“Americans spend less time than residents in any of the other OECD countries in meal prep at only 30 minutes a day” pointed out Tom Barlow in his article Americans Cook the Least, Eat the Fastest. This generation would be happy to know that they can use only 30 minutes to cook any meal at any time. However, before the cooking, they need to prep for the ingredients that they will need. Then the question of which grocery store to go to comes into play. Following it, are other questions such as what can they buy at which store, how far is the store, is it open 24/7? Trying to respond to each of these questions and other more that are linked to the food people buy will require a journey of discovering tree different grocery stores specialized in their own ways.
First of all, one would think that finding a grocery store is the easiest thing because food is a basic need that everyone should have access to. However, as Tracie McMillan writes in her book The American Way of Eating: “…food desert: a community with insufficient grocery stores for its population” (McMillan 6), this phenomenon is a reality in our society. For instance, a closer look at the East-Lansing area shows that there are three Meijer stores easily accessible around the area, there is only one Fresh Thyme Farmers Market and only one Farmers’ Market that opens once a week. To get to the closest Meijer store, one needs a car or at least the bus. Then, depending on one’s place Fresh Thyme can be very close or it can be further than the closest Meijer store. Lastly, depending on one’s schedule and place, the East-Lansing Farmers’ Market can be appropriate or may never be accessible. With all these conditions, for most individuals, Meijer which is opened 24/7 is the most convenient store to get grocery from.
Secondly, even if one manages to get to one of the grocery stores, the type of food they have access to is very different from one place to the other, and, also, limited as in the affordability of it. The author McMillan explained this best when she states: “… the fact that good, fresh food tends to cost more, especially in cities, making it difficult, if not impossible, for folks of limited means to afford it” (McMillan 5). The essence of this observation which is that good food, and even food, in general, is expensive can be seen in the three grocery stores around East-Lansing. In terms of fresh food or organic food, Fresh Thyme and Farmers Market are the best places to be compared to Meijer which is mostly packaged and processed food. By contrast, Meijer is the best option for cheap and affordable food compare to the other two grocery places. While this observation is true, it does not necessarily follow that it is the best in terms of ethics and methods because as seen in the documentary-movie The Harvest/La Cosecha, sometimes children are involved in the harvest of those products, and the workers are not paid properly which reduces the cost and makes the final product seen in the store way cheaper compare to farmers’ prices.
Thirdly, the differences between these three go as deep as to affect the kind of culture that is developed in them. On one side, we have the Farmers Market which is a community-based market where the farmers are most of the time part of the community from which their customers are from. On Sundays between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., the East-Lansing Farmers Market looks like a community gathering with local artists playing live music, and with the back of most farmer’s cars opened and full of fresh products which are also displayed on small tables right next to the cars. One can see mostly middle class and upper-class old people and young people who are educated students laughing, chatting and buying products offered by farmers. Farmers are most of the time wearing their farming clothes. In the middle, like a hybrid between a Farmers Market and big grocery stores is what Fresh Thyme is. With low aisle without numbers, fruits and vegetables displayed in the middle of the store, and the customers were mostly young and old middle class to upper-class educated people. Fresh Thyme allows the community to access fresh, healthy and organic food during the week when Farmers Market is not opened. On the other hand, there is Meijer, big retail and grocery store. Meijer is a huge store with tall aisle and numbers to help people navigate it. It offers anything from fruits and vegetables – not always organic – to frozen pizzas and burgers, clothes, shoes, games and more. One can see any type of people at a Meijer – educated or uneducated, rich or poor, young or old. Everything is mostly in a package and there are services such as self-checkout or curbside pickup that took away from the interaction between customer and retailer. The music playing in the background is popular and people wear what matches their social status or daily life habits. These differences make a clear cut between the store that people can accustom to buy from.
