HW 8- Re-do

 As said in my previous homework number 8 post, my first attempt at growing sprouts failed.

This time; I got a bit luckier. I started growing the sprouts just under a week ago; Monday night (it is now Sunday night).

I started off by removing the sprouts onto a paper towel. 

Then I put them into a sifter and rinsed them in the sink.

The last step was to towel dry them.

I decided to try some; they were quite spicy. I actually called my mom in to the kitchen and asked her to eat one, her reaction was, "wow that's got a kick...now what are you going to do with them?" That was a good question seeing as I already had dinner and I personally don't think that black beans really go with sprouts. I did some really fast research in my mom's handy-dandy vegetarian cookbook/guide and decided to keep them in the fridge in a plastic baggie. 


The experience wasn't that strange; almost every year in elementary school we'd have to put a bean in a plastic baggie with a wet paper towel and see watch what happened over a span of a week or so. That was the extent of my elementary plant-growing life, but it kind of felt the same as this experience. Instead of being excited that " I was making my own food" I was more focused on getting some sort of product so I could do the homework and be done. I think if I grew sprouts out of free will rather than as an assignment I would be more into it.

HW 9 - Freakonomics Response

1. What intellectual moves serve as the basis of "Freakonomics"? Just as Allen Iverson relied on his crossover dribble to beat bigger and stronger defenders, intellectuals such as the protagonists in "Freakonomics" have a "tool box" of particular ways of looking at the world: figuring out topics, asking questions, finding evidence, and evaluating truth. Please describe the 3-5 "tools" that the film repeatedly shows in use, with an example of a moment from the film for each one.

 

The goal of a documentary is generally to spread knowledge to it's audience. But what qualifies a film to be a "documentary"? The tools of the documentary trade; data, experts, and intriguing visuals. Throughout the entire film the audience is thrown numbers, charts, graphs and statistics. One part of the movie focuses on names. More specifically, how names effect the future of a baby. The audience was given an expert (a professor who had done a study on baby names/race and the effect on their future) who narrated visuals by using data. One example is when the audience is shown two boys; one is black one is white. The boys are standing in front of a nice house; the narrator tells us that this is the white boy's house. A new house shows up, it's smaller, dirtier, and uglier; it's the black boy's house. Immediately so much data is thrown at you by this man's voice behind these two boys in front of houses your head begins to spin. He starts bringing up statistics, "In the black boy's neighborhood there is a higher percentage of single-mothers", etcetera. We learn that names don't necessarily plan out the child's future but that it's more of a matter of where they're from. In each of the sections there is always an expert who relays data to a most-likely after-effected* visual.

*please don't kill me for using wikipedia, it does give a pretty good description

 

3. What sources of evidence do the Freakonomics authors most rely on? Why is this innovative? 

 

The Freakonomics filmakers seem to rely on the authors quite a bit for evidence in this film. While each section of the movie had other experts to give us our data and statistics and narrate our visuals, a lot of the talking seemed to come from the authors. I think that it's an interesting approach. Steven Levitt does have certain qualifications to be considered a source seeing as he is an economist and Stephen Dubner has been writing books and articles for quite some time and has been exposed to many topics. I don't really think it's terribly innovative, I just think it's a good way of putting more "expertise" into the film.

Response:

Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices.

I do think that Freakonomics makes me think a little harder about social practices but I think that people are already aware of certain things. Example; the sumo wrestling. People knew that the cheating was going on; but they didn't face it. There's things that I do, my friends do, and other people around me do, and I question those actions; but I never fight it or dig deeper. I feel as though the hidden in plain sight "weirdness" is actually quite normal. People just don't want to face the "weirdness" (meaning normality) of it all.

Here in the U.S. we've had a number of documentarys/informative films come out about our food. "Food Inc.", "Supersize me" and "King Corn" just to name a few.  For some, these films have changed their lives; they started to look at their plate and instead of wondering they actually changed what they saw. But for some others they looked at the plate, wondered, and dug in.

