On Writing

I've never approached writing from a food-driven basis perspective. This year gave me the opportunity to explore news way in which one can write, and in doing so expanded my mind to a new form of writing. This quarter hasn't demanded academic bullshit like my previous quarter had (sorry for the vulgarity, but it's necessary). In exploring the culture of food and the various issues and concerns that surround it, my writing has expanded to incorporate a new window thought. To validate any respectable journal or essay, the author has to include accountable sources to argue a certain point. But you're not just arguing a senseless and boring point as many classes require; you develop a certain degree of passion-fueled writing that may just be worth the time to read. In almost all of my blog posts and essays, I have incorporated sources that I found to be of worth and of interest. Most classes require research-based essays, and approaching such a form of research from a food-based perspective was a fresh reminder of how writing can be enjoyable. We are surrounded by food everyday, we need it to survive, but yet we don't know where our food comes from much of the time or how it is produced. That is a topic worth spending time to write about in my opinion. I have found this not only to be important, but helpful in building a concrete foundation for my own writing aspirations.

Food Economics and the Wealth Disparity

Dupuis mentions a possible solution in addressing the current food crisisl that is in deciding what to eat in order to stay healthy. He finds the root of American eating to be the same root that drives many of our global problems – injustice. “We have historically made diet part of the struggle over social deservingness... we need to stop trying to solve our social problems through our stomachs and think about the ways in which this type of politics simply justifies current inequalities” (History of Food Advice, 42). That brings me to one of the most defining aspects of food economics: wealth disparity. The organic and local food sections of the closest grocery don’t cater to the poor community. Food stamps sure for one thing won’t cover your organic eggs, nor will the minimum wage that the American workers on the lower end of the socioeconomic class get paid. Food injustice doesn’t just prevail as a deciding factor as to which family can afford more nutritious ingredients, but it sets apart and paints a defining line between economic and social classes. When a certain amount of money is allocated to food for a family each week, choosing between the expensive locally raised eggs and the large-scale corporate produced eggs becomes easy. Twenty thousand dollars a year is far from enough to support a family of four who wants to be more health conscious.

Pollan portrays an ideal and attainable solution in choosing food products that aid rather than hurt the body, however these solutions are limited to the middle and upper classes. Pollan suggests to the reader, “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (Unhappy Meals, 15). He goes on to state, “Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number – or that contain high fructose corn syrup…and get out of the supermarket whenever possible” (16) – suggesting that farmer markets are a healthier and more viable solution. His advice is sounds and intelligent, Pollan suggests a world where eating better is in reach. It remains in reach however for a limited few. As Americans, for many of us and for many of those that compromise the wealth of the world, eating right is not a problem. For the majority of those struggling to survive, and for the billion or so inhabitants on Earth that face a food and water shortage every day, eating right becomes more of a problem. As Dupuis points out, citizens of the world must address larger issues, such as current inequalities. In my opinion, one of the greatest inequalities in the world is wealth disparity. Wealth disparity decides who eats what, who lives where, and who goes to what school if any. It also decides between who lives and who dies, and who thrives and who perishes. It is the survival of the fittest, or survival of the blessed. But the global economic system of open markets and free capital that we are told works best wouldn’t aid such global wealth disparities, and aid in the unjust food system that our world’s revolve around – or would it?

On Other Posts

I know College kids drinks a lot, but I didn't realize the CAS (College Alcohol Study) found that out of 140 college students in the U.S., 44% replied to meet the requirement of being binge drinkers. I also recently heard that the definitions for alcoholism and addiction are going to be changing, and as a result will incorporate more heavier drinkers as being alcoholics when they were previously labeled otherwise. I read on another blog about sodium that,  "by eating one less bag of Gardetta’s each day 'that I could possibly increase my life expectancy 5-6 years like the Finnish population did during the past 25-30 years' " (Bryce's Blog).

Eating Lunch, Eating Dinner

My mother used to tell me breakfast was the most important meal of the day. She still tells me the same thing today. At least 17% of adults regularly skip breakfast, including myself. Whether or not this statistic is aiding to the demise of the American diet, the American diet is in fact fighting for its life. And the truth is that it’s hanging on by a thread.

            I read of recent headway in the American raw milk industry, despite Supreme Court Judges constantly opposing the idea of Americans consuming such products. Our European friends have been doing just that for years. They vend raw milk out of machines, sell it at restaurants, and drink it in the mornings at home. They also prevail in proving to be much healthier and leaner than their American neighbors. Yet of course as Americans, processed milk with additives and preservatives must be healthier for the human to consume. But then again, humans are the only animals to consume another animal’s breast milk.