In as much as cooking some food goes hand in hand with people’s taste preferences and cultures, the same can be said about the type of grocery store they go to to get their vegetable or frozen items for cooking. In the article In America, you are what you eat: Education and income matter more than party affiliation, the author says: “It’s difficult to separate the effects of education and income on consumer tastes, since richer people also tend to be better-educated”, which is self-explanatory when one looks at these three grocery stores in East-Lansing. At the end of it all, what one cooks is no longer just taste, but all these unwritten cultural and social class traits that are associated with stores and the food itself.
Works Cited Barlow, Tom. “Americans Cook the Least, Eat the Fastest.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 Aug. 2011, www.forbes.com/sites/tombarlow/2011/04/15/americans-cook-the-least-eat-the-fastest/. “In America, You Are What You Eat.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 20 July 2017, www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/07/20/in-america-you-are-what-you-eat. McMillan, Tracie. The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields, and the Dinner Table. New York: Scribner, 2012. Print. Romano, U. Roberto., Eva Longoria, and Rory O'Connor. The Harvest: La Cosecha. [Los Angeles, CA]: Cinema Libre Studio, 2011.
Climate change and agricultural change in Asia
Podcast or Documentary:
Before the flood, Fisher Stevens and Leonardo Dicaprio
This documentary, that was directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Fisher Stevens and Academy Award-winning actor, environmental activist and U.N. Messenger of Peace Leonardo Dicaprio presents a narrative of how climate change is impacting different part of the world at the same. The documentary describes a chronological development of human activities that had contributed and continue to intensify global warming and other consequences of climate change. Leonardo Dicaprio moved to different part of the world to witness for himself how glaciers are melting in the Arctic Circle, Florida is flooding, Beijing’s sky is moggy, 300 million people are without power in India, and islands are sinking in the Pacific. This documentary’s main goal is to raise enough awareness about the fact that climate change is real and that it is not just an idea as the politicized environment in the U.S. is using it to divide the public opinion. The U.S., China and India, which are the three biggest polluters of the environment, were well presented in the work. The most surprising thing is how these three countries are responding differently to the consequences. For instance, as of June 2017, President Trump decided to cease any participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, while China, as shown in the documentary, is moving fast toward renewable energy, and India due to their deficit in energy needs more than ever to turn toward coal, which is cheaper and abundant. This situation creates a dynamic in the world that push some countries like the U.S. to reduce their carbon footprint while others like India need more than ever to increase a little bit their carbon production. Also, one the consequence of climate change in the documentary had to deal with agriculture. In one of the scenes, Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment talked with farmers who had their crops destroyed because of the fact that they received half of the year’s rainfall in just 5 hours. This reduces the quantity of food that will be available to that pollution, cutting down the farmer’s source of income.
Book (1):
Nagothu, U. (2016). Climate Change and Agricultural Development: Improving resilience through climate-smart agriculture, agroecology and conservation. Taylor and Francis, pp.1986-1999.
This book written by prominent professors and researchers on the field of climate and its impact on the agriculture, and edited by professor Udaya Sekhar Nagothu, is describing new innovative solutions that farmers and countries’ officials can implement in order to tackle the consequences of climate change on their agricultural production. The third chapter, which is mainly focused on building climate resilience through smart water and irrigation management systems of the Southeast Asia (SEA) region, starts off by acknowledging the fact: “Climate change complicates an already difficult situation in which agriculture in the region must keep pace with growing food demand”. Indeed, due to climate change, the seasons are shifting which creates less production and new diseases that threaten the life of the plants and, ultimately, the wellbeing of the people. On the one hand, the solutions proposed in this chapter are very import and necessary, but they only address the present effect of climate change. It is either that the solutions are not long-term mitigation oriented and not sustainable or the chapter failed to show that scope of the solutions. Also, like in the U.S. with the meat industry, the staple crop which is rice and which is the most consumed and produced food is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases. This creates a problem on the production of rice, but, at the same time, if the SEA region wants to be food secure, they need to apply more of these solutions to the production rice. Consequently, on the other hand, the farmers have to increase the use of chemical fertilizer, increasing the production of the crops. In the long-term, as seen in the U.S., the use of fertilizer will impact the health of the population. However, for now, this is the best solution the SEA region has got, and there is a need to feed millions of people who cannot wait for a better long-term and stable solution.
