Researching

So I have been doing research on my thesis. I am not sure how I am going to make my book yet, meaning which direction I want to go. But right now I am trying to narrow down the countries that I want to select. I am looking over most of the cultural foods and trying to get the most interesting and bizarre foods. From what I am seeing is quite amazing to me. I found this one book that was great :

Strange Foods: bush meat, bats, and butterflies, an epicurean adventure around the world.
By Jerry Hopkins

The book talks about the authors journey around the world while trying a wide range of food. while showing pictures of a lot of the food.

So now its researching why that's the chosen food of the region. I also have a book about the history of food.

I am still in the researching phase and trying to narrow things down.

Will post more info when I come across it.

Thesis Proposal

My thesis topic is to explore the relationship between food and culture. The intention is to examine foods that are unique to other cultures and the motivation behind why those foods are popular within that culture. My purpose is while we often dismiss countries food to be different or extreme, we don't examine as to why. Some factors that are not considered are social values, geography, religion, and economic circumstances. My process will be based off research of a select handful of countries that have a very different culture.

Inspiration

My inspiration comes from a few places. One, I always seem to be hungry. Two, a TV show I watch. It's called Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. The host travels around the world trying all different foods, that while it may seem gross to us, it is a delicacy in their country. I find it quite interesting how pretty much anything you can imagine seems to be eaten in other countries. But that's the culture the people were raised on. And thirdly, I have worked in a restaurant the last 4-5 years, so I have been around food and see lots of flavors and different ways of preparing the food. But while working in the food business I have only worked in American cuisine style foods, and I have always wondered how it would feel in another country, eating the non traditional foods we eat here.

I have always wondered why different cultures have such a wide range of foods. Some of those food are very extreme, like eating every part of the animal. Nothing goes to waste in these countries. Even eating bugs is just and everyday cuisine. Its said that the bugs have lots of protein in them. I could never understand as to how people can eat such extreme foods and then have another country (US) be so appalled. There are many factors though that come into play as to why they eat the foods they do. Just by watching on TV you don't get the whole story as to why they eat what they do. You just see the food. We are used to eating whatever we want in America. We aren't restricted to foods because of religion, and what other countries may eat, is frowned upon here.

http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Bizarre_Foods Bizarre Foods link.

Previous Work

here is just a few samples of some things i did last year. I need to shoot my portfolio book still. i have more samples at

http://www.ryansacks.blogspot.com