            My own diet excludes breakfast for the most part. Occasionally on the weekend when I wake up, I may wonder over to eat breakfast, but for the most part, it’s a meal that my stomach does not desire at eight, nine, or ten in the morning. I know my stomach may resort to burning stored fuel in my body at that point, such as fat, but it is just a meal that I do not have hunger for. Back to my point though, such a scenario is exemplary of the contemporary American eating habit. Yes it is true that the average American may consume some caloric intake before noon, but it is often insufficient.

            Nutritionists recommend time and time again that it is better to consume small amounts of food over an extended period rather than eat three definitive meals a day. In doing so, homeostasis may be well maintained by keeping energy, and effectively moods leveled. Unseen health implications from a lack of eating in the morning affect both energy and mood levels. “Over the years, a number of studies have examined the subject, and most have reached the same conclusion: starting a day without a solid meal tends to have slight but detectable effects on mood, memory and energy level” (O’Connor). Those who eat nothing in the morning continuously do worse on memory tests and account for high levels of fatigue four hours after first getting up. Dismissing breakfast from the American diet is just one aspect of my own life that leads to unhealthy eating.

            As a whole, American health habits seem to be steadily decreasing. With a wealth disparity that is every growing amidst the fifty great states, the poorer are forced to buy cheaper and less nutritious food. According to Gallup Wellbeing, American’s eating habits were worse in 2011 than they were in the previous year: “Americans' Healthy Behaviors Index score was 63.8 in May, down from 65.2 in the same month last year. Adults' health habits have been worse in each of the past three months compared with the same months in 2010” (Witters). It may be possible that Americans are purchasing less expensive foods such as fruits and vegetables because of the recession and tough financial times. Regardless of the case, it is time Americans double take the way they eat – myself included.

           

We are all guilty to some degree of failing our bodies both mentally and physically, but we are also the privileged few that have the money and resources to do something about it. Maybe raw milk isn’t such a bad idea. Perhaps by resorting to the ways we ate one thousand years ago, humans will discover fewer cancers and less disease. Stomachs were not meant to digest pesticides and preservatives. There are simple steps to promote healthy eating that I myself can take. I may not start eating full-fledged meals every morning, but I may just start my day with an apple or banana rather than a sole black cup of coffee.

Works Cited

O'Connor, Anahad. "The Claim: Skipping Breakfast Can Affect Your Mood and Energy

Levels During the Day." The New York Times. 21 Feb. 2006. Web. 16 May 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/health/21real.html>.

Witters, Dan. "Americans' Eating Habits Worse This Year Compared With Last."

Americans' Eating Habits Worse This Year Compared With Last. Gallup Wellbeing, 9 June 2011. Web. 16 May 2012. <http://www.gallup.com/poll/147989/americans-eating-habits-worse-year-compared-last.aspx>.

 

What We Have in Common

It seems to be a hit on the weekend to go out and eat rather than eat on campus. I for myself was spoiled eating this out because it was my birthday and I had my girlfriend and mother in town. I've also noticed how small or insignificant breakfast is for a lot of other university students. I rarely eat breakfast, and if I do, it is normally of a small proportion later in the morning. A large amount of students also snack throughout the day and sometimes only eat one or two meals instead of the recommended three. Take one look at the majority of the food blogs and I think it is easy to infer that college students don't accommodate their schedule around eating three meals a day at designated times.

Shrimped Out

            The other night I was sitting around the dinner table. I had just eaten my first dinner meal as a twenty year old and I sat awed in disbelief that I had actually made it to twenty. There was something as a kid that led me to believe I would never make it, but I reassure myself now such thinking was constrained to my teenage years. Not that you actually feel any different turning from nineteen to twenty, it may just be the least exciting birthday ever; anti-climatic in contrast with the year that is to follow.

            Nonetheless, I was sitting around my sister’s dining table in Lakewood with her, my mother, and my girlfriend. My mother had just cooked Pesto and Shrimp pasta, a meal I love. Take spaghetti, mix it in with some basil, lemon juice, garlic, onion, a few thinly diced vegetables, olive oil and that delicious pesto conjecture, top it off with some medium sized shrimp and you have an amazing and relatively quick meal. It had been years since I had been with mother when she cooked up such a magnificent and vibrant dinner. All of the ingredients in the meal I absolutely love, but that’s not what caught my attention. I had spent years living on various farms growing this vegetable and that, tending these sheep and slaughtering those chickens, shearing the sheep and milking the cows by hand – it is something I absolutely love to do. There is an aspect of being self-sufficient and raising your own food that puts all other food you ever consume to shame. I had worked at both indoor hydroponic and aquaponic farms, dealing with fish as a means to enrich the water rather than using soil. I love working with food, and as I stared at my shrimp, I realized I knew nothing about where the little creatures on my plate came from. Sure, occasionally one might get fresh shrimp from the sea, but the reality remains that just like a large percentage of the world’s fish consumed, the shrimp probably came from a farm somewhere in East Asia.

