hw # 18

My experience this holiday fits into both "anti - body" and "body - centered practices, because at first the minute our guests walked through the door we hug and kiss on cheek due to having hispanic background which is more touchy feely than in the American culture, so we pay more attention to each other's body movements. Then when it came time to eat it became anti - body ( although not as anti - body like in school) but we still sat very still and listened to each other say what they were thankful for and say grace. At Thanksgiving in my family the food pleasure supplement did dominate the event, because most of what we did was sit there and eat as a family, all 7 of us on one table and talk about how good the turkey and sweet potatoes were, even my sister in law's dog joined us eating turkey as well under the table. Which makes me wonder for other animals like dogs isn't most of their life body - centered?

A tradition we have after we've "stuffed" ourselves we watch TV, usually the specials that are on like the Beyonce Special. So this is an Anti - Body practice we have because we sit on couch ignoring our bodies and just concentrating on the TV screen for the rest of the night. Except when we say goodbye again. But this time when the Beyonce Special ended I decided to take my sister- in law's dog for a walk, so now I was paying attention to my body and the dog's ( as well as protecting it from other dogs) after leaving my body for an hour.

The nutritiousness of the meal was definitely huge for my family dinner, the first thing my mother commented was that turkey compared to other meats isn't as bad for us. And she made sure we all had our huge share of veggies, a side of fresh homemade sweet potatoes my father made, and with only a piece of turkey. Health was a topic that was brought up at the table because my brother was sick so we started talking about what medicine he should take. Shoud he take Dimatap or DayQui? Or something natural? Like his wife suggested a ginger tea with raisins which helped her feel better when she had a cold. There also were empty chairs which should have been filled by my sister-in law's parents but because of her dad's condition (diabetes) they were back in Domincan Republic so he would not have to deal with winter in NY. And the main reason he had come to NY was because unfortunately he had a stroke, so he had come to New York to get check up and medicine here then go back to DR but he promised to come back. So during dinner we asked questions on how they were and his health for politeness and our general care. So as you can see my Thanksgiving dinner had both of the anti - body practices and "body - centered" practices that occurred through out the night.

hw # 17

My experience with illness is not much, I've seen my little brother get a cold and everyone else I know but experiencing some one who has been seriously ill I have not. Dying unfortunately I have had experience with, I had a class mate die in front me ( honest truth not trying to sound melodramatic) in middle school. At first the feelings I felt were of confusion, why did he collapse when he seemed so healthy? It kinda hits you how quickly a person can go from seeming so alive at one moment and the next be dead. And the thoughts one has after, of the dead can be "was it my fault this happened? Or why couldn't I have done anything to save him/her?" and even feelings of pain, loss, regret come to mind as well.

The way I've been taught to see dying is that if he/she was a good person and followed god's path, he/she would join him in his kingdom, if not he/she would go to hell. My entire life I've been brought up to believe this due to my family's religion. Illness I was taught was something that one should avoid by keeping healthy and choosing the correct life style. It is also something that must not to be avoided and should be treated right away. But for my family, the medicine doctors prescribe aren't the always the answer to an illness because they can fix your problem but can cause another in a long run. So my grandparents and mother are huge believers of homeopathic medicine, because it is natural and will still treat the problem but without causing any other.

A social norm of illness and dying is to always rush a person who is ill or dying to a hospital to be cured or to find them a cure. The idea of a hospital brings several images to my mind: blue uniforms, hospital beds, seat right next to bedside, curtain, and the smell of plastic and fear. Hospital; Someone being born in a hospital at the same time that someone is dying is what comes to mind when I see the word. How life and death can all occur under the same roof. A second social norm is to visit the sick and accompany them through their pain because you know one day you will have the same fate. Another social norm is to shrink away from the idea death, to avoid the thought and topic, so we occupy our mind on everything else and try to forget. Last social norm I can think of at the moment as I mentioned before is to use medicine as the answer of many illnesses and research to find one for those that are still incurable.

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?