Keep eating, keep reading, keep cooking

Four months ago, I wrote my first article as the food columnist, leaving you with a request — that you bear with me as I attempt to prove food is more than sustenance.

I hope I caught your attention with my writing.

If not, I hope you enjoyed the picture of the burrito I published with it.

Though I went into the semester with that goal, I didn’t know the extent of how pervasive food is with every aspect of life.

Food is what you eat, as we all obviously know, considering it’s one factor in simply keeping yourself alive.

However, when you look closely at the food someone eats, you can learn about tradition, culture and social justice.

I don’t know if I succeeded in achieving my main goal, but if not, I had the enjoyable opportunity to publish articles about how certain traditional meals help people remember their past and how rappers are putting out cookbooks.

Though I’m sad to leave my position as this semester comes to a close, I’m excited to give the position to someone else that can discover more about themselves as they navigate how to connect food and writing.

Plus, holiday season is upon us, and as soon as I’m finished with final papers and I’m back home, I’m baking countless pies.

While I’ve watched the quality of the food I consume deteriorate as this semester has progressed and I’ve gotten busier, I hope what I’ve written about since the start has remained as appealing as the picture of the perfectly rolled burrito I published with my first column.

Keep eating, keep reading and keep cooking, readers.

­— acarnold@indiana.edu

Follow columnist Amanda Arnold on Twitter @aMandolinz.