Category Archives: Other

World Hunger Benefit Concert: Explained

This project was one of my first experiences planning an event for a large group of people. I learned just how many moving parts needed to be organized in order for everything to go according to plan. Unfortunately, after all of our planning we had to cancel the event because our venue pulled out. The big lesson we learned was… Read more »

Global Topics to Local Action

At first, I was cautious about whether my groupmates and I were all on board to focus on Food Security as our topic.  I worried that I would not be able to contribute as much as I would like due to my lack of knowledge about the field, as well as the wide variety of politics surrounding food as I learned… Read more »

Clean Water Accessibility. Fix One Factor, Fix It All

Water, one of the most common element on earth, and cover 70.8% of the earth’s surface is an important resource for the survival of all lives, including humans, and it is also the most important component of living organisms. In other words, we as human cannot leave without water. With that amount, water should not be a problem to every… Read more »

Sweetly Savage: Inequality in the Chocolate Market

Life is like a box of chocolates. This might mean something to your average first world consumer but to cacao producers in Africa the saying has no context. If it’s not obvious by the title the contemplative practice I found the most helpful was the chocolate practice. The combination of having both raw cacao and a piece of chocolate itself… Read more »

The Hoodia Rap Song

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***Click HERE to take a listen — Hoodia Rap*** Here is a rap song I wrote from the contemplative practice about industrialized food process, hunger, and its aftermath. The Hoodia plant grows naturally in the southern region of Africa. The San people traditionally consume the bitter plant as an appetite suppressant, to help survive in desert conditions where food resources… Read more »

Putting the Present Second – A Contemplative Practice

Why are we as human beings obsessed with the idea of making the most out of the present? There are numerous idioms about “living in the moment” and “making the most out of your time” that convey warm sentiments, but as a society we’ve taken them too literally. In fact, we’re “living in the moment” so much that there might… Read more »

Examining the relationship between modern farming techniques and disease incidence

The Australian Aborigines experiment from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food peeked my interest due to its findings and its connections to my background in biology. The basis of the experiment was to isolate recently westernized Aborigines with type 2 diabetes into an area away from western civilization. This coerced the relocated Aborigines to rely on foraging to obtain food,… Read more »

Contemplating Grapes

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Michael Pollan states in his book In Defense of Food “Health is, among other things, the product of being in these sorts of relationships in a food chain…if the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the… Read more »

Amazon: ‘Donating’ Food Waste to Families Experiencing Homelessness in Seattle.

During Mattieu’s lecture, the tweet about Amazon really stood out to me. It made me think of the AmazonGO store, and then about how they donate their expiring foods to the homeless shelter where I work. Which lead me to take a look at the social implications of donating expiring food to those who cannot afford to buy it. Looking… Read more »