News Articles (3):
Article 1: As Climate Change Threatens Agricultural Sector, India Must Craft New Policies, Aman Thakker, December 20, 2017, The Diplomat
Article 2: Climate change could ravage Indian farmers, Sushma U N, January 29, 2018, Quartz India
Article 3: Climate change to adversely impact grain production in China by 2030, Man Li, February 13, 2018, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
In these three articles, the authors and researchers describe with observations, data and scientific experiences the different ways in which climate change is affecting the agricultural output of countries such as India and China. The articles are unanimous on the fact that climate change is directly causing lower crop yield and irrigation issues. The articles made sure to also address some of the issues with innovative solutions that could help to better the situations of both countries and to mitigate the consequences. For instance, Man Li in her articles states some solutions that China is implementing such as: “… Adjusting cropping patterns, strengthening agricultural infrastructure, deferring sowing time to avoid high-temperatures or drought, water saving techniques to increase the efficiency of water…”. These articles made it clear that even if climate change and global warming are not terms associated with the agricultural field, their impacts are not only being seen on natural disasters but also on small phenomena such as an increase or decrease in the world temperature that makes dry season a little longer or rainy season a little longer. These make plant either dry because of lack of water or plants drown because of too much water. However, the articles were inspiring because the elaboration on the results gained from experimenting some of the solutions showed that they were practicable solutions for the farmer. In contrast, the sustainability of those solutions was not discussed which does not give to the reader the extent to which they can be applied, and also, they do not directly address directly climate change. Indeed, solutions should be able to maintain the change in the climate at a certain state that will, therefore, make the solutions viable and sustained.
Summary of the Topic’s Potential:
Out of this research, my personal impressions of climate change and its impact on agriculture and parts of human development have changed. Firstly, I see that we are not starting the discussion about climate change from the same level of contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG), of tackling and reducing its effects, and even of power and means to mitigate some of the consequences that are already visible on our planet. For instance, when in the U.S. people are still debating the truth about a certain phenomenon called global warming and disembarking themselves from the Paris Agreement, people in China are fighting and migrating toward renewable energy because the population’s health is at stake, and people in India are trying to migrate toward fossil fuel and coal to be able to serve enough energy for every household. Then, the fight is no longer the whole of humanity against climate change and the safeguard of our pale blue dot. Consequently, every country or region of the world can try to tackle the issue on their own, but only a global effort can have an impact on changing the trajectory and fate of the Earth on which were going now. This will require stronger policies that will have to be accepted by all countries and mostly by the bigger polluters such as China, U.S. and India. Secondly, focusing on the agriculture and the water scarcity due to climate change allowed me to have a deeper level of understanding of the agriculture and food system in South East Asia (SEA), specifically, China and India. Climate change effects are really there, and it is the poor and the farmers who are mostly paying the prices. Therefore, the need for solutions to help these population is expeditious. However, are chemical fertilizer sustainable or is irrigation more effective while water is becoming scarcer as temperature increases? These are questions that I left the research with because I could not think about anything else, and these solutions are adequate for the people at this moment and point in time who need it. So, it is a topic that I would like to learn more about and see how other parts of the world are dealing with the same issues. Lastly, I believe this is an interesting topic that my teammate would like to explore and together with our research on different part of the world, we shall be able to complement each other’s knowledge and find a common and novel topic that we allow us to analyze the effect of climate change on agriculture and food production.
