This is a project for my Food For Thought class. The purpose of this project was to write an autobiography in the first person as if we where an ingredient. In this project I learned a lot about my ingredient which was the meat from a Cuban dish (ropa vieja) also known as flank steak and where it comes from. I am proud of my autobiography and my illustrations. You can read my story below
I am a flank steak. For most of my life, I have hung out in the stomach of a cow, on a small farm in Colorado. Then one day, I saw a huge truck coming from a distance. Then suddenly, the truck came to a stop beside the gate of the farm. A huge guy got out of the driver’s seat, and with him he has a shock-y stick. He starts to walk towards me, and of all the parts of the cow he could have shocked, he chose to shock me, the stomach, with 8000 volts of surging electricity! He started forcing the rest of me into the huge truck he brought.
Finally, the terrible pain is over. But now it is pitch black inside the truck. All I can hear are desperate cows mooing for help all around me. After long hours in the truck, the huge door at the back of the truck opens and it is the man again. This time, he pulls us, one by one, out of the truck and apparently we are now in a place called Iowa, which I can tell by the sign on the side of the road. The man is now herding us all to a big factory. The doors of the factory open and we are led to a dark room with tons of rows of cows. I am taken to a small fenced off area and for hours all I can do is think to myself, “What will my fate be?”
Then I look to one side of me and I see a partner that has been with me my whole life. His name is Loin. I ask him, “Loin, what will be our purpose?” Loin says, “Well I will be cooked and served in country clubs and restaurants all around the country,” and I say, “Well, what about me?” and Loin then says to me, “Your history is actually very interesting. You are usually used in a Spanish dish, ropa vieja, also called flalda. The legend behind that dish is a story about a man whose family was coming to his home for dinner. Being very poor, the man could not buy them enough food when they came. To remedy his situation, he went to his closet, gathered some old clothes (ropa vieja) and imbued them with his love. When he cooked the clothes, his love for his family turned the clothes into a wonderful beef stew.the dish also originated in the Canary Islands which was the last place ships from spain would stop on their way to the americas.”
Then from the end of a very long hall I see a man coming towards me. He opens the gate and leads me to a room and separates me from the rest of my body. Then he packages me and takes me to a very cold room, and for days I am sitting in that room seeing packages just like me coming and going. One day, finally, I am picked up and I am put in a box and into another truck, but this time three days come and go, then finally, for the first time in days, I see light as the package is torn open and I notice I am being put on a shelf in a freezer in a place called Jewel Osco. The night was long and cold, then morning time comes and people start rushing in picking up packages of meat, but not me. I feel like I am never going to be put to use, and then a small cuban lady comes and picks me up and takes me home. She puts me in a pot and cooks me and serves me to a young teenager as the fork comes closer I feel like I am more and more ali……..
