Hw #11

I chose experiential (a) and decided to change my diet, but in order to do this I began the change slowly. With parental consent I began to buy vegetables we needed for dinner at the farmer's market which was located on 1st ave right in front of the housing for low income families. ( Reminded me of how in class we talked about how the government was subsidizing fruit stands in order for them to stand in poor neighborhoods.) Once I bought peppers, one an orange color and the other in a green color, and they both tasted real good. The orange pepper was oddly shaped (I believe due to fact didn't have any chemicals, naturally grown) and it tasted sweet. And when my mother cooked it with meat and olive oil the juices gave meat an extra flavor. The green peppers were also good but tasted more like most regular peppers except a little more tangy.

After slowly changing the vegetables in my food, I also began to cut back on the junk food I ate during the week, ate homemade food for a week and did not eat out until Sunday. It did work and I personally don't eat McDonald's or Wendy's only like 3 or 4 times a year. Usually when I finish eating I feel sick and stuffed, and an hours later I am hungry again, while when I eat a regular home cooked meal it is more filling and healthy. I'm also type of person who is tempted to buy snacks like chips, candy or cookies like any teen. But decided to instead throw an apple or pear in bag to eat as a snack instead.

From this unit I have definitely learned a lot, its been eye opening about the food our society eats. And for me its important because now every time I eat, how the animals and farmers are actually treated is now always is in the back of my mind and has made me change some of what I eat. It honestly hasn't made me want to become vegetarian, but it has made me want to see a change in the process of food and for it to become more about the consumer not the business.

Hw #12

Thesis: Many of the dominant social practices in our society - practices that define a "normal" life - on further investigation turn out to involve nightmares and industrial atrocities. Argument 1: Most people aren’t informed about the nightmarish atrocities that happen behind “the kitchen.” And this is normal, so we continue to eat these foods on our plates because it is a normal social practice. Supporting Claim 1: Much of what we are uninformed about is being kept hidden by the mass production companies.

Evidence: What goes on in the feedlots

Evidence: Animals and workers are mistreated

Evidence: What is put into our food

Evidence: Over production

Supporting Claim 2: Companies do not care about the consumer; it is all about the business. Business = money.

Evidence: Organic now government owned word

Evidence: No interest in if food is healthy but in selling it

Evidence: Whole foods

Not done.. evidence is almost done

Hw # 7d

Chapter 17:

Precis: In this chapter I venture into the word vegan and why this has become a food trend and the moral/reasons people become vegetarian.

Gems: " Eating meat has become morally problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to think about it. Vegetarianism is more popular than it has ever been, and animal rights, the fringiest of fringe movements until few years ago, is rapidly finding its way into the cultural mainstream." - pg. 303

" That's not because slaughter is necessarily inhumane, but because most of us would simply rather not be reminded of exactly what meat is or what it takes to bring it to our plates." - pg. 302

Questions/Thoughts: Most people learn to see "we" eating animals as cycle of life, but some people see it as morally wrong. Who knows what the right way is? The one our ancestors ate or this new modern way of seeing foo and animals?

Chapter 18:

Precis: To understand how before existence of supermarket I needed experience another way of feeding oneself besides food shopping, the method people used long go. Hunting. With help of a friend, I was able to learn how to hunt and one day I tried out these skills. On the second outing was finally able to shoot my first pig and when I did I had a feeling, i never would've thought i would have after, happiness. Instead of guilt or disgust, I was excited that I had killed this animal. But this didn't feeling didn't last, it ended when it came time to carry its carcass and cook it.

Gems: " Nothing in my experience (with the possible exception of certain intoxicants) has prepared me for the quality of this attention." - pg. 334

" The one emotion I expected to feel but did not, inexplicably, was remorse, or even ambivalence. All that would come later, but now, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific - unambiguously happy." - pg. 353

" But I realized that here in this single picture you could actually observe this food chain in its totality, the entire circuit of energy and matter that had created the pig we were turning into meat for our meal." - pg. 362

Question/Thoughts: I enjoyed this chapter, was able to take peek in how it feels like to hunt and what goes into hunting.

Chapter 19:

Precis:Nature doesn't entirely make every plant we see as edible (i.e. chanterelle mushrooms) and throughout history we have learned what we can and cannot eat.

