Filed under: Food + Health, J500 Week 7, Society + Media | Tags: Jacob Muselmann, meat eater, meataholic, salads, still hungry, tofu, veganism, vegetarianism
Photo courtesy of onsugar.com
Tobacco-less cigarettes. Non-alcoholic beer. Decaf lattes. Low-carb bread. Fat-free desserts. Assuming you haven’t thrown them down halfway through, all of these in the end leave you wanting. Aside from robbing themselves of their fundamental and sought-after components, they render you unsatisfied, a mere shadow of the real thing you were after. And I suppose this has been my beef with vegetarianism.
I don’t remember quite when, but I even tried it once without telling anybody. There were a couple of reasons for the self-imposed meat fast. I didn’t want colon cancer, and veganism was the sure-fire way into the hip, Nietzsche-reading, artsy subculture in high school, where the coolest parts of “granola hippie,” the college-bound political fact-heads, and the urbane came together. And besides, I had just came to terms with salads as a legit self-contained meal.
Before that time, I had mocked vegetarians for their self-righteous crap about changing the world with their tiny stomachs (and big mouths), and there was always plenty of fodder. I had been a proud meataholic my entire life. But getting on in years, I’ve grown tired of cycling through my meats (turkey for lunch so it’s beef for dinner; ham for lunch, then I guess it’s chicken for dinner) and the dull exhaustion one gets each time after eating animal muscle.
So when I tried cutting meat cold turkey, I fell flat on my figurative face. I lasted only a few days before my energy level became so scant I nearly fainted. This problem isn’t unheard of, (and the reason for it is quite gross) but I felt like a bit of a freak for needing some foreign flesh to sustain my own. Still do.
Now I know how bad meat is for the environment, the desire is welling up in me again. And yes, I know about tofu, and how taste-wise, it’s like dressing up a corpse for a party. If we are to be less meaty as a people, we’re going to need some more viable options to fill that fried chicken-shaped hole in our hearts—and I’ll tell you right now, it’s gonna have to be really, really good.
—Jacob M.
Filed under: Farmer Stories, Food + Health, J500 Week 7, Society + Media | Tags: Clyde, family, farm, farming, garden, gardening, healthy, horticulture therapy, Kansas, potatoes, therapy, tomatoes
Coming from Clyde, Kan., my mom has always told me some interesting tales about her time spent on farms.
From cleaning chickens to helping deliver calves, I’ve heard my share of, and have been a bit grossed out by, these stories. But I recently asked my mom more about farming in our family.
My grandma, my boyfriend, me and my grandpa at Coronado Heights Park in Lindsborg, Kan. Grandma and Grandpa always have the best food at their house, including veggies grown by Grandpa.
I had always just assumed my mom grew up on a farm, but she explained that it was a little bit different than that. They had a small number of chickens and had a vegetable garden (which sounds like a farm to me), but they didn’t have any crops. My grandparents, my mom and my uncles also helped other farms in their community regularly. My grandpa helped process chickens for local farms — I’m not quite sure if I want to know what that means — while my mom said that she would help gather eggs or clean chickens.
She said she also thought my grandpa liked to garden as a way of therapy from this job at Northern Natural Gas where he would work in extremely hot and stressful environments. I think it’s interesting that even today growing food is still proven to be therapeutic.
Between my grandpa’s gardening and hunting and my grandma’s canning and baking, my mom said their family was pretty self-sufficient. Looking back she said she realizes how much cheaper and healthier that way of living was, but at the time, she said it’s just what they did.
“That’s just what we did,” — she says this a lot when she talks about her farming experiences. I think that because farming becomes such a tradition and a way of life for some families, no one really questions how healthy or sustainable it is to grow food for a family. It really just becomes second-nature for some families to decide to farm.
Since I can remember, my grandpa has always grown some sort of vegetable, usually tomatoes or potatoes. He still grows vegetables even though he and my grandma don’t live in a farming community anymore. My mom can no longer eat a store-bought tomato because she says it doesn’t taste right, and I’m beginning to be the same way. Veggies that Grandpa grows taste way better than anything I’ve ever bought.
My mom still has some farmland in Concordia, too. She has 360 acres of rotating crops of soybeans, milo or wheat. She told me that she is never going to sell it.
Like she always tells me, “Farmers never really retire.”
— Lauren Cunningham
Filed under: J500 Week 7 | Tags: Great Garbage Patch, one-time use, packaging, plastic, plastic bags, polyester, reduce vs. recycle
Continent-size collections of trash rotate in the Pacific. SOURCE-James Vito
Shoes to sweatshirt to sunglasses, plastics are closer to me than I would prefer. Just as the Great Garbage Patches wreak havoc far in the Pacific Ocean I feel that plastics are trashing my food and clothes.