            Because shrimp are one of the most popular types of seafood in the world, approximately “5 million metric tons of shrimp are produced annually… Shrimp aquaculture, which increased nine fold during the 1990s and is one of the fastest growing forms of aquaculture, now accounts for one-third of the shrimp produced globally” (Aquaculture).  Prior to the twentieth century, large-scale shrimp farming operations were unheard of. Today, shrimp aquaculture, or the harvesting of shrimp in massive quantities represents an economic market dominating China, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Brazil, Ecuador and Bangladesh. The vast majority of this shrimp is than imported into the United States, the European Union, and Japan for consumption. There is something that turns off the senses when you realize your shrimp is a pawn in a farm rather than a creature in the sea; but then again, most livestock represents masses awaiting their slaughter for human consumption – it’s just how our global population feeds itself, and we love our food. Because shrimp are found in both fresh and salt water, they become that much easier to mass-produce and harvest. Thailand now represents the largest shrimp-exporting country in the world.

            Despite the fact that commercial shrimp farming wasn’t introduced until the seventies, humans have been hunting and eating the swimming crustaceans for millennia. Shrimp aquaculture has taken over as a profitable means to produce shrimp so that twenty-year-old birthday boys such as myself are able to enjoy shrimp wherever and whenever they want – even in springtime Colorado. The consequences of commercial shrimp farming have led to unprecedented and unsustainable practices that eventually destroy our value for the environment as well as value for the organisms that compromise human diets. “The explosion in the number of intensively operated shrimp farms has not only impacted the costal zone of Thailand, but has also resulted in an unsustainable aquaculture industry. Abandonment of shrimp ponds due to either drastic, disease-caused collapses or more gradual, year to –year reduction in the productivity of the pond is common” (Dierberg and Kiattisimkul). One rarely thinks of the environmental implications when enjoying a delicious meal of Shrimp and Pesto pasta. However, the implications still remain. “As integrated aquaculture management practice becomes more the practice than the exception, less risk of crop failure to the industry and reduced discharge loadings from intensively managed shrimp ponds to receiving waters can be expected”  (Dierberg and Kiattisimkul).

            I never really thought about looking into the shrimp I eat. I do know that the next time I purchase shrimp to cook at home, it is going to be ocean harvested in open waters rather than contained to the walls of a fish farm in Thailand. And that goes for all of the seafood I purchase from now on – I am going to make it a point to eat fresh and happy sea-dwellers rather than the commercially farmed fish that fuel the large corporations of the world. When it comes down to eating right, I don’t just think of eating food that was produced in an ethical manner, but I also think about supporting the average fisherman rather than the Monsanto’s and Tyson’s of the world. At some point, the world is going to have to readdress the way we consume, and I do believe that point in time is knocking on the door as we speak.

Works Cited

"Aquaculture." WWF. Web. May 2012.

<http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/globalmarkets/aquaculture/dialogues-shrimp.html>.

Dierberg, Forrest E., and Woraphan Kiattisimkul. "Issues, Impacts, and Implications of

Shrimp Aquaculture in Thailand." SpringerLink. Springer Science Business Media, 1996. Web. May 2012. <http://www.springerlink.com/content/n3w5871569222414/>.

Food Journal

Food Journal:

11 May 2012

Friday:

11:30 AM: Turkey sandwich on wheat with lettuce, tomato, cheese, onion, cucumber, Dijon, side of chips. Cup of coffee, glass of water, orange-mango juice, bowl of fruit

1:30 PM: banana

4:30 PM: coffee

6:30 PM: burger with sautéed mushrooms and onions, Swiss cheese, bacon, barbeque sauce, fries, water

12 May 2012

Saturday:

11:00 AM: Omelet with cheese, green pepper, spinach, salsa, onion, blueberry yogurt, orange juice, coffee, Naked juice

2:00 PM: coleslaw, small amount of vegetables and chicken at cooking show, coffee

6:00 PM: Restaurant downtown, crab cakes, small salad, burger sliders, drinks

12:00 AM: Chicken burrito with rice, black beans, peppers, onions, sour cream, corn, salsa from Illegal Pete’s, lemonade

13 May 2012

Sunday:

11:00 AM: Scrambled eggs with goat cheese, mushrooms, onions, coffee, orange juice, coke, apple

6:00 PM: Kaos Pizza, Pepperoni, pepper, bacon, beverage, small salad
10:00 PM: Chocolate covered strawberries, beverage, chips

America's Eating Disorder

When placed on an international perspective, the American eating disorder is, according to Pollan a result of the anxious eating that surrounds American’s problem with food. We eat too much, too quickly, and with too few breaths in between the chew. No, it is not realistic to chew each bite one hundred times for the sake of a satisfactory metabolic process, but it is also not unrealistic to chew each bite twenty times, something I know I don’t do. Rather than swallowing our food whole in a frantic frenzy, it might be time that Americans learn to chew again. It may just be that Americans need to re-learn the art of eating, despite our humanistic instinct to eat and consume, rather than eat and enjoy. Think about the society we live in – the fact that Americans need to relearn how to eat goes to show just what crisis, or what national eating disorder America is facing.