Gems: " Gardening is a way of being in nature steeped in assumptions of which the gardener is seldom more than vaguely aware - if at all. To work exclusively with domesticated species, for example, is bound to color your view of nature as being a fairly benign place, one that answers to human desires ( for beauty, for tastiness). " - pg. 365

" I wonder if books fail us here because the teaching transaction - this one is good to eat, that one not - is so fundamental, even primordial, that we're instinctively reluctant to trust it to any communication medium save the oldest: that is, direct personal testimony from, to put it bluntly, survivors." - pg. 372

Questions/Thoughts:

Chapter 20:

Precis: At the end of hard work of hunting, foraging and gathering, had a cooked meal surrounded by friends. Cooking and sitting at table, not necessarily the food, made it the best meal.

Gems: "Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animal and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the place and the people that produced them." - pg. 404

“Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter-this quality of sacrificed life-just before the body takes its first destructive bite.” - Pg. 405

" For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."

Questions/Thoughts: We have reached the end of the book, but I feel OK now that I know all this information how can I or people do to stop these deep dark secrets of food industry? Or as Ally put it " How do we avoid eating this shit?" Do we just accept it?

hw # 10

The viewer gets the chance to take a "peek inside the kitchen." To see where our food comes from, who produces it and how it is produced. The main point of this film was to lift the veil on what is being hidden on the farms, in the supermarket and in the fast food companies. Something which most people put little thought into even though they've been eating food fortheir entire life. Normal.

The movie provides a more real image of what's going on in slaughterhouses, whereas in the book they might describe how bad the produce is being treated but seeing with our two eyes is more impacting. The movie shows a short and sweet precis on every section Pollan went over in his book, so the book of course gives more evidence, details, and goes infinitely deeper in these subjects than in the movie. In the movie they didn't show part where he goes hunting and how connected he is to nature around him and how it's all food, found this chapter interesting aspect.

The image that remained with me after watching the movie was of the animals being alive one second and in the next are being turned into what I see all the time in the supermarket. Meat. The feeling that dominates my response on what is going on with our food is disgust, how we are sold food full of chemicals and antibiotics and there is not much we can do about it. And if we try to make a change or to inform, we'll become in debt and spend long time in court. Not even a distraught mother over her dead son could move these companies, it's all just a business.

Hw # 7c

Chapter 11:

Precis: Its Tuesday my second day on Joel's farm and today I learn how important chicken feed is, "feeds the broilers but, transformed into chicken crap, feeds the grass that feeds the cows that, as I was about to see, feed the pigs, and the laying hens." Joel seems to say that these animals do most of the work for him but from what I saw today it is more work, him and his workers work sun up to sun down while the mass production farmers only work like 5o days a year.

Gems: " It was hard to believe this hillside had ever been the gullied wreck Joel had described at dinner, and even harder to believe that farming such a damaged landscape so intensively, rather than just letting it be, could restore it to health and yield this beauty. This is not the environmentalist's standard prescription." - pg. 209

" By means of this simple management trick, Joel is able to use his cattle's waste to "grow"large quantities of high - protein chicken feed for free; he says this trims his cost of producing eggs by twenty - five cents per dozen." - pg. 211

" It's all connected. This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well." - pg. 213

" Pig happiness is simply the by - product of treating a pig as a pig rather than as " a protein machine with flaws" - flaws such as pigtails and a tendency, when emiserated, to get stressed." - pg. 219

" Its a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons." -pg. 221

Questions/ Thoughts:

How come we haven't found a way to get polyface farm to provide our food instead?

Is it because the government doesn't agree with way they farm?

If we gave these farmers more land and less debt I believe they'd be able to produce a lot more in these polyface farms.

Chapter 12:

Precis: On Wednesday it was not about " the ecstasy of life on a farm" but the day to slaughter the chickens. Unlike other farms Joel slaughters them in his very own farm not another facility. The workers became mechanical no longer felt morally troubled about killing the chickens this is why it's so easy for them to kill them than for us to watch them. In the end the customer can even chose its on chicken and out in plastic bag to ensure their chickens aren't just another processed food product. Joel saw all the chickens waste or guts or other things that are usually thrown out as treasures because unlike other farms nothing goes to waste and all have a cycle where one thing helps and leads to the other.

