Up until this quarter, I’ve never experienced anything like a contemplative practice. I have never had a professor turn the lights off and ask the students to think about a particular subject. I’d never even heard of it, so when Professor Litfin handed out raisins and turned off the lights, I was as confused as I could be. Personally, I… Read more »
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 »
When we think about hunger in the world, we imagine the lack of food. The video “Silent Killer: The Unfinished Campaign Against Hunger” tells us the other reason of world hunger. In Brazil, enough amount of food is produced to feed all people in Brazil. However many people cannot get enough food to live and are facing to hunger. The… Read more »
It is obvious that people once lived in a very different way than we currently live now, but it is easy to become oblivious to that. Through industrialization, we only physically see current developments, and we see developments of the past through photographs, museums, etc. We see black and white photos, and it seems that color didn’t exist back then…. Read more »
Humans as omnivores have adapted to be opportunists in our diet. This can be an immense advantage when you are surviving in the wilderness as a hunter-gatherer and is probably why humans are some of the most successful organisms on the planet. But the question of what you should eat is one that can bring up much anxiety. If you… Read more »
Incorporating mindfulness into my life has always been a consistent source of clarity and a way to process information from the day, however incorporating it into my education has never been a habit of mine. In our course, the contemplative practices are a way to use mindfulness to enhance our education, and allow us to connect with how the material… Read more »
One of the classes contemplative practice that impacted me the most was the contemplative practice around chocolate. In America when we think of chocolate we think of a sweet smooth snack. However, the original cocoa nib is extremely bitter, and has a gritty texture. While tasting the cocoa nib for the first time, Professor Liftin played a video about the… Read more »
One of the many problems resulting from the state of our current food system directly impacts human health. Pollan claims to offer a simple solution however it is exclusive, many socio-economic barriers render people incapable of practicing his three rules. Furthermore, the rules he lays out are trivial when situated in the modern-ecological context, post-agrarian-revolution and post-industrial-revolution. Revolutions bring with… Read more »
As a young adult woman in a time heightened by social media popularity and the craze of food science, I—like many young women—are at a millennial crossroad, confused and perplexed by the need to look a certain way to achieve maximum “likes” while also drowning in a sea of supposed scientific facts that influence how I can have a body… Read more »
We have been told from a young age that humans started as a hunter-gatherer society. However, as time has progressed we stopped hunting; humans have progressed to the search for something more artificial, something easier to grab and gather. With the uprising of the industrialization of food we have come to find that nutrition, the quality of our foods, has been… Read more »