Final Post

For me, I came into the class as someone who doesn't really think about what they eat.  I mean, I knew what I was eating, and knew it wasn't necessarily good for me, but i didn't ever pay any mind to it and instead went along just choosing whatever I thought would taste good.  Which was usually fairly unhealthy.  I have learned how to assess what I eat, and also how much food can say about someone else.  The writing I have done in this course has contributed greatly to my understanding of food cultures.  All the research I've done to write the papers I've written has lead me to be much more well-informed when it comes to food. I think that in the future my eating habits will continue to evolve, and I'll still refer back to habits I developed as a result of being in this class.

How I eat.

For me, I generally decide what to eat based on what my options are.  I like to feel good about my eating choices, so I try to include some greens and other vegetables in most of my meals.  I go to the dining hall and grab whatever the entree is that they are serving, but often the dish with vegetables isnt something i find particularly appetizing, so I'll go to the salad bar and add some raw carrots or lettuce to whatever it is that I am eating.  I never drink soda anymore, I stick to water, verve, and gatorade.  I think the values that ought to inform my food choices are flavor, satisfaction, and guilt.  I feel guilty eating lots of greasy food, so I try to cut down, but I wont lie and say that if I had my way I wouldn't be eating greasy food at every meal.  The flavor and satisfaction is there, but the knowledge that what I may be doing to my body is so overwhelmingly alarming, that I can't consume that kind of food all the time in good conscience.

SE5 - The Importance of Cheerios

The Importance of Cheerios

            I personally love breakfast.  The thought of juicy bacon and eggs with a grapefruit on the side is absolutely mouth-watering to me.  Throughout my high school career, I made breakfast a priority.  I always wound up being the first person I knew to be awake every morning because I would leave myself at least an hour and a half to shower, eat breakfast, and then get to school.  I even would be late for school if it meant not having to compromise my coveted breakfast hours.  Kids called me crazy, asking why I didn’t just sleep in or get to class on time and then eat a lot at lunch.  When you woke up today were you late for school?  If so, this could have prompted you to skip breakfast and rush out the door, however, thanks to a study conducted by students at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1996-1999, I have accredited research to say that this may not be the smartest idea. 

            Their study was preformed to observe the same group of individual adolescents over three years.  They asked each participant each year how often they ate breakfast, how well they did in school, and how much exercise they got.  What they found was very interesting to me.  The overarching conclusion to their expansive study was that adolescents who generally ate breakfast every day happened to have a much more healthy BMI (body mass index, calculated from weight and height) than those who frequently skipped breakfast.  As it turns out, adolescents who were eating breakfast every day also had more energy throughout the day, enabling them to participate in getting more exercise, doing more schoolwork effectively, and using less of their time playing video games and computer games.  The students who were of a healthy weight at the start of the study, and each year reported frequently skipping breakfast actually became more overweight as the years went on.  They also reported less physical exercise and as a whole reported having more trouble with their school work.  Sounds like breakfast may be more important than even I anticipated. 

            So what should most people take away from this?  Well, although this study was done only on adolescents, research indicates that both behavioral patterns and weight patterns that occur in adolescent years are known to carry over into adult life and hold true for most adults as well.  The study states as a way of justifying their own research, that although it wasn’t their research that concluded this, that teen eating habits and the consequences of those eating habits are likely to remain prominent throughout adulthood as well. 

            Some people don’t eat breakfast because they say they don’t have time.  I say no way.  I can eat a bowl of cereal with milk in three minutes flat.  Even though a bowl of cereal may not look like much, “cereal intake (hot and cold, per calorie and per cost) may provide a healthy breakfast.” (Niklas)  So stop telling yourself you don’t have time for breakfast.  Make time.  Breakfast food is delicious, relatively healthy, and can give you that boost of energy you’re looking for when you stop at Starbucks and fill yourself with the artificial energy that we call caffeine.  I never miss breakfast no matter what, and I have never once felt like I needed a cup of coffee.  Instead, I do fairly frequently wake up feeling starving and sluggish until I get at least my daily fix of cereal.

Berkley, CS, HRH Rockett, MW Gillman, AE Field, and GA Colditz. "Longitudinal Study of Skipping Breakfast and Weight Change in Adolescents." International Journal of Obesity 27 (2003): 1258-266. Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group. Web. 14 May 2013. <http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v27/n10/full/0802402a.html>.

Nicklas TA, McQuarrie A, Fastnaught C, O’Neil CE. Efficiency of breakfast consumption patterns of ninth graders: nutrient-to-cost comparisons. J Am Diet Assoc 2002; 102: 226–233.

It seems like a lot of us, including myself, like to add french fries to their meals.  I know that french fries are considered one of the least healthy foods you can ingest, due to the fact that they are essentially deep fried starch.  I noticed the lack of consistency in the amount of meals people ate.  The less meals someone ate, usually that person had larger meals in general.

Food Journal

FOOD JOURNAL BEGINNING WITH DINNER ON THURSDAY, MAY 9^TH, 2013:

·      On my way back from picking my friend up from the aiport, we just stopped at village inn.  I ate 3 pancakes, 3 scrambled eggs, hash browns, 4 strips of bacon, and a large orange juice.

·      Friday morning: just ate scrambled eggs, some hash browns, a bowl of cocoa krispies, and two glasses of water.

·      At “lunch” I had a glass of Gatorade, and a hamburger with fries. 

·      For dinner I ate a breaded pollock square, French fries, a small salad, and also rotisserie chicken with mac and cheese and mashed potatoes from nagle.

·      At around 1:30 AM on Saturday (late Friday night), I went to jerusalems and ate the beef shawarma plate.

