strategies were not 
just relevant to her writing for this class, but also in her game-making classes and her day-
to-day life. For example, she recalls visiting a friend's apartment and noticing they had a 
book titled Recipes Every Man Should Know. It took just a few flips of the pages to analyze 
the language the authors chose to use and realize how they tried to cater to a male with no 
prior cooking experience. Additionally, Zoë recalls an assignment in a game development 
class.  The purpose of the assignment was to look at how game developers targeted their 
desired audience and deconstruct whether the game successfully completed this task. The 
entire deconstruction process was much easier to conduct because she knew what 
questions to ask, such as, “Who are the developers, and what made them choose this 
specific audience to cater to?” and “Why did the developers write in a certain style in order 
to cater to their intended audience?” and so on.  
  
Thus, as Zoë learned to think about texts themselves as being socially, geographically, and 
culturally situated, she began to see recipes and other artifacts in ways she had not 
considered.  Notably, she was able to apply the skills she gained in the Rhetoric of Recipes 
to similar analysis in another class and in a friend’s apartment.  
 
Conclusion 
Personal experience and the literature alike (Ziegleman 2010, Vester 2015, Gregory and 
Wayne 2020) confirm that food is intricately intertwined with stress and that people turn 
to food for comfort.  The worldwide pandemic hit university students in unprecedented 
ways as they struggled to make sense of a new stage of university life first from a computer 
screen and then from isolated dorm rooms.  The pandemic also required university faculty 
to change how they taught and to engage students beyond a lecture at the front of the 
room.  Students needed to do.  In these circumstances, Miriam and Zoë found themselves 
allies.  Miriam wanted the class to be about rhetoric so that students would understand that 
rhetoric is an essential skill to function in a complex world.  A student like Zoë, who is 
studying game design, a major heavily focused on coding, math, and technology, initially 
found it hard to imagine how a class named Rhetoric of Recipes would have an impact on 
her degree. As the course progressed, however, Zoë came to understand rhetoric as 
ubiquitous.  She learned to see it in political speech, in marketing, and, yes, in recipes.  It is, 
she says, “around us all the time whether we realize it or not,” and “the art of being able to 
dissect anything that is presented to you by asking who the target audience is, who the 



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17 

author is, what the style of language that an author is utilizing, and many other questions is 
a very important skill to have.”  
  
In short, choosing a recipe to explore, while still academic work, became an interesting and 
thought-provoking exercise for the students.  Using food as an academic tool connected 
them to meaningful aspects of their lives and allowed them to connect their learning to 
more tangible concerns.  Through critical study of recipes, they learned to define and use 
key rhetorical terms, situate rhetorical perspectives while applying the theory to recipes, 
and examine the power dynamic inherent in a text as seemingly innocuous as a recipe. As 
others have shown already (Ariel 2019, Rowat et al 2014, Steinberg 2012, Wright 2006) 
food proves a powerful subject for student learning.  In Rhetoric of Recipes, this learning 
happened through hands-on activities like baking bread to understand why we formulate 
things the way we do, studying the context of key lime pie to examine the connections 
between rhetoric and manipulation, and analyzing a recipe of their own choosing to 
determine purpose and strategy.  Could students have gained the same set of skills—of 
defining, situating, applying, and interrogating—with a different theory, using a different 
text?  Could this lesson have been conducted without food?  The other sections of the Core 
204 class that ran at the same time say absolutely, yes.  There are many ways to teach and 
learn successfully.  However, Miriam and Zoë contend that the use of recipes specifically 
and food more broadly as a topic for a class that teaches critical thinking skills engaged 
students in a troubled time in uniquely accessible ways. 
  



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