The sad part about plastic is that its built to last but usually only used once. Lunchbox sandwiches are covered in plastic wrap because a hundred feet of it costs a few dollars. Plastic is easy because there’s always more. Nevermind that it ends up in our food through leaching and bioaccumulation. Through emphasis on short-term, the process of making plastics adjusts our culture.
The concept of one-time use starts with purchases but moves into other aspects of our lives. It can make us throw away a dying plant; it can make us give up on a relationship sooner. Our culture of fast-paced gratification is shoddily crafted with BPA-laced support beams.
Flavors abound but why is there no choice for containers? SOURCE-life.com
Not to say that this culture isn’t firmly secure. Plastics are a fundamental material in most products we consume. At grocery stores, a layer of plastic encases almost every food–even when cardboard is there! Fresh vegetables must be bagged before most grocers will ring them up. Stacks of plastic soda 2 Liters remind us of the thousands of bottles that float through stores each day.
How did this happen? When did this plastic safety net decide to wrap itself around our lives? Breaking a glass jar can be, well, jarring but do people really despise glass enough to banish it from the pantries of our society?
The origin of plastic is gasoline. Oil companies cannot refine all of the crude oil it finds. The non-refinable matter (what doesn’t end up in our tanks)is turned into toys, tabletops and whatever else the consumer needs cheap and in mass quantities. In the battle against plastics, it appears the infrastructure is against us.
The amount of plastic justifies its existence. By itself, an 8 oz. bottle of soda is a ridiculous concept. Higher price, less product, more hassle are all reasons to avoid the option. They find their way to picnics and office refrigerators because of bottle mentality. The 8 oz. bottle is justified by the 20 oz. bottle and the 20 oz. is here because of the 2 liter. Plastic bottles seem alien when compared to glass jars but a recycling bin full of plastic bottles makes sense of my bottle use.
Putting food in plastic wouldn’t make sense if our drinks weren’t bottled in it; we wouldn’t put drinks in plastic if the rest of our liquids weren’t stored that way.
This momentum builds rapidly but it can stop abruptly. We can opt out of personal packaging, reuse glass jars and buy wholesale. When it comes to plastics “reduce” means more. We need to drastically reduce our plastic consumption before “recycle” can make any noticeable difference.
Sean T.
Whoever can guess how many bottles win them all! SOURCE-treehugger.com
Filed under: J500 Week 7 | Tags: butter, generational eating, grandparents, healthy eating, recipes
Growing up in a Jewish family, food has and will always be an important tradition. Brunches at my grandparent’s house occurrs monthly with the standard lox, bagels, and egg casserole.
“Tess, eat more,” is what I hear at every meal with my grandparents. By the end of every meal, I am full up to my ears. Dessert is a must for my grandma. So even after brunch, the dessert that is served is usually some type of pastry or coffee cake. Usually a brunch is just one course, but for Grandma Stella, it turns into at least three.
What I do find interesting about my grandma is that she thinks everything she cooks is healthy. She always stresses to me that she is making a “healthy” meal. However, when I see her preparing the steamed vegetables, I see her putting a stick of butter on top.
When I was little, this didn’t phase me. Now that I focus more on my health, when I see her do this, it makes me cringe! I don’t understand how she thinks this is healthy! Is this a generational thing or am I making too big of a deal out of this?
It seems like a stick of margarine is my grandma’s weapon; she puts it on absolutely everything and calls it healthy! I really don’t understand it. I try to empathize with her in that food was nearly impossible to afford for her family when she was growing up. Maybe that is why she doesn’t really care what she is putting into her meals.
I don’t know if I should give in to this and just eat whatever she makes or if I should say something as in suggesting a healthier way to cook things. The questions that arise are “will this offend her,” or “will this make her upset?”
What is this correct way to approach someone on this issue? Personally, I am very conscious about what I eat. When I see my grandma preparing her meals with the ingredients she uses, that is all I can think about during the meal.
Through writing this, I think I have discovered my plan of action; I am going to suggest some healthy options for my grandma as well as cooking with her. This will not only bring us closer, but it will inform my grandma how to be more healthy.
-Tess H.
Filed under: Food + Health, J500 Week 7, Society + Media | Tags: beer, birthday, culture clash, holiday, Judaism, Kansas, kosher, March 30th, Passover, tradition
The end of March is a very special time for me. The weather is nice, mid-terms are finished, and, most importantly, it is when I celebrate my birthday. On Tuesday, March 30th of this year, I will turn 23. This will be my first prime-numbered age in four years, and will also be the first time I can remember my birthday coinciding with Pesach.
