Here's an example of an A paper with a strong writing voice and a clear thesis. I've underlined the thesis and mapping statements:
Manly Eating: An Exploration of Apex Predator Fantasies by Jeff McMahon (sorry, this blog does not accomodate MLA format spacing. For that, consult your handbook)
Scanning the cookbook titles aimed at food-ignorant bachelors and helpless males in general, we are afforded a general understanding of the Male Code regarding man’s relationship to food. First, he is an incurable sloth evinced by such titles as The Lazy Bachelor’s Cookbook and The Bachelor’s Guide: To Ward Off Starvation. Second, man’s tastes tend toward crudeness and primitivism evinced by such titles as No More Mac and Cheese: A Bachelor’s Guide to Cooking with Ease and A Man, a Can, a Plan: 50 Great Meals Even You Can Make. Third, man will not go out of his comfort zone to prepare a sophisticated dish unless his intent is to seduce a woman evinced by such titles as Cooking to Hook Up and The Bachelor’s Datenight Cookbook. While these books offer a helpful account of man’s dietary inclinations, they only begin to scratch the surface of man’s dietary Male Code. To examine with more depth and detail man’s eating pathology, we must begin with the premise that man’s dietary habits are rooted in his Apex Predator Fantasy. The fantasy is comprised of three major ingredients: Large portions that evoke the mighty slabs of Mastodon flesh his ancestors feasted upon during the Cenozoic Era and which gratify man’s need to conquest; anti-social eating that emphasizes survival and the view that other humans are competition for food; and the predator’s tunnel vision that compels him to eat, for prolonged periods, only one food at a time.
Apex Predator Fantasies pertain to man’s need to conquer and devour. This impulse is placed in its proper cultural scope in Laurence Shames’ The Hunger for More where he explains that America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, the American red-blooded male still has the hunger to conquer and exploit, but he has circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, he has regressed into his troglodyte ancestors. In other words, gluttony and feral barbarism have been disguised as the pioneer’s conquest. This is precisely the theme that restaurants and other industries use to appeal to men’s most base eating instincts. For example, near my house is a popular restaurant aptly decorated like a Wild West saloon. Its theme is the prospector’s search for the mother lode. The restaurant specializes in oversized portions of steak, prime rib, baby back pork ribs, spicy chicken wings, cheddar cheese mashed potatoes, deep-fried onion ring “flowers,” carrot cake, cheese cake and chocolate fudge cake. The cakes are famous for their moisture, the result of several cups of mayonnaise that are used in the batter, and for their huge size. Each “slice,” if it could be called that, is over a foot tall and leans to the side as if it were about to tip over, but through a miraculous breakthrough in chemical-additive engineering, the cake remains upright and intact. The portions are so big that the waiters have to practically use cranes to get the platters of food from the kitchen to the patrons’ tables. Big helpings of food require big tableware. The knives resemble ivory-handled scimitars, and they evoke a more primitive age when men dressed in animal skins and tore the blubber off of beached whales and woolly mammoths.
While romanticized by these Wild West restaurant theme parks, troglodyte-style eating is ultimately an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard from traveling businessmen that there is a steakhouse in Houston where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.
Man’s anti-social eating extends to his aversion to eating and talking at the same time. We see this anti-social behavior played out in the successful Carl’s Jr. ad campaign where handsome, presumably alpha males tell the world to leave them the hell alone as they devour their triple cheeseburgers. The ad evokes the caveman days when man hoarded his bounty and ate his carcasses with great urgency lest some rival tribal member sink his chops into his kill.
Another eating practice that disdains the social life for survival is man’s preference for eating while standing rather than sitting. I was first introduced to this valuable principle during my childhood while watching an episode of the 1969-1972 TV series The Courtship of Eddie’s Father in which a bachelor and family friend, affectionately known “Uncle Norman,” was babysitting Eddie and teaching the impressionable boy the ins and outs of bachelor life. One “rule” was to eat all meals while standing over the kitchen sink. It saves time, it doesn’t require eating over dishes, and it doesn’t require the after-meal wiping of counters since all the food particles that fall out of your mouth, fall into the sink.
