HW 18 - Health & Illness & Feasting

Ahhh thanksgiving time.  When I think of thanksgiving I think of the "3 F's", Feasting, Family, and Football.  This holiday always makes me feel happy and comfortable because I am surrounded by all those who love me.  Usually on thanksgiving I have my whole "family" which would include cousins distant cousins and random assorted aunts and uncles.  About a week before thanksgiving I was informed it would just be me, my mom, my dad my brother and my 1st cousins and aunt and uncle.  When I asked why I was told that some of my family members were feuding with each other.  I don't understand how at a time when family is supposed to come together my family just didn't even wanna be in each others presence.  Every thanksgiving I do always feel bad that I have never had a thanksgiving with my grandmother.  She has been in a nursing home ever since I was little so it is really sad to not have thanksgiving with her.

This year since thanksgiving was held at my house my mother got the great job of preparing the feast.  The only part that I hate about thanksgiving is the anticipation for the food to come.  You find yourself sitting in a room talking to your family for hours.  At first your having a good time and then half way through the conversation you just really start to get hungry.  I feel like I am starting to get rude since all of my responses end up just being one word.  When the food comes tho the satisfaction that comes from it is worth the wait.  This was the first thanksgiving where I actually sat down at a table and ate.  Usually everyone is crowded on the couches watching TV.  After I ate I thought I was never going to be able to eat food again or I would explode.  That feeling lasted me about an hour until it was time to eat pie.

Finally the other thing that really makes up thanksgiving for me is watching a good football game.  Usually my family sits around the TV and claims that they are watching the game, when really only me and my uncle pay attention.  When everyone come we all say hello and then I get right back to my game.  My dad always says that its fine to have the game on when people are here, but then everyone ends up just talking to each other and they claim that the TV is "so loud they cant here each other".  I would like to say so then move, but I cant.  So this forces me to not even be able to watch football on thanksgiving. That is until everyone starts to eat then I usually try and sneak peaks at the game.

HW 17 - First Thoughts on the Illness & Dying Unit

Illness and dying have always been very significant topics through out the course of my life.  Ever since I was young the thought of dying has always been a scary thought for me.  The thought that there will be a point where you will die and not experience life is a scary thing to imagine.  But as for the thought of getting sick it is not a scary.  When I was young I took getting sick as just another opportunity to get off of school.  Now on the other hand I feel that I cant afford to get sick during the week or else I will miss something important.  The reason that I am not afraid of getting an illness is because I just don't think I am going to get one.  But there I am just talking about the flu or a cold, on the other hand i am very afraid of getting a life threatening illness.

Some experience that I have had with death and illness is that about a year and a half ago my fathers best friend Sherman Darby passed away from cancer.  Sherman was possibly the greatest person that I have ever met in my entire life.  He was kind and would put everyone before himself no matter what.  When someone like that dies of a disease like cancer it makes it so much worse because he did not deserve to get such a horrible disease.  Another experience I have had is that my aunt passed away from leukemia when I was around 11.  This again is an example of someone who got taken by such a horrible disease for no reason.  I know that some people think that everything happens for a reason, but in these cases I feel that there was no reason for this to happen.  These weren't bad people who deserved anything like this in there lives, so then why did they have this happen to them? 


The way that my family approaches these topics are pretty similar to mine.  They figure that death is something that is going to happen to everyone at some time.  Although like me they don't like the thought that one day they will die they have come to terms with the fact that it will happen.  I feel that the thought of my family dying scares me more then the thought of me dying.  I feel that if my family dies then I wont really have anyone to be close to.  I am sure my family feels the same way about this topic when it comes to losing me or another family member.  I feel that the loss of a family member has much more of an impact on your life then the loss of a friend.  They both hurt but one of this is more personal since those are the people that matter to you most in life.

HW 11 - Final Food Project 1

For this assignment I have decided to choose option a which was for us to be experiential (change diet, change shopping, change how you prepare food, how you eat).  I chose to change three things which were to change my meals, what I had to drink and where I purchased my food from.  For two days I am deciding to eat meals that don't have meat in them, I am trying to drink things that aren't loaded with sugar and I am trying to shop either at a supermarket or a whole foods.  In these two days of changing my eating habits I am going to try and resist the temptation to eat things that I am not allowed to while gathering my evidence.  This connects to our unit on food because it has made me realize that what I usually eat isn't exactly healthy for me even know I may like it.  This is giving me a chance to see if I depend on eating the foods that I would normally have on a daily basis.