Take away the diapers, and this was surprisingly accurate. Image found on Google (the search engine, not my hometown).
What is “Pesach”, you ask? It is more commonly known as Passover, one of the most significant holidays in the Jewish faith. I grew up celebrating this holiday (“holiweek” would be more accurate, though it sounds tremendously awkward) every spring, a difficult feat in a place like Topeka, KS (known today as “Google, KS”). It is challenging because, like most observances in my religion, it involves a dietary restriction. In this case, to recognize how Israelites escaping Egyptian bondage did not leave time for their bread to rise when leaving, we do not eat anything leavened. Mostly, this means avoiding bread products. In elementary through high school, this was extremely challenging, because school cafeterias in a community with very few Jews tend not to accommodate us too well. Lunch every day featured rolls, or pizza, or pasta (considered leavened because of the effects boiling water has in the cooking process), and I couldn’t touch one of them. In high school, I had the alternative of a salad bar, but it was of incredibly poor quality.
This year, with Passover and my birthday happening at the same time, I am presented with an even greater conundrum. I am used to not having a traditional birthday cake, as tradition in the Cohen household has been, for many years, for my mother to prepare one of her famous cheesecakes, but this still puts a limit on what else I can have on March 30th. It will be the second night of Passover, meaning there will be a Seder (a combination of a meal and service), and while I am not always the best Jew in the world, I try not to miss those. My preference on my birthday is generally to meet friends at a favorite restaurant, then go out for drinks. Sadly, beer includes yeast, the most well-known of leavening agents, and if I were to stick to the rules adamantly, this would be off-limits.
I already know that I am going to play a bit loose with the rules for this unusual occasion. I’ve never kept kosher, so I try to follow guidelines for holidays, basically as a way of compensating. Even then, I find the occasional loophole. A favorite over Passover is to invoke the small amount of Sephardic heritage in my family, which frees me up from avoiding starches all together. There is always a little bit of guilt involved (cue up any stereotype you want about “Jewish guilt”, because you probably heard it from one of us). But even if it’s just to have a few beers and some chips on my birthday, I am making a special exception to the rule.
~Ben C.
Filed under: Farmer Stories, Food + Health, J500 Week 7, Science + Tech, Society + Media | Tags: farming, geodetic center of the lower 48 states, history of agriculture, industrial agriculture, local, organic, western Kansas
My grandfather, or “Granddad,” as we call him, grew up on a farm in western Kansas.
My Granddad outside his one-room school house, near the farm he grew up on in western Kansas. Photo by Ben Pirotte
Like most of his generation, he grew up healthy, happy, and with strict values. One of those values: frugality. But why is frugality such an important value of a person who grew up in the Depression? Because they had little to nothing. So, surviving on just a few dollars a week, and only buying the materials necessary to clothe, feed and house your family became what was important.
Just a few years ago, my family and I were able to go visit the land my great-grandfather used to till. Strangely enough, there’s a plaque installed on the property marking the geodetic center of the lower 48 states! Today, it is an “active cornfield,” which goes to show just how important farming is in the makeup of the United States, being right at its heart.
However, much has changed from the days of Granddad’s childhood. What used to be a country of many small farmers that made up 21% of the US workforce, all insistent on making a new life for themselves and their family, has now turned into just a few “desperate” farmers trying to make ends meet, and a few giant business conglomerates.
So, has the nostalgic, pastoral idea of farming died? With the mechanization of farming as an industry, and with yields from farming being more productive than ever, large, mono-crop facilities produce the vast majority of our food at a cheaper price to the consumer. But what about the cost to the environment? Industrial agriculture requires more use of pesticides, and with mono-cropping, soils are depleted through time and eventually need more and more fertilizers to create the same output. There seem to be alternatives to this model–such as buying organic and local. But are these ideas realistic?
While it is clear that we most likely won’t be returning to the days of small farmers in places like western Kansas, there is a need to reform our food system. Industrial agriculture is imposing a problem not only to the quality of our food, but is also a major problem to the health of our environment. Small steps can be made to reforming the system, but until our world as a whole is able to factor in all the costs associated with industrial farming, and not just the cost to grow, produce, harvest and ship a product, we won’t be able to see the necessary change.
–Ben P.
Filed under: J500 Week 7, Society + Media | Tags: corn, ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup, monoculture
I love corn. If you tell me we’re having corn for dinner, I’ll look at you with wide, excited eyes, clap my hands and proclaim, “I LOVE corn!” That reaction is involuntary and I really can’t control it.