Pandora's Lunch Box in our current time
I hope this email finds you well. I spent these last two week reading the book Pandora’s Lunchbox by Melanie Warner. I would tell you when I saw the title, I could not help it but the Greek mythology about Pandora’s box is what came to my mind. I remembered my middle school Latin teacher explaining Zeus’ plan on destroying humankind by putting into Pandora’s box all the evil and wickedness. So, I opened the first pages of the book expecting to discover through it all the evil and wickedness that is hidden in our lunchboxes, specifically, the food we consume every single day of our life. However, as in the myth where Zeus put “hope” in the box too, I was looking forward to an element of hope among all the things that the author will be talking about.
The book is mainly about food but more focus on industrial food, or processed food. Warner started off by defining processed food as “something that could not be made, with the same ingredients, in a home kitchen” (Warner xvi). From that base point, she went on detailing the research she had done on the food industry, the work and research of food scientists and chemists, and the marketing and the salespeople. From her different site visits and talks with the people in the industry, we can see that the food industry is just another industry like others that is about more profit and larger scale. However, we are given some hope in her narrative in the form that we, as the people and the consumers, have the final say on the kind of food we want to eat.
Firstly, you know that growing up in Cote D’Ivoire, we were able to witness, on a daily basis, the transaction of food from the farm to the market, and then to our houses. So, we know that food has always been a livelihood for those farmers. Therefore, reading and following the description that Warner makes of the movement of food production from the farm to the factories now, depicted to me a whole new business model that the food industry has created. This business model gives an opportunity to students like us to major in food science and packaging. It is also offering better jobs to scientists and most chemists. For instance, in an article wrote by Michael Moss in the New York Times titled The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, I learned about “sensory-specific satiety…it is the tendency for big, distinct flavours to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more” (Moss). To be able to meet all these taste standards, the use of advanced and expensive state of art machines that mimic the human mouth and brain is required. Consequently, for the industry to be able to invest in all these technologies and provide food for enough people all over the world, they need to make a lot of profit. Additionally, in the book, I met food scientists and chemists who are as much passionate about their job as anyone else is about theirs, and who deserve to make a living out of the thing they enjoy the most, mixing flavour and composition to create something new and unique.
On the one hand, seeing, throughout the book, the bad thing that the processed food is bringing to our health, one may develop the feeling that it is the responsibility and the fault of the industry and specifically of the scientists who are making those foods. On the other hand, the book also highlights the facts that one of the industry’s popular clichés is “Everything in moderation”, and how regulations have been passed in order for the food industry to label everything that is in their food. So, to that extent, the responsibility can be put on the consumer who still buy something that is bad for their health.
Therefore, secondly, I think the book made a great point about showing us the power that the consumers have in the battle against the big companies of the food industry. Warner would not have found a better person to exemplify this power than Harvey W. Wiley, M.D., whose life was that: “… customers should be able to know that what they were buying” (Warner 24-25). His fight proved to me that if one person can change so much thing about such a big industry, the whole population can do more. Also, at the end of the book, Warner showed a family that switch their diet around and it made a positive change in the individual family member’s life. Moreover, in her book The Financial Diet: A Total Beginner’s Guide to Getting Good with Money, Chelsea Fagan show us that: “Few choices we make in life will have as much a sustained and profound impact on our budgets as learning how to cook…” (Fagan et al. 89). So, although I agree with Warner, I cannot accept her overall conclusion that “the choice of what we feed ourselves and our children is ultimately ours” (Warner 220) because most people cannot afford fresh food, and food companies make their products addictive and very cheap.
My final take away from the book is that in as much as food should contribute to the healthiness of people, the politics and lobbying made in place and that surround the food industry does not make that primary function of food very appealing to companies that are only after profit. Definitely, the book did a good job of describing in detail the process that corn, soy and meat undergo in order to end up on the shelves in supermarkets. This creates an awareness on the part of the consumers who now, through the law of supply and demand, know that they can demand more fresh and natural food, and the companies will have to change their business model. This book changed the way I see processed food.