The first thing I am going to talk about is the struggle that I had while trying change my eating habits.  The first thing that I had to do was pick up all of my "healthy" foods.  I went to whole foods and got a bunch of pasta, cheese, salad materials, and some other things my mom picked out.  That was the easy part, the hard part was actually coming to terms with the fact that I couldn't snack on any junk food when I went to a deli with friends.  When I saw my friends eating their candy and chocolate it really made the whole eating healthy experience a lot harder.  When you know you cant have something and people around you have it, it's definitely very hard to resist it.  Also when you cant eat meat your eating options around school are very limited since basically everywhere i go for lunch has meat in their food.  So I had to get pizza since that was the only place around the school that I liked that didn't have meat in it.This also connects to changing what I drink because with these meals you want to have a drink and since I am trying to drink things with little sugar I had to have an orange juice (which doesn't go well with pizza).  Since the things that don't have sugar in them are very limited you also have to chose a meal sometimes according to what you can drink with it. 


The second day I focused on what meals I would prepare for myself.  Since most of the food my mom got me(mostly vegetables) wasn't very appealing I was going to make myself spaghetti.  Since I am a very picky eater there are few things that don't have meat that I will eat.  Spaghetti being my favorite non meat food(and one of the only foods I know how to make) I decided to make that.  I prepared this meal no differently then I would have prepared any other.  I don't think that this really has an impact on the way I prepared it since there is no way for me to disrupt my goal if I just make spaghetti normally since nothing that I should not be eating isn't being added.  When I was making it I thought to myself how I actually do depend on eating meat since I am so picky that there isn't a lot that i am willing to eat and i don't want to have to eat spaghetti 4 times a day.


After this whole experience ended I did end up going back to eating meat.  Actually I went to Mcdonald's and got a big mac.  I thought that this unit would change the way that I think about food and in some ways it did but in some ways it didn't.  It definitely didn't change it in the way that if i desire a certain food i will go and eat it no matter how it was prepared.  The one thing that this unit did make me change tho was how much of this food I am going to eat.  I will definitly think differently about how many times a week I eat this food. 

HW 12 - Final Food Project 2 - Outline

Thesis:  An individual living in our culture must recognize and respond to the nightmarish industrial atrocities at the root of dominant social practices in order to live a morally satisfactory life. 


Major argument 1:  Living with these nightmarish atrocities makes me wonder if the way I view food is correct.


Chunk 1: The way americas slaughterhouses are being run


Evidence 1:  Mistreatment of animals in slaughterhouse 
http://media.www.tchnews.com/media/storage/paper840/news/2008/03/10/News/Animal.Cruelty.In.Slaughterhouses-3259951.shtml 


Evidence 2:  Exploitation of workers in slaughterhouses 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/opinion/06iht-edmeat.html 


Evidence 3:  Attempts of improvement in slaughterhouses 
http://www.hanbooks.com/slshstofgrne.html


Chunk 2 of major argument 1:  The way that animals are raised for food.


Evidence 1:  Mistreatment of animals
http://www.ncga.coop/newsroom/animal-treatment


Evidence 2:  Animals being rushed into growth by use of chemicals
http://www.lowdensitylifestyle.com/the-meat-you-eat-steroid-use-in-livestock/


Evidence 3:  Improvements made by the state of california on animal treatment
http://environment.about.com/od/environmentallawpolicy/a/prop_two.htm

HW 10 - Food, Inc. Response

Precis:


The main idea of this movie was to give people an insight on what it is really like in the places where our food is prepared.  They wanted to show you the actual truth behind what you are eating.  In the movie they showed you cases were a child died from eating a hamburger from a certain company that I don't remember.  The movie also showed you how the animals were treated before they were killed and how they were killed.  The last main idea was that it showed you how their is actually a lot of corruption in the food industry.

Some things that the movie offered that the book did not were more specific details of the way the animals were treated.  It really showed you how horrible their last seconds alive are and the way that the workers treated them.  Something that the book offered that the movie didn't was that the book was a bit more specific with the interviews and they had more statistics.

Some questions that I have after watching this movie are how come there aren't any laws against the way that these animals are treated?  The main feelings that dominate my response are just thinking about how horrible it must be to get treated that way for no reason.  It also really makes me think twice about eating the food I do after finding out the treatment the went through.