In fact, unbeknownst to himself, Uncle Norman was reliving the survival dramas of his nomadic ancestors who had to constantly “eat on the go” as they warily evaded predators and enemy tribesman. Fearful that they may become a choice morsel for some mammalian or reptilian carnivore, they did not have the luxury of mulling over the embarrassment of dishwasher spots and the crystal scouring agents of Calgonite. It is no surprise then that modern man is fretful and fidgety when asked to relax for a long, drawn-out meal at the dining room table and is disdainful of kitchen chores. His DNA-encoded flight-fight response makes him more at ease while eating inside his car, while standing over the kitchen sink, or while watching a violent athletic spectacle on his large-screen television.
A corollary of the stand-up-while-eating rule is the principle that says that food eaten from the ground is a good way to earn Man Points. Picking up a peanut, a blade of shredded cheese or a chicken drumstick that’s fallen to the kitchen floor and immediately putting it inside his mouth, man earns respect from his fellow men who understand that by ingesting this bacteria-laden tidbit the man is boosting his immune system. As far as the experience of eating contaminated food the ground goes, man enjoys the satisfaction of knowing he’s not wasting food. Additionally, once his reputation develops for having an “iron stomach” and a willingness to “clean up” after people’s kitchen messes, he will enjoy increased popularity at parties where intoxicated guests are prone to dropping their cheese and crackers, not to mention the added bonus of being lavished with he-man, Man-Point-earning nicknames like “The Incinerator,” “Dog,” and “Beast.” Being given these empowering sobriquets, man sees the wisdom of mimicking his caveman ancestors who had the insight to recognize that if they made a fuss every time a piece of mammoth blubber fell to the ground, they would have starved to death—plus his eating food off the ground is antithetical to the modern desire for frivolous home décor like kitchen tables, which require unnecessary and dangerously grueling treks to Pottery Barn.
Yet another anti-social behavior related to man and food is his disinclination to keep salt, sugar, eggs or anything in his kitchen that would give his neighbors an excuse to come over. If a neighbor knocks on his door and asks for a pinch of salt, what’s next? Milk? Eggs? Frozen peas? Hamburger Helper? No way. Man likes to establish early on that his cupboards and freezer are bare so that even if he did have, say, a bag of frozen corn, it would be so old and freezer burned as to render it inedible. Or even more disconcerting, the frozen bag of lima beans his neighbor needs for her casserole could prove highly dubious if the neighbor was borrowing frozen beans from a man who has recently endured a painful vasectomy.
While the idea of sharing or “borrowing” food to neighbors is, by many, smiled upon as a form of “community bonding,” it creates inflated expectations for the man whose sole objective is to lower others’ expectations of him and to thereby enjoy a life of bare responsibilities.
I can recall many years ago, I had my girlfriend over at my condo, and, wanting to show her how much she meant to me, I went out of my way to make her a special treat of microwave popcorn (my last package), but that, alas, I had no salt. I therefore visited my neighbor, a divorced prison guard, and was disappointed that he did not have any salt in his kitchen either. I remember returning to my condo in a huff and telling my girlfriend, “Can you believe this guy? He doesn’t even have any salt!” Upon which she reminded me that my negligence to buy this standard table condiment was the very thing that had made me pay my neighbor a visit in the first place.
Interestingly, after being turned away from my salt request, the prison guard, who had previously kept me at a frosty distance, now seemed to have a deeper sense of sympathy and connection with me. For there was now a tacit understanding between us that we were two undomesticated bums, completely oblivious of stocking one of the world’s most basic provisions and as such we were quite proud.