Works Cited Chelsea Fagan et al. “Chapter 4: How to Be Your Own Italian Grandmother.” The Financial Diet: a Total Beginner's Guide to Getting Good with Money, Henry Holt and Company, 2018, pp. 86–97. Moss, Michael. “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 20 Feb. 2013. Warner, Melanie. Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took over the American Meal. Scribner, 2014.
Journey from natural to industrial and back
Food is a fundamental necessity for the good functioning of the biological system that we are. We need to feed ourselves to grow, be healthy, and to have the energy to do other things. However, even though the food is necessary, the type of food we eat differs from place to place, from culture to culture, and from belief system to belief system. My personal food habits are crafted by all those parameters. In as much as I would like to say that I eat whatever I find, I cannot because there is more to food than the society we grow up is showing us.
I grew up in a small town, Man, in western Cote D’Ivoire. My city is very rural with a lot of villages around it, and large forests in which people have plantations of coffee, cocoa, and cassava mostly. This abundance of agriculture gave most of the inhabitants the opportunity to eat freshly harvested products. We would mainly eat boiled and mashed cassava with soups made with fresh leaves of cassava, or okra, or eggplant. This chance that we had to be close to fresh legumes and vegetables might have been the reason I did not grow up eating heavily processed food. Actually, we did not have access to industrial food that much because the city was so far from the capital city, Abidjan, where the airport and the port are. In fact, most of the processed food we eat in Cote D’Ivoire is imported front developed countries. Therefore, transportation of the food from one place to another plays a huge role in the food system, and in the kind of food people can afford to eat. The roads all over the country are not perfect which increases the time and price of transportation. Also, because the food is imported, it is way expensive than most local food; consequently, it becomes a luxury that only a few people can afford. So, I can say that I grew up eating more natural food not because my parents were experts in nutrition, but because that was the kind of food that was available in larger quantity and accessible.
Years later, when I finally moved to the capital city, I saw my food habits changing. My mother continued cooking the same food we used to eat in the small city, but we had more variety of food now. We started eating more processed food and buying cooked food from the street. For instance, pasta and bread became things we eat commonly. Also, we started having dessert and drinking soft drinks after meals. With all these new items coming to the table, and my parents working all day with me in school too, one would think that my family attitude toward food would change and that anyone would eat whatever they found and go about their day. However, it did not, instead, dinner over weekdays and lunches over weekends became our family time. Indeed, food was something that my mother took very seriously: “everyone has to finish their food and be thankful for it because there are people somewhere who will not eat anything today”. I believe she has this strong attitude toward food because of her upbringing in the village. She grew up going to the plantation with her parents and harvesting whatever they were going to eat that day. On the one hand, being able to witness and take part in the production of the food that one consumes makes it more of an achievement and a valued item than just a taste and pleasure. This is the attitude that most people in my rural community where I grew up have about food because they all know that if one does not go to the farm, sow, and harvest later, they will not have anything to eat. On the other hand, most of us who are part of the modern society do not get that opportunity to be involved in the making of the food we eat that is why we tend to treat food has a commodity that we can afford, eat it or not, and trash it when we want because it will be on the shelves of the supermarket the next time we want it.
My own awareness of the food I eat increased a lot when I was in middle school. There was this one day when I bought street pork meat coming back from school with my best friend. I presented it to him to have some pieces, and he kindly rejected the offer. That shocked me because we never refused food from each other. That was when he explained to me that as a Muslim he was not allowed to eat pork meat. I understood his religious explanation, but as someone who believes in science, I went on doing my research. This was the first time I did a research about the food I eat, and it was eye-opening on the simple natural food we usually eat in my country which has nothing to do with industrial factories. I realized that even though I might not have noticed it before, my belief systems affected the food I ate. As an example, the side of my family who is traditionalist believe that I should never eat taro, and because I am allergic to it, it is a personal totem from my ancestors. While my Protestants parents believe that we should eat anything that God has put on the Earth for human beings. In general, Cote D’Ivoire is a secular country with almost 50% Muslims and 50% Christians with a minority of Traditionalists, so everyone’s food belief is preserved and the same taboo are respected. Personally, after that first food search on pork meat, it became my way of selecting the food that I eat and how much I eat of anything. I do acknowledge that it is not an easy task to go researching about every food before consuming it, but it is very relevant today in the highly processed food world we are living in. This practice can save us from some medical bills and give us healthier lives. As a result of those research, I started eating sushi because of its good nutrients which has been one of the best foods I have had so far.