Gems: " Joel's reasons for wanting to do this work here himself are economic, ecological, political, ethical, and even spiritual. " The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview." he'd told me the first time we'd talked." - pg. 227

" I couldn't make out any insects in the gizzard, but its contents recapitulated the Polyface food chain: pasture on its way to becoming meat." - pg. 234

" Joel can seethe future of this one in a way I can't, its promise to transubstantiate this mass of blood and guts and feathers into a particularly rich, cakey black compost, improbably sweet - smelling stuff that, by spring, will be ready for him to spread into the pastures and turn back into grass." - pg. 238

Questions/Thoughts: Wonder if the author after experiencing all this will he continue to eat meat?

Why does the USDA see what they are doing as wrong when it is so much better than the other farms they regulate?

Wonder what Joel thought about letting chickens living in their own waste?

Chapter 13:

Precis: It is Wednesday and today comes the day when the consumers of Joel's polyface farm come, some as far as a few miles away. The buyers have the chance to connect with who and where their produce grew creating a trusting bond between consumer and producer and are more willing to pay the higher price. Joel says if we took off all subsidies the mass - produced food has, it would "level the playing field." Which in reality in a way is true the price we see in supermarket, it is not the actual price due to the government policies.

Gems: " After that, it didn't surprise me to read that the typical item of food on an Americans plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater." - pg. 239

" Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?" - Joel pg. 240

"This is the chicken I remember from my childhood. It actually tastes like chicken." - pg. 242

" One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren't as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?" - pg. 261

Questions/Thoughts:

These people who have access to a polyface are lucky i believe they can meet and see where their chickens are grown letting them know their food is safe.

Will we one day no longer buy from mass- produced but instead from these type of farms? or will it just never happen?

Chapter 14:

Precis: I decide to try this food I've watch grow and be killed in front of my eyes, at first felt a little queasy at thought of me being able to eat it. But I cooked a dinner for two friends from nearby buying two chickens, eggs and corn from Joel's farm to make dinner. ( Although he gave it to me free as a gift.) With a good conversation, surrounded my friendly people and good and healthy food.

Gems: " The anthropologist Claude Levi - Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked - nature into culture." - pg. 264

" Willie agreed there was something neat about the alchemy involved, how a plant could transform chicken crap into something as sweet and tasty and golden as an ear of corn." - pg. 265

" When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too." - pg. 271

" I closed my eyes and suddenly there they were: Joel's hens, marching down the gangplank from out of their Eggmobile, fanning out across the early morning pasture, there in the grass where this sublime bite began." - pg. 273

Questions/Thoughts:

When he described what this food tasted like, he to me seemed to speak honestly of what the chicken and eggs tasted like and that it didn't taste out of this world but the chicken did taste more chickeny and the eggs had a "muscle tone."

My question of if the author would ever eat chicken after having seen the farms and foods process to his own plate was answered in this chapter, he did. He came off as proud and happy to be eating these foods form Joel's farm.

Chapter 15:

Precis: I've decided to do the thing that will connect me with my food more than going to supermarket or even a farm could ever. Become a hunter gatherer. After finding someone who knew this style of living. Started with easier part the gathering, after recognizing a couple plants found a wild mushroom that matched what chanterelle mushroom is but he faced the decision to eat it or not. The omnivore's dilemma.

Gems: " My mother had inculcated a fear of fungi in me that put picking a wild mushroom in the same class of certain - death behaviors as touching downed power lines or climbing into the cars of strangers proffering candy." - pg. 278

" Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter - gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were more robust and long- lived than agriculturists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors." - pg. 279

" Some very basic things: about the ties between us and the species (and natural systems) we depend upon; about how we decide what in nature is good to eat and what is not; and about how the human body fits into the food chain, not only as an eater but as hunter and yes, a killer of other creautures. " - pg. 281

Questions/Thoughts:

The fact that the hunter gathers were healthier than we are today but we can't just go back to this way of living because there is not enough wild game for everyone to eat.

This way of livng brings a new view of what you see around you at least in the woods because it all has potential as a source of food.