HW 8 - Growing Our Own Food

The first time I tried in school to grow sprouts failed, I got a small little ball of sprouts that were probably no good. I was away for the long weekend and couldn't take care of a new batch so I started on Monday when I got home. I can't really write about the entire experience of growing sprouts right now, but I can talk about the experience of growing my own food.

When I was much younger my mother joined our Co-op's garden. We got lucky and our patch partner only likes to plant in one corner so we have the rest of the patch to ourselves. I used to really like gardening; getting muddy and playing with the hoses. There was even a "club" that I made with one of my friends where we sat under a tree and collected sap and herbs and mashed them up with rocks. I would get really excited whenever spring rolled around.
Each year my mom likes to try one or two new plants. I would always choose a new flower to try and she would always choose a new vegetable. Every spring/summer we always have snow or snap peas growing along with mint, rosemary, oregano, basil, usually some lemon balm, and tomatoes. We like to make the patch colorful with some marigolds (they tend to come back each year on their own). And yes, we do actually eat the vegetables and herbs that we grow.
Sometimes growing our own food can be frustrating. There have been some seasons where we plant something new and it never shows up; a waste of space and time. Because the season in which we can harvest our vegetables is so short, we like to maximize our space and we want plants that will give us something useful pretty fast.

I do enjoy going out to the garden every once in a while and checking on the patch or reading on one of the picnic benches, but I'm not as enthusiastic about growing plants. I do however enjoy the outcome; one of my favorite things to eat is fresh basil, it's one of those things that tastes just "OK" when it's not fresh, but it full of flavor and color when it's fresh from the patch.

HW 7b

Chapter 6
Precis: Corn has made America into a "Fat Republic". America was the "Alcoholic Republic" around the 1820s; this name comes from corn whiskey; which was drank by the average American of the time. The alcoholic republic and the fat republic are nearly parallel in their patterns. Corn becomes cheap; making it's demand go up as well as production, which leaves us with excess corn. What do we do with the corn? We make it into something. During the 1800s, it was distilled into corn whiskey; it was cheap to make and cheap to buy; currently, corn is processed into many different forms; the major form being high fructose corn syrup; an ingredient found in the majority of processed foods.

Gems:
Response: I feel like the main idea of this chapter was money. The entire time I was reading I had the song from Cabaret stuck in my head, "Money makes the world go round, world go round, world go round".


Chapter 7
Precis: The industrial food chain ends with fast food. Fast food places have "healthy" items on their menus like salads to invite the on the go "health-conscious" mother into their humble abode with their child craving chicken nuggets. There are 38 ingredients in chicken Mcnuggets, which lead to a lawsuit against McDonald's by some obese teenagers in NY. This led to McDonald's making their nutrition facts available in a pamphlet. out of the 38 ingredients, 13 can come from corn. Fast food is not meant to be savory; it is meant to fill you up; fast.

Gems:
Response: I stopped eating fast-food around 6th grade; at one point I thought I'd be rebellious and not even go into places like McDonald's and Wendy's. I have since then discovered that one friend buying a ton of french fries and a drink provides a warm, smelly place to stay in the winter when one doesn't want to go home. I actually can't stand the smell of fast food. I've kind of gotten over it, but sometimes I'll pass a McDonalds and I gag. I can't explain it.



Chapter 8
Precis: Naylor Farm Vs. Polyface Farm; Joel Salatin runs Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley, which is also a pastoral farm. He has created a food chain; everything gets used. By the end of the season he will have "25,000 pounds of beeg, 50,000 pounds of pork, 12,000 broilers, 800 turkeys, 500 rabbits, and 30,000 dozen eggs"(Pollan 126). Grass is the most important part of his farm. The Naylor Farm is a near opposite. One difference is the industrial farm caters to the global market whereas a pastoral farm generally sells at a local market. Salatin has a big problem with "organic" food, "I would much rather use my money to keep my neighborhood productive and healthy than export my dollars five hundred miles away to get 'pure product' that's really coated in diesel fuel" (Pollan, 132). In order for "organic" foods to make it into America's food markets, there had to be some exceptions and changes to the idea of "organic". 
Gems:
Response: I've always been unsure about organic products, I've heard little bits and pieces here and there. I've heard that as long as a product contains something like 90% organic products it can be labeled as organic. I've also heard that organic isn't necessarily healthier, so I've decided that I'm going to look that up.

