HW 18

The holiday Thanksgiving has gone form a anti-body practice of giving thanks for what you have and are given to a body–centered practice that is centered around eating till you are to full to move. On this holiday groups of people come together to be with one another and bring large amounts of food that could feed multiple families. This is the modern practice of this holiday. There is no meaning to the holiday now. People look to the holiday as a time to get together and see the people they love. But do they really love the people or the body-centered practice of the holiday.

At my families Thanksgiving we had enormous dishes full of the festive food that could never be finished. But not only the normal the enormous dishes of festive food were there, part of my family who are vegetarians walked in and with more huge dishes to share with everyone. There was double the food this year with the same number of people as every other people.

The after the meal of “thanks” in my family it comes down to the talk. Everyone in my family comes to the family room of where ever we are and sits down to talks. People notice who’s missing at first from the people with spouses not sitting next to them, like my late grandfather Sam Gordon and my late uncle Jim Cotter. People also notice when my grandma is drunk because after my grandfather died she fell in love with gin. My family could be a bunch of bad politicians after the awkwardness. The talk always starts out about the kids in the family and how school is. Then on to the way the D.O.E run and the latest governmental issue till it gets heated and again it gets very awkward. Till my dad who does not talk much in these conversations because its my moms family and he rather not get involved in it crakes a lame joke which they think is funny. I sit there staring in space and texting. I always look at my dad around eight and say lets go because I’m not having fun. No one is my age and no one wants to talk about anything but my school life and collage. It feels like I’m having the same conversation a thousand times. My family follows their cultural practice which is a body centered one. We don’t pray, we don’t say who we give thanks to, we just come and eat talk and leave on the same way we came.

HW 17

Dying has been a thought on my mind since I can really remember. I used to think about it a lot when I was younger. It is my greatest fear.

At the age of eleven I experienced the pain of death for the first time when my uncle, Ira, died of lung and brain cancer. I didn’t really know my uncle because he lived in Arkansas but it was still heart braking. My next encounter with death was when I was fourteen and my oldest and closest grandfather of 97 died peacefully of old age. This showed me that death could be “simple” and clean. This death for me was foreseen still I could not accept it. Then when I was fifteen my other grandfather died of a heart, he was the healthiest person I knew. He exercised every day by swimming and jogging. This event was outstanding to me that someone so healthy could just die with out warning. Nine month ago my grandmother died of old age. I was very close to her because I never knew my grandfather and it really hurts me that I couldn’t ever see or talk to her again. Then two month ago a big tragedy happened in my family, my other uncle died of a sudden stroke. I had seen him not one month before when he was visiting me from San Francisco. This felt unreal to me because it still felt like he was in my living room talking to me. I was very close with him and to here him dying was not acceptable to me. In the same week I had a friend kill her self by hanging. I had never thought I’d have a friend commit suicide. At this point in my life death was vivid and as real as it got but I had not flinched when I heard all this news I always just sit in silence because it all felt unreal. Till I cracked and could not hold the pain of death in anymore because real life had set in.

Death has changed my perspective on live. My family has past away so fast and I have felt the pain that my friend had felt before. I now always try to make life as fun as possible and do as much as I can in the time I have. All these people that have died have there own meaning and story in my life that makes me who I am. I’m scared of dying or wait, am I scared of the unknown. Just as I was afraid of the dark when I was four because I didn’t know what was in the dark. Does dying lead to something else’s? What happens after? That’s what I want to know. Why do we live now if we one day we die and then for all we know don’t know anything, don’t think, see, hear, just nothing. I will never have known I wrote this for Andy my 11th grade sociology teacher. This area is a place of weakness for me. A place I don’t like to enter in my mind because I suppress as much id it as I can because I can’t candle the truth. But what is the truth.

HW 11 - Project Part 1

I have been improving my diet for months before the food unit in order to get in better shape. I started by cutting out junk food, soda, white grains and fast food from my diet. Then I only ate foods with lots of protein and nutrition. This helped me lose wait, have more energy and helped me gain better self-control over my body. I was able to control my bad food urges but the new foods that I was eating were not always the best tasting if I didn’t have time to make it something good. So I cheated my diet by eating very small amounts of fast food to get the tastes I loved so much. Ultimately this disappointed me and when I was given this project I thought what I have been doing has helped me a lot by feeling better about myself and I wanted to help others.

Amhara came up with an idea or a dream, to make a facebook group that would be a protest against fast food for one week. There would be thousands of people invited and joining making it a movement. I liked the concept so I asked to join her group as an admin to work with her but she had already made the group. I became an admin then to just watch and see how people reacted because I did not agree with how she set the group up. People wrote on the wall as if it was a joke and criticized it saying one week is nothing you needed a real change by doing this for a month or for the rest of your life. I agreed because my food life style has changed because I keep up with my diet.

