Intentional and Non-Hierarchical Discussions of Food Culture and its Consequences

For our final project, my group chose to focus on soil. Initially, we had planned to organize an after-school event for local elementary students. Quickly we discovered that the process to clear such an event with the district would be lengthy and likely too bureaucratically complex for us to succeed in such a short period of time. Furthermore, the soils… Read more »

Industrial Hemp – what can it do for you?

Our group was on non-food agriculture, focusing on industrial hemp. Of course, the obvious choice for us could’ve been on cannabis, as it has become a larger part of the economy in Washington State and beyond. However, we decided to focus on the legalization of industrial hemp on a federal level for various reasons. Initially, we planned on having educational… Read more »

From Global to Local: The Scales of Food Access

Anybody who has considered food accessibility can tell you that it is a complex issue. Our group looked at food access from a global standpoint, addressing questions such as how to end world hunger and the complexities of “free trade”. We have learned that globally, developed countries send their surplus, very cheap food to developing countries with the tagline that… Read more »

Industrial Hemp

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Our group chose non-food agriculture as our topic, from there deciding to focus on the legalization of industrial Hemp at the federal level. Initially, our ideas for the project involved educating the public by contacting a variety of political representatives around which to base an informative panel where we would draft a variety of questions that they could then respond… Read more »

Reflections on Group Action

This action project was a learning experience for me and for my group. We began with the intention of affecting direct policy change through legislation aimed at legalizing hemp nationwide, but soon had to redirect our efforts after our first avenue ended up being impractical during the time period we were allocated. We chose hemp legalization as our issue of… Read more »

Reflecting on Food Accessibility and Our Own Impacts

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 »

Action Project Synthesis

What I learned: I think the biggest thing I learned about within the action project of this class, is that the group project dynamic we all hated in high school is not as present in college. Hearing every group present in our section yesterday, I was so impressed! Maybe it was just our group, but there were so many creative… Read more »

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 »