Ashley M. Beardsley, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

PDF | Annotated Slides

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Servings: Adjust to fit class size

Prep Time: Varies

In-Class Time: 30-minutes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While most recipes dictate where you must begin, you can choose to start, jump to, or end this recipe with the Writing and Creating Multisensory Content Canva annotated slides. The slides take you through the embodied, multisensory in-class activity with metacommentary explanations of the steps and how I set up the experience. If you want a more typical recipe structure—narrative introduction, ingredients, prep, and instructions—continue reading here, where I explore bread as a calming practice pre- and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first time I experienced food in the classroom was in Perugia, Italy. I spent a month learning about Italian foodways—food’s socioeconomic, cultural, and political connections that form identities.

I was enrolled in SOIT 361: Not Just a Meal—The History and Politics of Food in Italy during a summer study abroad at the Umbra Institute, where we learned about food through highly participatory classes. For instance, we had a workshop at a pizzeria to embody the history of pizza, took a field trip to Chianti to meet Dario Cecchini, an internationally recognized butcher who models respect for animals by using every part, and learned about Italian cheese through an in-class tasting.

Through consuming class content, food and eating moved from something I enjoyed to a tool I began understanding as complex and political. Being in Perugia, it made sense that we learned about the Salt War of 1540. When Pope Paul III, who controlled the Papal States, taxed salt, the popular story explains that, like the American colonists who threw tea into the Boston Harbor to protest the British government’s tea tax, the Perugini rebelled, eliminating salt from their bread. It’s possible that the Perugini exclude salt due to the Salt War, but, as Zachary Nowak and Ivana Di Biase (2010) note, pana sciapo, or unsalted bread, was common in Perugia before the war and continues to be served today.

Although food or beverage’s role in political upheaval wasn’t unfamiliar to me as a 21-year-old American, I began to understand the impact that food or ingredients played politically in a new way. I saw how removing an ingredient as commonplace as salt could be an act of defiance accessible to citizens, and the idea of using food—an item often available—stuck with me over the years, following me into my research. That summer, one item marked every meal: bread. With or without salt, eating thick hunks of bread was a common practice, but eating is only half of such embodied, multisensory memories. The other slice (to use a bread analogy) is enveloped in smell. The smell of Perugia’s bakeries evoked a feeling of warmth each time I entered. This warmth consumed me, even on rainy summer mornings, and became a comfort I associated with friends, travel, and my first foray into food studies. Such multisensory experiences recall “the many intricate ways that the perceptual is entangled” with our daily lives and linked to places (Ceraso, 2019). So, it shouldn’t be surprising that, like thousands of others, I kneaded bread during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I created something tangible I could eat and smell by combining flour and water. The loaves transported me to another place and time wrapped in gustatory nostalgia, a “sentimentality for a lost past” that draws on food to evoke emotions and construct multisensory experiences (Holtzman, 2006, p. 367). Here, I use William Kurlinkus’s (2018) definition of nostalgia as “pride and longing for lost or threatened personally or culturally experienced pasts” (p. 16). Such nostalgic feelings, said Kurlinkus, connect to positive experiences (p. 47). Indeed, pandemic sourdough uses nostalgia to create remembrances that draw “our attention on the active, social, and reflexive processes of memory” that evoked the senses during the pandemic (Humphreys, 2018, p. 72). Doing so provides the link needed to escape the present situation while manufacturing happy moments to recall in the future, and it was through bread baking that I began to see how drawing on nostalgia and multisensory experiences can serve as a research method.

As I stretched loaves into lopsided boules, my nostalgia led me to ask: What if rhetoric and writing studies scholars used baking and eating to redefine their scholarly and pedagogical practices? And what would it look like to incorporate multisensory experiences in the classroom?

Ultimately, the materiality of sourdough loaves is significant because they are an edible simulacrum that incorporates nostalgia to provide comfort and community. By applying sourdough to pedagogy and engaging in an embodied, multisensory in-class activity, I demonstrate how folding the senses into research and teaching practices can shape how rhetoric and writing studies scholars and graduate students view academic writing, multimodal composing, and food’s political potential. When food is presented as an agent of change, as it was during my summer study abroad, rhetors have access to use an ingredient or dish to circulate their message. Multisensory methods call for an acute awareness of the present moment, or the moment in which the audience interacts with the text, to create an interconnected, embodied way of knowing that enhances our understanding of how compositions are rhetorically designed. We can find this awareness through food in general, but more specifically, bread.

 

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INGREDIENTS

Ingredient amounts dependent upon class size. 

• Active sourdough starter Water
• Flour
• Sourdough bread, sliced into chunks 
• Dehydrated starter

BEFORE CLASS

1. Place active start, water, flour, sliced sourdough chunks, and dehydrated starter on a table accessible to students.

ACTIVITY

1. Come up and check out what we have on the table [10 min.]

• Interact with the items in whatever way makes sense to you (but do not eat anything)

• Take a piece of bread and a topping (optional)

  • Don’t do anything with the bread yet (you’ll be able to eat it if you’d like in a few minutes) 

• Go back to your seat

2. With your eyes closed, touch the bread [1 min.]

• Notice how it feels

3. With your eyes closed, smell the bread [1 min.] 

• Notice what it smells like

4. With your eyes closed, taste a piece of the bread, nothing on it [1 min.] 

• Notice what it tastes like and how it feels in your mouth

5. Open your eyes and look at the bread [1 min.]

• Notice what it looks like

• Optional: Add your topping and taste [1 min.]

  • Notice what it tastes like and how it feels in your mouth

6. Write [10 min.]

• Eat the rest of your bread (optional), and use the following questions to guide your writing: 

  • What's the food's texture?

  • How does it smell?

  • What memories does the smell evoke? Where does the taste land on your tongue? What memories does the taste evoke?

  • Does the bread taste how you expected?

  • If you added a topping, what memories does the topping evoke?

  • What do you notice about the bread’s appearance? 

7. Reflection and sharing

• What did you write? Why did we go through this whole experience? How does it relate to the Horton and Quesenbery (2013) you read for today, or our understanding of designing with accessibility in mind?

 

REFERENCES

Ceraso, Steph. (2019). Sound never tasted so good: “teaching” sensory rhetorics. Intermezzo. https://manifold.as.uky .edu/projects/sound-never-tasted-so-good

Holtzman, Jon. D. (2006). Food and memory. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35(1), 361–378. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123220

Horton, Sarah, & Quesenbery, Whitney. (2013). A web for everyone: Designing accessible user experiences. Rosenfeld Media. 

Humphreys, Lee. (2018). The qualified self: Social media and the accounting of everyday life. The MIT Press.

Kurlinkus, William. C. (2018). Nostalgic design: Rhetoric, memory, and democratizing technology. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Nowak, Zachary., & Di Biase, Ivana. (2010). Identity in Perugia: The half-invention of tradition and anticlerical bread. Journal of Italian Studies, xxxiii, 37–56.