Once More Into Academia, Dear Friends!

Writing 122 is here, and it's all about the persuasive essay. For starters, we are to analyze the merits of food essays. I picked a rather odd one.

One trait of an essay is to entertain. Does "What's Cooking? Eating in America" by Bill Bryson entertain? Lemmie think...

A Seventh Day Adventist doctor named John Harvey Kellogg, who runs Battle Creek Sanitarium, conjures an odd regime for his underweight patients. They are to minimize physical exertion while remaining on a diet of grapes. Pounds and pounds of grapes. Waking from a dream, Kellogg brews up a formula for a flake cereal that, because it was unusual, could only be healthy. (The logic of the time.) His patients love it.

One inert and underweight patient gives a quintessential product endorsement by rising from his wheelchair, animated not only by the health giving food, but also by a sudden realization, profound and invigorating like a sugar frosted lining in a milky cloud. This food, not only good for breakfast, great for a snack, portends increasing financial opportunities. That man, C. W. Post, knowing he had a tiger by the tail, strode from the sanitarium, and advanced the nation along The Road to Wellville by his own creation. A cereal to which he gave an incongruous and sardonic name: Grape Nuts.

Doesn't take a lot of critical reading to understand that's entertainment.