Chapter 16:

Precis: The omnivore's dilemma is what one as humans face every day in our lives and due to the flavors we taste, disgust, sweetness, bitterness are some of what helps us decide what to eat and what not to eat. In America it is even harder to decide because of the types of foods many of the immigrants who come bring and the constant fads and diets we have. We also have certain ways to eat the food like raw fish with wasabi to minimize danger of eating. Cooking led to another way of eating to bringing more energy to us humans.

Gems: " The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things of nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own." - pg. 287

Questions/Thoughts:Its interesting to know how much goes into the decision we make every day on what to eat, how other animals like rat or koala have their own ways of deciding what to eat.

We rely on others to know what to eat and not to but why do we when we are still eating things that may be food we shouldn't?

Hw # 9 - Freakonomics

A tool the protagonists in "Freakonomics" used were conducting experiments to find evidence to determine the truth. An example of this was when they conducted one in a school by giving high school students money as an incentive to get their grades up. But in the end the reality was many didn't, only 5-7% had a change in their grades. Another tool was asking questions by surveying people, when they talked about the baby names they had several moments in film where they showed people being asked questions and what they thought about names. Giving them more evidence for the truth. Last tool I saw they used was evaluating the research, in the one about sumo wrestlers and how it seemed tobe the purest of sports they still had cheating. So they evaluated the numbers the sumo wrestlers would have in many matches to see a common occurence. And it seemed that those who were already assured to next round would let a companion who just needed one more win would let them.

I agree that Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the hidden – in – plain – sight” weirdness of dominant social practices because they show evidence and real – life situations that let people know the “truth” of things. Like how names don’t change who you are or become, but where you grow up and your economic class does. Their example was a girl named Temptress who didn’t act the way she did because of her name but because of where she grew up. In a poor neighborhood and single mom household. Another example was the two kids named winner and loser, and loser ended being the actual winner graduating college and having the good life, while winner was a convict and in jail. Showing that your name won’t determine whether you’ll become a screw up or successful in life. I understood that it could affect you in life as in more/less job opportunity but can’t affect your life in a huge way.

These are things most may not know even though it seems obvious especially for those out there who hire baby name specialists just so their child won’t be a failure. This reminded me of my current math class and how sometimes the truth is not as obvious as we think, and an example was if there are more colored people jail, doesn't that make a colored person more likely to be a criminal? Well we learned using logic that this wasn't true it didn't actually make them any more likely to be a criminal than any other person. But cops still stop colored people more than any Caucasians. Weird. We could possibly conduct an experiment we think answer would be obvious to see if it actually is, like determine whether it is true those who eat meat are the ones more obese than those who don't? Maybe the answer won't be as obvious as we think.

Hw # 7b

Chapter 6:

Précis: Comparing 1820 to modern day America, drinking half a pint of whiskey every day was normal then. And today eating huge portions is also seen as normal due to the serving size some genius invented in order to sell more, leading to the rise in obesity. Another reason is that the cost is these foods are cheap because of the cost per calories. And corn is the cheapest energy on the market so of course we end up eating a lot of it in our diet. Especially with the huge portions being served to us in processed foods.

Gems: "It turns out the price of a calorie of sugar or fat plummeted since the 1970s. One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale you look is that the industrial food chain has made energy - dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, which measured in terms cost per calories." - pg. 107

"While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the market will continue to be the unhealthiest." - pg. 108

"Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise." - pg. 106

Questions/Thoughts:

Why is the President, the very own government letting us eat these cheap calories when it is unhealthy for us?

I believe that not allowing fast food restaurants to super size foods would help decrease obesity, because it is what led to the increase of obesity.

Chapter 7:

Précis: Family day at McDonalds I inspect the number of corn we intake in a single meal even include our transportation and the amount would fill and overflow the back trunk of my car of kernels. But the question is whether or not so much corn intake is really as bad as we think. The idea of McDonalds also has huge impact on why we eat it; to me it brought memories of my childhood and the smell brought comfort. But these cheap calories seem to have a consequence because in long run it can cost more to one becoming obese or get heart disease later on in life.