·      Saturday: this morning I had two bowls of Cocoa Krispies again and also had two glasses of Gatorade, scrambled eggs, two chocolate chip pancakes, a very small waffle (eggo size, not Belgian waffle), a half of a grapefruit, and a little bit of vanilla yogurt.

·      Drank a sanpellegrino (lemon) at 12:15 PM

·      At lunchtime I got a turkey burger with lettuce on it, French fries, a bowl of applesauce, and a slice of cheese pizza.

·      Drank another sanpellegrino at 6:30 PM

·      For dinner, I just had some cheese ravioli, French fries, a salad, and two cans of Verve to drink.

·      Breakfast was simple, lots and lots of bacon, a little bit of scrambled eggs, and a medium sized helping of hash browns, with two full cups of Gatorade. 

·      Drank two waterbottles full of Gatorade throughout my three soccer games. 

·      Ate Broccoli, Mac And Cheese, a cup of water.

·      Drank a waterbottle full of water at my Acapella group’s rehearsal from 7-9

·      Snacked on a bag of pirates booty at around 11pm tonight.

Maple Syrup

Earlier today, I woke up craving something filling.  I was starving.  I went to the dining hall and did what many Centennial Halls residents do: I made a Belgian waffle in the waffle maker and drizzled maple syrup all over it.  Now although I know that the syrup we use at halls is probably just flavored corn syrup, it got me thinking back to my days in New England where we only had the best in Vermont, Grade A amber maple syrup.  I wondered how the industry worked.  Yes, I, just like all who grew up in that area, went on one or two field trips to a maple syrup processing “sugar house” in the woods, but I still don’t have a true grasp of how it gets from the tree to my waffle.  So I did some research.

            Prior to the 1950s, the United States was responsible for about 80 percent of worldwide syrup production.  Presently, it only accounts for about 20 percent, with New England producing 75% of all United States-made syrup (Rock).  Due to climate change, the ideal climate for harvesting maple syrup that once occupied the northeast United States has now shifted to Quebec and other parts of Canada (Belluck).  Quebec itself now accounts for about 75% of  worldwide maple syrup production due to this climate change (USDA).  All this is interesting, but I was also interested in finding out exactly how it is made.

            Maple syrup can only be harvested in late winter, early spring temperatures when temperatures are in the low 40’s during the day but go back to the 20’s at night.  Syrup season only lasts about a month spanning from late February to early April.  Harvesting is fairly simple; a spile (an iron spigot that allows flowing) is inserted into a matured tree that feeds into a bucket which hangs on the tree and collects raw sap.  The buckets fill up, drop by drop, until enough has been collected to start filtering and processing. 

            Anywhere from 35 to 50 gallons of sap are needed to yield just one gallon of finished product.  To get from sap to product, the sap undergoes a process inside a “sugar house”, the common name for maple syrup processing shacks.  First, syrup is pre-heated up to a near boiling temperature before being put in a boiling pan where much of the water is boiled off.  As the water evaporates, the sugar remains and becomes grainy in the syrup.  Once the grainy sugar has been filtered out, it is packaged and sent to supermarkets for sale.(BWF)

            One thing I found particularly interesting is that it appears that maple syrup is one of the food products that still doesn’t rely on big processing plants to sustain its industry.  Most “real” maple syrup is produced by small operations across Quebec and New England.  From what I’ve seen in my own visits to maple syrup sugar houses, they are often family run operations where the larger ones hire some employees.  For the most part however, they are small farms where everyone profits from the sales of the syrup rather than a CEO profiting and then assigning salaries.  This was interesting to me because it seems like this way of farming is becoming old fashioned and we get so wrapped up in efficiency that large scale operations and processing plants get put in place for many other nationally distributed products.  This is a great way to keep small businesses functioning and I hope that we don’t see maple syrup production fall into the clutches of the corporate world.

Maple Syrup. United States Department of Agriculture. September 2005. p. 12. Retrieved May 5^th, 2013

"How Real Maple Syrup Is Made." RealMapleSyrup.com - How Is Maple Syrup Made? Balsam Woods Farm, 2012. Web. 04 May 2013. <http://www.realmaplesyrup.com/how.html>.

Rock, Barrett, and Shannon Spencer. "The Maple Sugar Industry." Cara.psu.edu. Consortium for Atlantic Regional Assessment at Penn State University, 2001. Web. 04 May 2013. <http://www.cara.psu.edu/about/publications/Maple_syrup.pdf>.

Belluck, Pam. "Warm Winters Upset Rhythms Of Maple Sugar." The New York Times. The New York Times, 03 Mar. 2007. Web. 05 May 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/us/03maple.html>.

Commercial Food

The three articles we read are all about different things, however they all serve to explain the same overarching problem.  We simply care more about cost than we do about anything else with regards to food.  In the article about tomatoes, it is explained chillingly the awful conditions the workers have to deal with so that we can get our tomatoes as cheaply as possible at anytime of the year.  What was very startling to me was learning that they are artificially ripened.  Todays tomatoes, possibly in connection to the artificial ripening, contain only a fraction of the nutrients a tomato sixty years ago would have had. 

         An Animal’s Place talks about not just how animals are brought from the factories to the dinner plates, but the very ethics behind eating these animals in the first place.  One of the main points it makes is that just because animals aren’t humans, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be treated with the same respect and kindness that we would treat the everyday human.

         Cook, in his article Fowl Trouble, is much more factual and provides good information about how awful it is for humans working in a chicken plant.  He makes the point that employees can very easily catch infection, get carpel tunnel, amongst other things. 

         All in all, these articles are simply a cry for reform in the way we consume food.  They all seek to show how our obsession with cheap-ness leads to food being produced