Most of the contemplative practices we’ve done in class have been insightful and useful to me. The most impactful one was the one where we had the raisins and were thinking about industrialized food. It helped to put food in perspective for me and think about how such a simple food could have so much processes and workers and miles behind it. It also made me question the cheapness of the food we’re eating. Raisins are probably less than one cent per raisin and each raisin has to be planted, grown, picked, dried, packaged, shipped, distributed, and then bought and it still only costs about one cent per raisin. Who’s getting paid and how much? Does that cost allow for fair payment of each worker? Does it factor in the environmental cost of gasoline that is used in virtually every process from travel to picking?
This insight made me really consider the implications of every food that I eat. A raisin is a relatively unprocessed food, but a blueberry scone I pick up in the cafe has many ingredients that all come from different places and even the cooking process of the scone has most likely been industrialized. A simple processed food has so many processes behind it, but most of the food in the Western Diet is many more times processed than a raisin.