Assignment 17: Food for thought

I found the research question to be in the “menu” article seeing as he’s writing about a restaurant. The question he poses is, “What is a menu and what does it mean to have a literate understanding of one?” He focuses on how important the menu is to the little community a restaurant has. It affects everyone, the waiters, the cooks, and the customers. The menu has to be just right for everyone to understand and benefit from. He gives the example of the menu holding over ninety main options. That’s not even including the specials or substitutes they could make for the customer. I have trouble remembering what I did yesterday let alone ninety items of food and drinks on a menu. The waiters need to be on their game every night to have that down. That’s his focus, menu aside. He was looking at the three waiters who worked there to give the feel of the community he had worked in. He talks about how each waiter worked differently in the community and that shows the fact that this community is diverse and diversity isn’t always a bad thing. A cool thing he included was the background of each of the waiters. This shows the reader that anyone from anywhere could end up working together in the same discourse community and that people should be open minded about how they react to new comers. This thought shows that what Gee’s theory of discourse communities would be like is very different in life than on paper. And on a side note, after reading this article I wanted Italian food.