In brainstorming the benefits of organic food, I immediately thought of health benefits, such lower pesticide exposure and increased nutrition. In fact, in Michael Pollan’s book which we read for this class, he states that “For most of our food animals, a diet of grass means much healthier fats (more omega-3s and conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA; fewer omega-6s and… Read more »
I struggle with anxiety and have even had panic attacks before. For me, feeling hungry often induces feelings of anxiety- I start to feel weak and faint, and I worry that I will pass out. I also annoyingly have a fast metabolism in which I get hungry quite often but can only eat rather small amounts of food at a… Read more »
It turns out that soil is way more beautiful than we think and is even linked to issues of veganism. I realized how little I think about soil and what it is composed of- in fact, I didn’t even know exactly what soil is. It was just something that I took for granted. Thus, it was interesting in the lecture… Read more »
Food impacts not just our waistlines but also the environment in many startling ways- such as agriculture’s use of fossil fuels and its overall impact on climate change. In a separate UW course, State-Society Relations in Third World Countries, that has turned out to be surprisingly similar to this one, we’ve learned about petroleum extraction’s devastating effects on building up… Read more »
The photos of what an American family and what an Ecuadorian family eat depicted in the photographic project Hungry Planet show sharp contrasts in the lifestyles and the food systems of those countries. Firstly, the Ecuadorian family lives in a traditional, rural village in the mountains in a thatch-roofed adobe-brick-walled hut. They don’t appear to have electricity, and their method… Read more »
Reading the chapter “Cheap Food, Hunger, and Obesity” from Michael Carolan’s The Real Cost of Cheap Food was particularly eye-opening with regards to the obesity epidemic in the U.S. Living in Spain, I hear plenty of commentary about “fat Americans” and their propensity for eating Big Macs. This behavior is typically blamed on individual laziness and a need to want… Read more »
It might seem a bit random, but the reading that we have done thus far in class has actually brought to mind for me feminist issues. One might not think that feminism and food have much to do with each other, but I see a direct link to it in comments such as Michael Carolan’s about possessing sufficient time to… Read more »
Both Michael Maniates’s “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Ride a Bike, Save the World?” and the book from our previous lesson, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food grapple with issues covered in systems theory- albeit in very different ways. Pollan’s book dismantles the reductionist theories that are ever-so-present in “nutritionism,” saying that foods are more than a sum of their vitamins,… Read more »