I do like food and good food in general which can mean a lot of things to different people. However, today I can say that I still eat a lot of natural based food with fresh legumes and vegetables which are my favorite type of food. When I am abroad and I do not have access to that food, I became vegetarian most of the time even though I would prefer cooked vegetables. This is because of the fact that my body is used to the freshness of everything I eat. Even in terms of meat, I only eat chicken killed right in front of me or beef killed the same day I will be consuming eat. Definitely, pork left my plate since that research and this is just a personal choice, and not because I am on a halal diet. Lastly, I would say I have become the food I grew up eating, and even though I like what I eat, what I actually like is my culture, my belief and the results of my research.
Journey from natural to industrial and back (Review)
Food is a fundamental necessity for the good functioning of the biological system that we are. We need to feed ourselves to grow, be healthy, and to have the energy to do other things. However, even though food is necessary, the type of food we eat differs from place to place, from culture to culture, and from belief system to belief system. My personal food habits are crafted by all those parameters. In as much as I would like to say that I eat whatever I find, I cannot because there is more to food than the society we grow up in is showing us, and this class was a good illustration of that.
I grew up in a small town, Man, in western Cote D’Ivoire. My city is very rural with a lot of villages around it, and large forests in which people have plantations of coffee, cocoa, and cassava mostly. This abundance of agriculture gave most of the inhabitants the opportunity to eat freshly harvested products. We would mainly eat boiled and mashed cassava with soups made with fresh leaves of cassava, or okra, or eggplant. This chance that we had to be close to fresh legumes and vegetables might have been the reason I did not grow up eating heavily processed food. Actually, we did not have access to industrial food that much because the city was so far from the capital city, Abidjan, where the airport and the port are. The fact is that most of the processed food we eat in Cote D’Ivoire is imported from developed countries. Therefore, transportation of the food from one place to another plays a huge role in the food system, and in the kind of food people can afford to eat. The roads all over the country are not perfect which increases the time and price of transportation. Also, because the food is imported, it is way expensive than most local food; consequently, it becomes a luxury that only a few people can afford. This phenomenon creates an economy that is immensely based on locavore agriculture demand as opposed to an economy based on scale that The Week Staff explained in their article The Limits of Locavorism. I cannot witness for the efficiency and sustainability of this system, but after watching The Harvest/ La Cosecha, I can advocate for the fact that it guarantees a humane condition of work and of life for both the farmers and their farm workers. So, I can say that I grew up eating more natural food not because my parents were experts in nutrition, but because that was the kind of food that was available in larger quantity and accessible.
Years later, when I finally moved to the capital city, I saw my food habits changing. My mother continued cooking the same food we used to eat in the small city, but we had more variety of food now. We started eating more processed food and buying cooked food from the street. For instance, pasta and bread became things we eat commonly. Also, we started having dessert and drinking soft drinks after meals. Through it all, food was something that my mother took very seriously: “everyone has to finish their food and be thankful for it because there are people somewhere who will not eat anything today”. I believe she has this strong attitude toward food because of her upbringing in the village. She grew up going to the plantation with her parents and harvesting whatever they were going to eat that day. On the one hand, being able to witness and take part in the production of the food that one consumes makes it more of an achievement and a valued item than just a taste and pleasure. This is the attitude that most people in my rural community where I grew up have about food because they all know that if one does not go to the farm, sow, and harvest later, they will not have anything to eat. After reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, I believe that this should be a virtue that every human being should have as in we shall all be actively engaged into our food system in order to make better decisions for ourselves, our descendants and for the environment. On the other hand, Chelsea Fagan made a great point in her book The Financial Diet: A Total Beginner’s Guide to Getting Good with Money when she states: “…much of our generation regards home cooking as simultaneously scary and far too much of a hassle. This costs us deeply in our connection to our food and where it comes from…” Not knowing where the food comes from has blindfolded most of the modern society that we are part of. This vice that has intruded households and families had allowed companies that are after profit to commit non-ethical and inhumane factory farming practices right under our eyes. Therefore, either we do care or not, and that we just love meat or not, the imminence of climate degradation is upon us and actions need to be taken for our own safeguard.