Ultimately the group did not get any buzz and I didn’t think that my original group idea was the right approach anymore. I thought about how people always want to be different and take challenges but not all people want to take the same challenge as everyone else. So I challenged my good friends as they challenged me to not eat fast food for a month and if succeed we would continue for another month but everyone would bring in one person they trusted to be part of this group. We saw each other on a regular basis so there was no reason to meet at certain times. When we meet we would tell stories about how the journey threw our food lives were going. For the first week the fast food world had be easy to leave for all of us but during the weekend it was tuff for some of us. During the weekend my friends were offered free fast food and it was hard but they turned it down. It took more time to make foods that tasted good, we had to do research to find healthy food places to grab fast meals not run by major corporations and it cost more money for this food.

My friends felt that the system of having someone close to you experiencing the same thing you were helped them stay on track because they didn’t want to fail someone they care about. The challenge they said was one of the things that drew them in because you always want to beat your best friend and to lose would be a big defeat. Then I had realized my activist goal had gone off track from making my group so exclusive people would want to join to a group a friends working to help one another be healthy. We did not stand as a number on facebook in the thousands, we had each other to look in the face and make sure we were living up to our challenge. We had to face the people we loved directly and tell the truth. Fast food is a drug you just want more. During the week so far I have felt more awake and full of energy.

HW 12 - Project Part 2

Overarching Thesis: 
Our culture has many dominant social practices that are nightmarish industrial atrocities and it is nearly impossible to change them.

Major Argument 1:
Many venture to change the “normal” food ways of America but corporate giants like Mc Donald’s and Tyson make they make it nearly impossible for a person to make a difference.

Supporting Claim 1:

Corporate giants such as Monsanto have power in the government so there is no debate over change to the food system.

Evidence 1: Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas was a Monsanto attorney and then in a court case that decided the seed saving conflict. Clarence Tomas wrote the majority option that allowed these companies to prevent famers from saving their own seeds.

http://www.cropchoice.com/leadstrya594.html?recid=540'

http://www.organicconsumers.org/Monsanto/farmerssued.cfm

http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/schmeiser.cfm

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/f/food-inc-script-transcript.html

Evidence 2: Margaret Miller was a chemical lab supervisor for Monsanto and to this day she is the FDA’s branch chief.

http://www.psrast.org/bghsalmonella.htm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

Evidence 3: Linda Fisher was the vice president of government and public affairs for Monsanto and then later became the EPA deputy administrator.

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Monsanto-Fisher-EPA-Job.htm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

Supporting Clam 2:

Large agricultural enterprises like Tyson have power over its Farms by being able to cut contracts and demand upgrades if they choose to.

Evidence 1: In McLean country Kentucky, Vince Edwards a Tyson grower offered to show the cameras of Food Inc. in side the chicken houses but after multiple visits by Tyson he changed his mind.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/ 

Evidence 2: After asking a dozen farmers one famer let Food Inc film in the chicken houses.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

Evidence 3: Carole Morison Perdue grower said, “ I understand why famers don’t want to talk because the companies can do what they want as far as pay goes because they control everything.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/comments/255197.pdf

Evidence 4: Carole Morison Perdue grower said, “The companies keep the famers under their thumb because of the debt the famers have. To build one poultry house is any where from $280,000 to $300,000 per house and once you make your entail investment the companies constantly comeback with demands of upgrades for new equipment and the grower has not choose, they have to do it or your threatened with loss of contract.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/comments/255197.pdf

Evidence 5: Carole Morison did not want to upgrade her chicken houses so in response to that her contract was cut.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/comments/255197.pdf

Hw 10

Food Inc. 
“The food industry has changed more in the last fifty years than it has in the last ten thousand.” Not for the better, for the worse. The foremost concept of Food Inc. is that America needs to change its agricultural industry the right way. America turned its agriculture world into a machine, so in humane that it is hidden from the public.

Food Inc. and Omnivore’s Dilemma have similarity and differences but the movie showed a more one-sided argument towards how bad the agricultural industry is. Compared to the book, which was more factual and informative acting as an unbiased opinion. The movie used images and facts to put forth the directors view on how the industry should be portrayed. In peoples minds this will stand out more because the harsh images that the director got of the industry are shown and not left to the imagination of the reader. In the movie they are able to state facts like “McDonald is the largest buyer of ground beef in America” and show the type of beef they are buying with comments on how it is made. But if this line were in the book it probably would not faze me as it did in the film because I would not have a graphic image sitting in my head. The movie also discussed more about the lobbyists in Washington and how they protect their industry. The book tells more about the actual farms the animals are coming from and the farms they should be coming from. The author, Michael Pollan worked on the farms getting the full experience of the industrial and non-industrial world.

When I think about Food Inc. I think of the animals being slaughtered, genetically grown food, sickness that can kill and then I think about how well the movie made me think like it. It also showed me another example of how our government is corrupt. The government does not put its peoples interests first but their pockets. The world looks to America not just as a role model but also as a source of income. If we are able to make food like corn cheaper than poor countries we might as well start killing them. The grains and food they once sold to the United States which possible made up their whole economy is now gone. Why does the government stand by while a food system is being built that is bad for people, bad for land and unsustainable?

HW 7d

Omnivore’s Dilemma By Michael Pollan

Chapter 17:
The ethics that concern the slaughter of animals are now being noticed. And people are starting to believe the justification of slaughtering an animal is if they live happy first.