Chapter 9
Precis:
Gems:
Response:

Chapter 10
Precis:
Gems:
Response:

HW 7 - Reading Response Monday

I currently am reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

Chapter 1
Precis: How corn is a staple in our current diet. It feeds the animals that we eat and can be processed into other foods. Corn is a C-4 plant; it creates 4 carbon atom through photosynthesis while most other plants only make 3. Americans completely rely on corn. The American food chain has changed with the hybridization of corn.
Gems:
Response: I'm really understanding how big of a resource corn is to America; we use it for practically everything. I'm grasping the concepts of our food chain/system.

Chapter 2
Precis: Corn fields is where our food generally comes from. Planting rotation between soybeans and corn to keep up production. Some areas have lost a lot of their populations because of the spread of planting. Corn is slowly becoming more expensive but there is such a large population of the corn that we have to do something with it.
Gems:
Response: Corn, corn, and more CORN. I knew some of this stuff about corn before but I never thought it was possible to see the word corn on a piece of paper so many times. I do find the book a bit of a slow read; but I think that with time I'll learn to enjoy it more.

Chapter 3
Precis: Grain elevators; tall concrete structures help to move corn to railroad cars in order to transport it.  The government basically runs the farms; they are one of the main money sources for farmers, they want to keep production high but prices low.
Gems:
Response: This was a fast chapter but some parts I had to re-read. Nothing extreme stood out to me in this chapter; maybe if I re-read.

HW 6 - Food Diary

One of my favorite places to get food during lunch is a pasta/cheese store which I shall not be naming for privacy concerns. When I go to said pasta/cheese store I will either get the penne auora or sundried tomato, basil and mozzarella sandwich. I went with option number 2. After eating, Bianca and I went down to CVS. I decided not to get anything but Bianca decided to get a Crunch bar. I had a couple of pieces of that.

Afterschool, I decided to go for a walk with Kady in Madison Square Park. Before going to the park we stopped at a food truck. I've never gotten anything from a food truck; unless you count the endless number of ice cream trucks that spread over the city. The food truck we happened upon was The Kelvin Slushie Truck, which Kady's mom had tried out and said was really good. Kady got a ginger mint slushie and I got a citrus pear slushie

When I got home I was a little hungry so I had some dried cranberries; I'm not really sure how many, and a bottle of water (our current tap water is bad). I was going to have some leftover orzo for dinner because my mom and dad were out for the night, but I passed out pretty early (6 or 7). And no, I didn't eat anything before lunch; breakfast is rarely a part of my day.

Today, I had no school so I ate at my internship. Even though I had time this morning for breakfast I really wasn't hungry so I had nothing. At my internship I order my food whenever I come in. The company has an account on Seamless Web which allows everyone working there to order food. My internship gives me 10 dollars to spend on food; including tip and tax. Each day there are three different places I can choose from. Today's choices were Cuban, Deli, and Burgers. I decided to get the "Spinach Rollie". The wrap was made up of a whole wheat wrap, sauteed spinach and mushrooms, accompanied with avocado, honey Dijon mustard, and tomato paste. I was a little skeptic on the Dijon+tomato paste combination but it was the perfect combination of sweet and tangy. The internship has 2 kitchens, stocked full with snacks and drinks so I grabbed a peach Snapple iced tea and ate lunch.

I didn't have anything else at internship (although there were some really yummy looking cupcakes left over after a client had left). When I got home my mom made spaghetti with steamed carrots, brussel sprouts and sauteed peppers. I'm not a fan of brussel sprouts so I decided to have some plain snap peas instead.  For snack after dinner I had some dried cranberries (one of my favorite snacks) and because I wasn't completely full from dinner I cooked a frozen broccoli/spinach/potato blintz. I also had a 100% juice pack left over from this summer when I had to bring bagged lunch every day to work and my parents would put one in the bag for me.

I didn't really keep track of my calories for the days; I can probably do some calculations pretty soon.