Like Water For Chocolate By Wendell Berry Summary

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July 22, 2015

Wendell Berry Poet Wendell Berry argues, “Eating with the fullest pleasure…is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.” It appears that Berry’s sentiment is correct. Eating is what makes us human. When we have enough food, we are happy. When we are starving we feel depressed and are filled with a sense of mortality. Thus, food emphasizes the human experience in two ways. As Berry states, it certainly links us to this world because food comes from the earth. Our consumption of food reminds us that we are derived from the very earth in which our food is grown and that at the end of our lives, we will return there as well. In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita reminds us of this natural

“Something strange was going on. Tita remembered that Nacha had always said that when people argue while preparing tamales, the tamales won’t get cooked. They can be heated day after day and still stay raw, because the tamales are angry. In a case like that, you have to sing to them, which makes them happy, then they’ll cook” (Esquirel 35). When Tita describes the food in this situation, she personifies it, demonstrating that the happiness of the food is aligned with her own personal happiness. It is unlikely that actually singing to tamales makes a realistic difference regarding their taste or tendency to be prepared more quickly, so the reader can assume that Tita is really talking about herself in this situation. She enjoys cooking and singing, so she is able to prepare food more quickly when she does both simultaneously. This is one of the few ways that Tita works hard to cope with her life’s situation. It is evident that the more distractions that she is able to create for herself, the more willing she is to be comfortable with who she is and ultimately achieve happiness as a

The sisters had lived through a lot of terror before escaping to Ireland, and they felt like strangers in a new land. Their production of food helped them connect more greatly with the Irish people who would visit their shop, and it was clear that those who purchased their food enjoyed it. Despite the trouble the sisters had faced in the past, this new life gave them a new purpose to be alive and keep pushing forward despite the small amount of adversity they faced at the hands of Thomas McGuire. McGuire is jealous of the sisters because he had wished to purchase their shop for a different purpose, and made his jealously abundantly clear. Overall, this demonstrates the value that food held for these individuals. While their entry into the food business was certainly not a magical cure, it made them feel safe and more stable in their new