HW 7d

Chapter 17:   One day I decided to use some of the eggs on Joel's farm.  Just to see what the difference was like.  When I ate the eggs I really noticed that their was a difference in taste between the eggs in a farm and the ones in a grocery store.  The main difference was actually the yolk thats in the egg because it is much thicker then store bought eggs yolk.  A gem was there is a difference between farm raised salmon and salmon that is from the wild.  A question I have is it that is it better have wild salmon or farm raised salmon?

Chapter 18:  The one more meal that I wanted to make was a meal grown with all of my grown, gathered and hunted food.  Although a lot of modern americans think they don't hunt food they actually do.  I had never been hunting until now and I was still deciding wether or not to do it.  A gem in this chapter for me was that a lot of americans don't hunt anymore since they don't have any need to.  A question that I have is that if americans don't need to hunt anymore then how come some americans still do hunt?

Chapter 19:  Animal rights programs don't eat meet not because its bad for them but because an animal had to die for it.  They still do eat eggs and drink milk but that is because the animal was not harmed or killed for the egg or the milk to be made.  On the poly face farm they say they try their best for their animals not to suffer.  A gem in the chapter for me was that the food industry use's the word "stress" instead of "suffer" when talking about the animals.  A question i have is why do you think poly face farm cares about how their animals are treated?

Chapter 20:  The reason that the meal i made was the perfect meal for me was because i made it with food that i hunted myself.  I feel that when you go through all that trouble to make gather all your food when its all done you feel so much better about yourself.  My main course was a wild california pig which i was cooking for my guide angelo and others.  Although my guests might have not liked the taste I still enjoyed the meal that I made.  A gem in this chapter was that even though others didn't enjoy his meal he still did.  A question I have is why did the author choose to go through the trouble of making his own food?  Was it for the experience or to prove a point?

Chapter 21:  As a hunter gatherer there were certain skills that I needed to know besides hunting.  Another skill that I needed was gathering.  Since the meal that I wanted to make in this case included mushrooms I needed to know skills on gathering mushrooms for the meal.  Picking mushrooms in the woods is different then picking mushrooms in your backyard.  Much more fun and much more dangerous.  You can get lost looking in the woods since you don't know specifically what you are looking for.  A gem in this chapter for me was that there is something called a hunter gatherer because I always assumed that in the process of hunted gathering was usually included.  A question I have is why did the author chose to make a meal with mushrooms in it?  Was he interested in mushrooms before the book? or what gave him the idea to use them?

Chapter 22:  Finally I was almost done with my "perfect" meal.  The date I set for the dinner was saturday june 18.  To make sure it was perfect I had developed a list to make sure I did everything I wanted for it to be the perfect meal.  If I say so myself my requirements for myself are pretty fair.  I am doing this with all hunted and gathered materials to show that I don't have to spend any money to prepare the perfect meal.  A gem in this paragraph was that the author could make a perfect meal out of fresh prepared found items.  That just shows how important it is that people have food and how food can really be made out of things you find in the woods.  A question I have is if he could make such a meal the way he did why don't others do the same thing?

HW 9 - Freakonomics Response

In Freakonomics the authors address the issue of correlation versus causation in the way they would talk about how your name could cause people to judge you.  In the movie they did a test where they sent out job applications to companies using the most common white name which is Jake and the most common black name which I believe they said was Tyron.  What they found out was that the person with the name Jake was 33% more likely to get the job then the person with the name Tyron.  This in a way showed that since Jake was more of white person name the companies chose him over Tyron which is more of a black persons name.  This represents correlation versus causation because it is showing that they chose the person with the White sounding name and judged the person with the black sounding name.  So in a way the movie does prove that some correlation is causation.

The sources of evidence that the Freakonomics authors rely on is surveys I think.  I think this because in the movie when they went around asking people about names for black and white people that was all the evidence that they really used.  This is innovative because it really gives people a different way of thinking and really makes them wonder about these types of things.  I think that they could have used a more efficient way of getting evidence but it was good to see normal peoples responses to their questions.

I agree with the statement Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices.  I agree because it really shows that you cant tell much about someone unless you look into it.  For example with the sumo wrestler part of the movie.  They talked about how the sumo trainer had one of his sumo wresters killed and the police said he died of natural causes and there was no need for a autopsy.  But the mans father insisted that they did and they found out what really happened.  This just shows that until you look into the matter you wont really know the truth about the situation no matter how weird it is.