Gems:
"Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the life of the pig- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog- that becomes the Christmas ham." (p.306)

"That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall." (p.317)

"We are the better for it, and they are never the worse...The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature" (p.328)

Thoughts:
I believe that the slaughtering of animals in our society cannot be justified in any means. We have changer the circle of life, which was made for the hunter/gatherer method that justifies the killing of an animal. When this method was used it was a sacred thing to kill an animal and you only killed what you need nothing more now. Now we kill to feed whom? The refrigerators that we stuff with food no body eats for years.

Chapter 18:
Hunting used to be natural way of life for humans. We have a sense of pride killing an animal. When I went out hunting I felt this sense of pride when I killed a pig but the after affect made me feel discussing.

Gems:
“A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would see to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hunter,” (p. 342)

“I felt a wave of nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical disinterest with which I had approached the whole process of cleaning my pig collapsed all at once: This was disgusting." (p.356)

"So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too - animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink, and decompose" (page 357)

Thoughts: 
I don’t feel I could ever take another animals life. That’s me being a hypocrite because I eat animals all the time but I don’t think I could hold a gun and watch an animals life end before my eyes. The biggest mystery to me is, how do people work at these slaughterhouses and live with themselves?


Chapter 19:
Humans have become very good at gathering over the year but there still is a risk of identifying something wrong. Wild mushrooms are easy to identify wrong even though we have become great gathers.

Gems: 
“For the individual human, his community and culture successfully mediate the omnivore’s dilemma, telling him what other people have safely eaten in the past as well as how they ate it,” (p.372)

"Without fungi to break things down, the earth would long ago have suffocated beneath a blanket of organic matter created by plants; the dead would pile up without end, the carbon cycle would cease to function, and living things would run out of things to eat." (p.376)

"Who's to say the day won't come when science will be able to measure the fungi's exotic energies, perhaps even calculate our minimum daily requirement of lunar calories?" (p.378)

Thoughts: 
I have no experience gathering mushrooms but I have gathered berries in the woods before and they are right, you have to know what your doing before you do it. You do not want to pick the wrong mushroom or berry because you will get sick or worse. Trust me I know from my own experiences. I find it also very interesting that mushrooms can hold lunar energy. Can this be used for anything like solar energy? Will there be lunar panels? It’s something I feel some research should be invested into. It could save the world or mess it up even more.

Chapter 20: 
After I hunted and gathered food for myself, which was harder than I imagined, it gave me a feeling as if I was linked to mother earth. This meal was food that mother nature meant omnivores to eat when she put us on here.

Gems:
"No, little if anything about this meal was what anyone would call 'realistic'. And yet no meal I've ever prepared or eaten has been more real" (p.392)

"I suddenly felt perfectly okay about my pig- indeed, about the whole transaction between me and this animal that I'd killed two weeks earlier. Eating the pig, I understood, was the necessary closing act of that drama, and went some distance toward redeeming the whole play." (p.401)

“Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we’re eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them,” (p. 404)

Thoughts: 
This chapter made me think a lot about how hard it is to get your own food from the wild, and how civilization spent most of their lives getting food. In Time magazine there was an article about organic food in the august issue and they said, “if we all decided to switch to healthier, chemical-free meat, there wouldn’t be remotely enough to go around.” (Kluger 32) We have to work towards coming off processed foods and switching to natural food like we used to live on. These processed foods are not just bad but from this book I have learned there made with the use of oil, which is not a resource that will be around forever. So how can America continue to let the food companies run this way if the companies, which feed us, are setup to fail?

Bibliography 

Kluger, Jeffrey. "What's So Great About Organic Food?." Time. 176.9 (2010): 32. Print.

HW 9

Freakonomics

#1
In Freakonomics the protagonist’s use three main moves to give evidence for their movie. The fist moves the protagonist’s uses are skits in which they bring real life situations to the people watching. This allows them to better understand what is happening on a basic level so they can relate. The scene in the movie about children getting better grades for money shows a human level connection.

Another move that the protagonist’s use in the film is the ability to show and explain data. Data was shown in the sumo scene to represent the links in evidence that showed fowl play was involved in the sport. Which was the link they were try to show about fowl play in the food industry.

The last move I saw the protagonist’s use was cartoons. The scene about one of the protagonists dough’s getting m&m for going to the bathroom on the toilet was better told in cartoon form because it would be hard to show just by descriptions.

#3
In my option the authors relied on life experiences as their main scores of evidence. Life experiences were two out of the four skits used to prove their point. This is a good idea for the author because it can connect to people on a more personal level and they can relate more to the people in the movie.


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

I disagree with this statement because I don’t believe that any hard evidence was given to me to use this movie as an inspirational example of exploring social practices. I think this because the movie was very vague in it’s evidence. For example in the scene with the sumo wrestlers, they no hard numbers to back up there statements, just numbers running down the screen. As well they had professionals on the same topic contradicting one another, which does not make me think they found good examples to use. The veil on the other hand that they talked about over the sumo league did make a good example of the veil the Food industry puts on Americans.