My own awareness of the food I eat is a continued learning in process that this class had cognitively informed. However, everything has a beginning and mine was this one day when I bought street pork meat coming back from school with my best friend. I presented it to him to have some pieces, and he kindly rejected the offer. That shocked me because we never refused food from each other. That was when he explained to me that as a Muslim he was not allowed to eat pork meat. I understood his religious explanation, but as someone who believes in science, I went on doing my research. This was the first time I did a research about the food I eat, and it was eye-opening on the simple natural food we usually eat in my country which has nothing to do with industrial factories. I realized that even though I might not have noticed it before, my belief systems affected the food I ate. As an example, the side of my family who is traditionalist believe that I should never eat taro, and because I am allergic to it, it is a personal totem from my ancestors. While my Protestants parents believe that we should eat anything that God has put on the Earth for human beings, yet they won’t surely eat our dogs while they can easily eat cats or some other pets which is intriguing. In general, Cote D’Ivoire is a secular country with almost 50% Muslims and 50% Christians with a minority of Traditionalists, so everyone’s food belief is preserved and the same taboo are respected. Personally, after that first food search on pork meat, it became my way of selecting the food that I eat and how much I eat of anything. I do acknowledge that it is not an easy task to go researching about every food before consuming it, but it is very relevant today in the highly processed food world we are living in. Talking about processed food, Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal, by Melanie Warner was an eye-opening book on what we see as convenient food. The idea that the food we eat was scientifically made to control our taste buds, our desire to eat hence our power to buy more is one that definitively changes the way I think about processed food. It made me more aware of the quantity I want to eat and when exactly I want to eat it. I will not stop completely eating processed food because I believe in and I would like to appreciate the authentic work that food scientists put in researching and engineering these foods. The practice of making ourselves more aware of our eating habits can save us from some medical bills and give us healthier lives. Indeed, health was something that this class emphasized a lot even though it only became evident when we talked about obesity. Most importantly this is the part that touched me the most because, as someone from a developing country with a medical system that is as efficient as in the United States, I need to be extra careful about the diseases that can come from my food. The documentary Forks Over Knives and its constant reminder of the saying “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” by Hippocrates helped me make a strong reevaluation and hopefully a termination of most of my dairy products and sugar consumption.
I do like food and good food in general which can mean a lot of things to different people. However, today, as I am ending this class, I can say that food is a complex topic that can relate to a lot of other social issues that a lot of people may not think about on a daily basis. The current food system is complex and the future of food is still uncertain at some degree: will we be all about sustainability or will we continue what we are already doing? The only certainty we have is that in as much as the environment is taking a toll from our food system, we are definitely taking more in terms of our health, our relation to our food and the ecosystem around us. At a personal level, it is easy to make some change. For me, I have been able to shift my diet a little more toward a plant-based consumption even though I will not call myself a vegetarian because I will still eat meat. Though I have decided to make sure that I consume meat that is sustainable, and hopefully there will be meat grown in laboratories in the future. Lastly, I would say I have become the food I grew up eating, and even though I like what I eat, what I actually like is my culture, my belief and making sure that future generations have a better planet to call home.