Our final ingredient in man’s Apex Predator Fantasy is his impulse to eat the same food over and over again. This urge can be traced back to childhood when boys would proclaim to their parents that they wanted chocolate cake or Cap ‘N’ Crunch for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all eternity and they would go on a hunger strike if their demand wasn’t met. These stubborn boys weren’t being the stupid little brats their parents said they were. They were expressing their DNA code that allowed their caveman ancestors to survive. For in the wild, Neanderthal man often had limited prey and he had to learn to eat the same food, depending on the migration of animals, which was determined by the changing seasons. Depending on what part of the earth a man’s ancestors are from, his caveman descendents usually had to survive two six-month or four three-month seasons during which time they would eat the same beast over and over again until a new season emerged. To this day, men are influenced by these eating habits and will zero-in on one food for three to six months until they are positively sick of it. Until that threshold arrives, the normal man is obsessed with eating only one food that gives him a “flavor explosion.” The “explosion” must not be interrupted by other flavors that will ruin his blissful eating. As an example, I was once in a restaurant gorging on an obscenely large slice of peanut butter pie, completely absorbed in the ecstasy of the pie’s overpowering flavor, when my wife insisted that I try her cheesecake. I had no interest in her cheesecake, but to be polite I indulged her and did so with disastrous results. The cheesecake, which I’m sure was topnotch, did not mingle well with the residual peanut butter pie flavors residing inside my mouth. Even worse, when I returned to my peanut butter pie, the “magic” was gone, no doubt because the cheesecake had altered the chemical composition inside my mouth and I was overcome with great resentment for betraying my caveman instincts.
Let us be clear then: Man is genetically programmed to focus on only one food at a time. That’s why a guy can eat peanut butter sandwiches every day for six months before he moves on to spaghetti, then pizza, then cold cereal, and so on. Other foods on Man’s Six-Month List are as follows: frozen waffles, refried beans, “super” burritos, submarine sandwiches, tacos, meat loaf, “fire hot” chili, and bacon cheese burgers. Due to his Homo sapiens hard-wiring, there is no such thing as an “inappropriate” breakfast, such as a meatball sandwich or an “inappropriate” dinner such as banana waffles with maple syrup. What’s “inappropriate” is cooking, which creates a barrier between Man and his frozen waffles.
Thanks to his cavemen descendents, man is overcome with the Apex Predator urge to satisfy his appetites with one food for six months and then he cannot tolerate it around the house. Evidence of this fact can be seen at the supermarket where you will notice the single guy filling his grocery cart with only one kind of TV dinner, say, salisbury steak. Six months later he will choose lasagna, then fried chicken and so on. Little does he know, he is replaying the dramas of Neanderthal Man during the Serengeti millions and millions of years ago, only now he has the advantage of a micro-wave oven.
Our study of manly eating would not be complete if we did not address manly supplements, those protein powders, vitamins, and herbal testosterone boosters that are supposed to make man’s muscles thrive and libido sizzle well into old age. True, he aspires to supplement his diet to prolong his youth and virility, but just as important is his desire to make a conspicuous display of the supplements he ingests, especially in front of the opposite sex. In his quest for manliness, he must let the babes to know that he is fueling his body with the highest grade ingredients on the market. But here’s his typical problem. He tends to be shy and no matter how hard he tries at work, he just can’t get the babes to pay him any attention. So he resorts to buying these huge vitamin pills. The outer coating is smooth and chalky, a big tabula rasa, so he can write on them with a black Sharpie pen. At home, he spends hours neatly writing words like “BULL TESTOSTERONE,” “GONAD EXTRACT,” and “ESSENCE OF GORILLA SCROTUM,” “VIAGRA X 1,000.” Then during lunch at the office, he takes out the oversized vitamin capsules and carefully places them on the edge of his desk so his female co-workers can get a good look at them. These oversized vitamins make good conversation starters because now the ladies want to know what kind of “program” he’s on. He can now tell them about his high-protein diet, his gym workout, and all the supplements he’s taking to make him a lean mean fighting machine. Clearly, the manufacturers of these virility cocktails pander to man’s Apex Predator fantasies, evidenced by the predatory names of their products—Pinnacle, Attack, Formadrol, , Higher Power, Universal Animal, PrimaForce, Beast Sports Nutrition, Goliath Labs Ejaculoid, and Horny Goat Weed, to name a few. One gets the impression from reading these labels that the nebbish male takes one sip and suddenly becomes Mr. Hyde. Millions of dollars are spent annually on feeding this transformation fantasy while, not surprisingly, there are no credible lab tests to scientifically support the suggestion or outright claim that these products will indeed transform the average man into a Hairy Muscle-Plated Satyr. Yet the urge to become an Apex Predator is so infantile and irrational that no body of scientific evidence can impede it.
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