Star Foods

You and Your Parent’s Expectations
Star Food is a psychological story that focuses on the expectations of the parents and their teenager’s success. His father wants him to become an objective, work orientated man while his mother wants him to be a man of “worldly curiosity” (19). He never seems to be able to amount to much. Even when he sets out to try to be more ambitious and catch the shoplifters, he ends up letting them go. He simply does not have the passion, ambition, and drive that his parents have. After a series of events Dade reaches a conclusion. He lets the woman whom he caught stealing go as a rebellion against his parents symbolizing his own independent thoughts. If he cannot meet his parent’s expectations, he should follow his own way of life. In the past, at age 12, Dade has tried his best to please his mother and father. He did his chores for the supermarket but one day his mom comes up to him and explains her theory of “limited fame” (106). It was then that Dade started sitting on the roof and just thinking. To his dismay after six years, “there was nothing that struck me and stayed, though, nothing with the brilliance of white light or electric explosion that I thought came with discovery.” (199). He had failed his mother. Dade has been trying to work to the expectations of his father as a young age as well. His dad had been “trying to teach me competence and industry” (328). Since he was nine “I have been squeeze-drying mops before returning them to the closet, double-counting change, sweeping under the lip of the vegetable bins even if the dirt there was invisible to the customers.” (330). When he points out the woman has been stealing, his father assigns him the job of catching her. To his dad’s disappointment, Dade fails numerous times. To instill a sense of duty, he hires Mr. Sellers, a young security guard. Mr. Sellers would “be trying to decide whether he was looking at the shoplifter” (620) and “He smiled at the customers and held the door for them” (617). Being young and having work-orientated characteristics, he is the complete opposite of Dade, rather like a Foil. He is a representation of what Dade’s dad wants him to be. That being, he has failed his dad as well.
Having failed both his parents, Dade goes back to the roof to reflect over himself. Suddenly he reaches an epiphany. “I’ll be damned. My life is making sense” (660). Having reached this moment of clarification, he sets out to do what he needs to do. He catches the lady. Although this time, instead of following what his dad usually does with reading out the blue card on the wall or unlocking the back door like his mother, he walks her out of the stockroom, out several blocks and stops at a corner and watches her until he sees her no more. This is the one act in the story in which he doesn’t do what his parents instructed him to.
The main focus of the story was to describe the relation of a parent’s expectations and a teenager’s success. Dade, like numerous teenagers failed to live up to his parent’s expectations and goes his own way. By releasing the thief Dade suggests that a parent’s expectation for their children may not be attainable despite all their efforts to achieve it.