Sometimes, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The first contemplative practice we did in class was the raisin activity. When we think about the lifecycle of our food (such as a raisin), it\u2019s easy to think of food starting at the store and ending with our mouths. But, there is so much history for consumables in our global food system. Raisins, for example, are grown on plantations and harvested by farmers\/agricultural workers and sundried. Afterwards, they are processed and packaged in a factory and shipped to stores. All the while, other systems are affected too as raisins, like other foods affect water usage and are then harvested by migrant workers and\/or with heavy machinery and that affects our domestic consumption of oil and gas.<\/p>\n
When I felt that raisin in my mouth during that time, I would like to say that I felt the world. I would like to say that I felt the global system in one bite. I would like to say that I could feel the labor and money that went into producing this one raisin that I\u2019m enjoying. But I didn\u2019t feel any of those things and I think that\u2019s one of the problems with modern agriculture.<\/p>\n
We, as consumers, have become so detached from the sources of our food, that the biggest impact on our consumption is not the unethical force this industry has on migration and workers\u2019 rights or even the aquifers we\u2019re depleting, but rather, the dollars and cents in store.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes, it\u2019s 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 »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemplative-practices","category-industrialized-food","category-systems-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1416,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions\/1416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}