The psychological attitude surrounding Americans and food is one of hypocrisy, where the calorie and fat content in food is more important than the actual process of eating food with friends and family. Yet America still remains one of the most obese countries in the world, while across the Atlantic the French are skinny, proud and slow to eat. According to Pollan, “We could eat less and actually enjoy it more… It’s so much simpler to alter the menu or nutrient profile of a meal than to change the social and psychological context which it is eaten” (Pollan). It seems the majority of the world go it somewhat right with eating - that is uncovering the pleasure in eating rather than finding strife.

Of course what we eat as a culture is important, but as Pollan points out, Americans must relook how we eat: “The French eat all sorts of unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: they eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone, and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs” (Pollan). What I find most interesting is that as Americans, it isn’t solely what we eat, but it is how we eat that is breeding a generation of obese and unhealthy youth. My own eating habits define that of the typical American, where eating on the go is the norm and slow, extended meals represent a nuisance rather than a luxury (because of the time crunch in my own life). I have sacrificed the art of enjoying food for the sake of being full and functional. We are in fact in a food crisis, and in my opinion, the way we eat reflects the values of our culture. Perhaps it is time to embrace eating once again, and to embrace living in each moment rather than living in the future or the past.

America's Food Crisis

At the heart of Pollan’s argument, he states: “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?'' (Pollan)

            Pollan lists a number of excuses to defend what he sees as the national eating disorder. Concerning animals, Pollan reasons that life for farm animals would be worst in the wild where many wouldn’t survive. Other reasoning’s include the defense that animals on factory farms have never known any other life, that human suffering must be addressed before animal suffering, and the fact that humans who choose to not eat meat point out a crucial moral difference between humans and animals. All of these excuses however are to some degree were refuted with evidence from Singer’s book Animal Liberation.

“In the same way we'd call that exclusion racist, the animal rightist contends that it is speciesist to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he's not human.” Pollan finds that killing animals for meat and clothing poses the most difficult animal rights challenge, because it has been practiced for so long. It is difficult to distinguish between animal pain and animal suffering, especially when that is being said in the context of industrial slaughterhouses. Pollan brings out the madness and cruelty in the methods which are used to raise animals and maximize their output, or meat for human consumption. Pollan’s analysis of the domestic animal industry brings out the horrors that are embedded in the very foundation of the industry, such as the fact that producers account for a ten percent death rate among hens that can’t bear their living conditions and ultimately die from a maddening constraint. Factory farms in this context are described as humans worst nightmares, where moral regulations go out the window in the presence of capitalism. This can be said for just about any industry – when capital presents itself, morals which normally hold authority vanish into thin air. Like the saying goes, money is power.

I used to live on a farm where we grew all of our own food, slaughtered all of our animals in the most humane fashion possible, and lived in a harmonious community. This worked great for a community of about 50, but does not work to when attempting to meet the demands of contemporary society, say the seven billion residents of Earth. People aren’t going to take the time to tend to their livestock and crops because they do not have time to do so. That being said, corporations are left to decide the origins of our food, and just how that food has been treated. It is a rather disgusting concept that our food is more or less, tortured before being served on a hot plate at Thanksgiving dinner. But we as Americans sure as hell wouldn’t want to think about that aspect of community and family dinners, or would we? Perhaps vegetarianism will one day be the normality of society, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
 As for Estabrook's Tomatoland, the fields of Southwest Florida that he depicts have emerged into modern slavery plantations, where migrant workers are enchained, beaten, and held against there will, forced to work under brutal conditions for no pay. According to Estabrook, " In the last fifteen years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than one thousand en and women who had been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg" (On the Tomato Trail). Tracing the origin of the supermarket tomato leads to the appalling discovery that tomatoes aren't nearly as fresh and nutritious as they may appear in the produce aisle at your local Safeway. Such an industry compliments the American chicken industry that Cook describes, "Eight billion chickens will be sacrificed this year to our desire for
cheap, versatile meals and slimmer hips, but they will have their revenge: cumulative-trauma disorders among poultry workers are 16 times the national average, and there is little hope that the
line will be slowing down anytime soon" (Fowl Trouble). America's production of chicken has led to a cannibalistic bird (companies grinds up unused chicken parts to be used as chicken feed) that is "farmed" in as little time as possible, to be sold at a cheap price. America is facing the most detrimental food crisis in history, Americans just don't know it; or they are not wiling to pay the price to fix it. Who blames them? Cheap is good, but how much farther will we go before something in the system begins to deteriorate? Our society grows chickens rather than raises them, I think we should be scared.