Writing my final paper was a very useful and reflective experience for me, and it is one of the few “final assignments” that I have actually really enjoyed. For some background, my group was working with issues of food accessibility and we decided to interview University of Washington professors whose work was relevant to or intersected with that topic. We… Read more »
Rarely in college classes do students get to sit down for a few minutes and absorb the materials that they learn in lecture. We sit through an hour or two of lecture and immediately leave when the bell rings without thinking about the impacts that the learning materials have on us as individuals. In a class that explores the environmental,… Read more »
Contemplative practices, as trivial as they may seem to others, have the power to inform in an interactive manner as well as generate thoughts about one’s role within regard to the rest of the food system. I personally have found our contemplative practices thus far to be very engaging and necessary. With an act as simple as being told to… Read more »
In the first contemplative practice, the first thing I thought about was how healthy this raisin was for me. As a health-conscious individual, I knew that this processed raisin had some nutritional value. And then it dawned on me: as much as we like to associate industrialized food systems with words such as “processed” and “unhealthy”, we can also associate… Read more »
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget both where your food comes from and how it gets to your table. Our contemplative activities are moments when we get to stop for a moment and actually focus on food and the way we view it, consume it, and create it. The first contemplative practice we did in class was the raisin activity. When… Read more »
Busyness has become a virtue in western society – a society that demands constant productivity as a means for constant consumption. The lack of “free-time” and an ever-expanding market of distractions discourages the practice of mindfulness, but when it comes to our habits of consumption, particularly of food, the lack of careful contemplation can leave us ignorant to the larger… Read more »
Imagine a raisin. Dry, wrinkled, brown, devoid of life and vigor. What was once a plump, robust grape is now a shriveled, mass-produced food product; a representation of the industrialized agricultural system of the modern world. As I held this microcosm of the industrialized food system on my tongue and closed my eyes, I began to think about how this… Read more »
The second contemplative practice stood out to me as the most impactful; it came about the time I was plan to eat my first meal of the day, as I always end up forgetting to grab something in the morning. I was starting to get the first feelings of hunger that always precipitate a meal – not really necessity, just… Read more »
For the past several years, I have made cooking and reflecting on eating a mindful practice. When I have time to cook I typically reflect on the process, flavors, smells, and textures. I isolate my perception to what is directly in front of me. Several weeks ago, however, I contemplated a concept introduced in class as I prepared a batch… Read more »
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 »