Gems: " The myriad streams of commodity corn, after being variously processed and turned into meat, converge in all sorts of different meals I might eaten, at KFC, or Pizza Hut or Apple bee's, or prepared myself from ingredients bought at supermarket. Industrial meals are all around us, after all; they make up the food chain from which most of us eat most of the time. " - Pg. 109

"I loved everything about fast food: the individual crunchy all wrapped up like presents; the familiar meaty perfume of the French fries filling the car; and the pleasingly sequenced bite into a burger - the soft, sweet roll, the crunchy pickle, the savory moistness of the meat." - pg. 111

" No I could not taste the feed corn or the petroleum or the antibiotics or the hormones - or the feedlot manure. Yet awhile " A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts" did not enumerate these facts, they too have gone into the making of this hamburger, are part of its natural history." - pg. 114- 115

Questions/Thoughts: The numbers given of how much corn we intake is huge compared of what one thought of before.

These cheap calories have a cause and effect I believe, they may be cheaper for those in low economic class but these people can later pay a higher price of becoming obese or having heart disease later on.

Chapter 8:

Précis: Visiting a Polyface farm and doing manual work the visual picture of the happy farmer and the leisure work disappears in my mind. After spending a day with Salatin I learn how he believes he is not a chicken farmer or cattle rancher but a grass farmer! To him and his farm the most important part is the grass because there everything else connects, the animals, their food and in the end the animals we eat. He believes they are better than the organic farms to him organic is just something else government owns. While unlike his farm it is just for him and his community, none of it can be exported. Soon I’ll find out whether this is true or not...

Gems: " Grass," so understood, is the foundation of the intricate food chain Salatin has assembled at Polyface, where a half dozen different animal species are raised together in an intensive rotational dance on the theme of symbiosis. Salatin is the choreographer and the grasses are verdurous stage; the dance has made Polyface one of the most productive and influential alternative farms in America." - pg. 126

" A great many animals, too, are drawn to grass, which partly accounts for our own deep attraction to it: We come here to eat the animals that ate the grass that we (lacking rumuns) can't eat ourselves. " All Flesh is Grass." - pg. 127

" We never called ourselves organic - we call ourselves 'beyond organic.' Why dumb down to a lesser level than we are?" - pg. 132

"A ten- thousand - bird shed that stinks to high heaven or a new paddock of fresh green grass every day? Now which chicken shall we call 'organic'? I'm afraid you'll have to ask the government, because now they own the word." - pg. 132

Questions/Thoughts: The author says he will investigate whether this farmer was telling the truth that this farm is better than organic farm. Wonder if it is? And if it is why then is organic seen so highly?

Chapter 9:

Precis

Gems: "In several corners of the store I was actually forced to choose between subtly competing stories. For example, some of the organic milk in the milk case was " ultrapasteurized," an extra processing step that was presented as a boon to the consumer, since it extends shelf life. But then another, more local dairy boosted about the fact they had said no to ultrapastueurization, implying that their product was fresher, less processed, and therefore more organic. This was the dairy that talked about cows living free from distress, something I was beginning to feel a bit of myself by this point." - Pg. 135

" The organic movement , as itwas once called, has come a remarkably long way in the last thirty years, to the pointwhere it now looks considerably less like a movement than a big business." - Pg. 138

Questions/Thoughts: Happy cow = real good steak

How with so many choices in Supermarket like Whole Foods can one make right decision in what to buy?

Chapter 10:

Precis:

Gems:" Curiously, we seem to like grass less for what it is than for what it isn't - the forest, I mean - and yet we're much more likely to identify with a tree than a blade of grass." - pg. 184

" Grass farmers grow animals - for meat, eggs, milk, and wool - but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat." - pg. 188

" Joel pulled a single blade of orchard grass, showing me exactly where a cow had sheared it the week before, and pointing out the finger of fresh green growth that had emerged from the cut in the days since. " - (talking about cows grazing) - pg. 190

Questions/Thoughts:

Grass for a farm is like what corn is for us essential, ( well for us it has become) and this chapter really helped me understand why the farmer called himself a grass famrerand learn a little about /joel's past of how he comes from generations of farmers and how his father's dream and hard work was taken away. Would this be why he doesn't follow government so this one day won't happen to him?