Oh, land of the sun! i dream of seeing you, now that i find myself so far from you, shopping in a foreign supermarket. everything is so coldly organized, sterile, functional that i am horrified. i ask myself what the hidden reason is behind this system of shopping. it seems that presenting food products in this manner has the objective of numbing our will and happiness. upon seeing carrots, corn, lettuce, even cilantro, disguised to appear real even though they’ve been frozen for months, one feels that it’s all part of a big set for an american movie. it’s as if we are part of a huge superproduction in which we act as if we are choosing, buying, and eating these foods, but everything is simulated. in mexico i am accustomed to going to the market every day, chatting with the merchants, tasting bites of fruit (real fruit) at each stand, running into my neighbors and talking to them among the magical smells and colors that are found only there. i am, essentially, accustomed to life.

source: esquivel, laura and stephen a. lytle. “lowfat mayonaise.” between two fires: intimate writings on life, love, food and flavor. new york: crown, 2000. 125-26. print.

how is theme related to historical and social context in the excerpt above?

esquivel is homesick and doesn’t like frozen food.
esquivel misses tasting real fruit for free at the market.
food in mexico was cheaper and more satisfying than in the united states.
small things like grocery shopping represent larger differences.
mark this and return

which speech are you talking about?

the thousand and one nights – or, as i prefer to call them in the following for purely practical reasons: the arabian nights – as we perceive them three hundred years after antoine galland’s epochal french adaptation bear a distinct arabic imprint. meanwhile, the commonly accepted model for their textual history acknowledges various stages in the conceptualization and effective formation of both the collection’s characteristic frame story and the embedded repertoire. the vast majority of tales in the preserved manuscripts of the nights has been integrated into the collection during two periods of arabic influence, the so-called baghdad and cairo periods (gerhardt 1963: 115–374). these “arabic” stages are preceded by an iranian version, probably dating to pre-islamic times, which in its turn profits from both structural devices and narrative contents originating from indian tradition. considering the eminent position that iran and iranian culture hold in the early stages of the textual history of the arabian nights, surprisingly few details are known concerning the collection’s relation to and its actual position within the iranian cultural context. in the following, i will discuss links between the arabian nights and iranian culture on several levels. in surveying these links, i will treat five major areas: (1) the iranian prototype of the nights; (2) tales of alleged persian origin; (3) persian characters within the tales; (4)persian translations of the arabian nights; and (5) the position of the arabian nights in modern iran