Author Archives: Sara Kathleen Parolin

Hungry for Justice

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For our Group Action Project, my group decided to tackle the issue of food security. In order to host an educational, accessible and impactful event we decided to host a free documentary screening of “Food Justice: A Growing Movement,” a short documentary about a community in Oakland that is transforming and localizing their food system. This documentary covered various definitions… Read more »

Thinking Like Gaia

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When Professor Litfin read Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Law that Marries All Things,” the verse that resonated most with me was “the great chorus of parts.” In relation to the Gaia theory and our global perspective of consumption, planet Earth is the ultimate adaptive organism while humans, as a smaller living system, are like parasites on a host. The Earth… Read more »

Create, Reflect, Repeat

Building self-awareness through reflective and contemplative practices has allowed me to develop a better understanding of myself and the world around me. In studying world food politics, contemplative practices help me connect the information I learn in lecture to my personal experience. These practices solidify key concepts and personalize the issues we’re learning about. When our class studied hunger, for… Read more »

Everyone has to eat, but we can’t all eat like Pollan.

Nutritionism, a food ideology described in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, is an inaccessible notion of food justice that isolates middle and lower-class consumers. Pollan describes nutritionism as a relatively revolutionary new way of thinking about eating food, especially as this reductionist approach translates meals into scientifically calculated intake. Pollan even says nutritionism “might be the best thing ever… Read more »