Most people would react this way to say, chocolate cake. Not me. I react that way to corn. And why not? It tastes like summer and is the color of sunshine.
flickr.com
However, crazy corn love aside, I had no idea I was eating so much of it. After a little Google searching, it turns out that corn is in more of my daily diet than I realized. The instant coffee and frozen waffles with syrup I had for breakfast? The peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread with potato chips and Coke that I had for lunch? The gum I chewed afterward? The grilled chicken caesar salad I had for dinner? My toothpaste?
Corn is in all of it. Sometimes it’s a sweetener, sometimes it’s a thickening agent, or it may be the feed used to fatten livestock. Considering the sum of its uses, we end up eating a lot of corn. And it doesn’t stop there. We’re wearing corn, writing on corn, and we can even put corn in our cars.
To some, it may sound resourceful to use one crop for so many things. I think it’s wasteful and unnatural. We’re planting acres upon acres of corn fields so we can have sweeter food, fatter cows, thicker soups, and cardboard.
Don’t get tricked into applauding the diversity of uses as innovation. In order to produce so much corn, farmers worldwide have turned to the unstable practice of monoculture farming, which is the opposite of diversity. This method of farming allows a farmer to produce a lot of one type of crop, but it depletes the soil and destroys ecosystem diversity in the process.
We’re being thrown precariously off balance by little, unassuming ears of corn. We’re consuming thousands gallons of artificial sweetener at the cost of tons upon tons of soil erosion. We’re fattening cattle with food they aren’t designed to eat, which results in sick cows and an increased likelihood of sick people. We’re plowing under forests to plant corn.
I hate to be concerned about corn, but I am. Food should be respected as food and modern agriculture is producing more than dinner. I hate that we’re feeding livestock food they shouldn’t be eating just because it’s cheaper. Furthermore, there are too many hungry people in the world for there to be corn in my toothpaste.
When it comes to corn, we have too much of a good thing. I may love corn, but not at the expense of sick animals and exhausted farmland.
K. Cochran
Filed under: Food + Health, J500 Week 7, Society + Media | Tags: cheeseburger, chicken nuggets, fast food, food inspection standards, McDonalds
When I was a youngster, every Saturday was game day. Being a bit of a tomboy as a child, I loved to play sports. So each Saturday, I was in one of two places-on the basketball court or on the soccer field.
However, as much as I looked forward to expending my energy on the basketball court, it was what followed each of my games that made my heart race with excitement. That was knowing my dad would be taking me to McDonald’s.
Photo by mbell1975/Courtesy Flickr
During my adolescence, I had an adoration for eating under the golden arches, or what my dad and I refered to as our “weekly ritual.” I fondly remember stepping through the doors of McDonald’s and immediately having my senses delighted with the aromas of oily fries, greasy cheeseburgers and deep-fried chicken nuggets. As a child, these unhealthy fast foods had become a staple of my diet. I am not completely sure how McDonald’s cuisine (if it can even be described as such) became my comfort food.
Photo by SuellenLemos/Courtesy Flickr
At the ripe age of eight, my palate was accustomed to greasy, fatty foods and as a result, I requested it more often. Coincidentally, there happened to be a McDonald’s conveniently located a few blocks from my elementary school. On the days my mom picked me up from school, we would make a pit-stop at Mickey D’s and pick up my favorite after school snack- an order of large fries. I am a creature of habit and cheeseburgers and fries were my food habit. Being raised in a time when fast food restaurants are abundant and within blocks of one another, it was exceptionally easy for me to obtain. Unfortunately, the news isn’t any better for kids nowadays. Apparently, a new study found children in the United States are getting over a fourth of their daily calories from junk food.
Even more troublesome is a report by USA Today, which said that the beef and chicken supplied to schools is not checked nearly as rigorously as McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, which cautiously scrutinizes its meat for bacteria and pathogens. When hearing information like this, it makes me cringe. Why aren’t government food inspection standards uniform? Inspection standards should be rigorous when it comes to the quality and safety of food. We place a certain amount of trust in our government to make sure that the food we eat won’t harm our health. So, whether it be a burger from Burger King or ground beef in a school lunch, it should become a habit for it to be examined closely and carefully.
Micole Aronowitz
Filed under: J500 Week 7 | Tags: deforestation, fast food, McDonalds, michael pollan, packaging, recycling, waste
My favorite childhood restaurant, like so many other people, was McDonald’s. I was a chicken Mcnugget Happy Meal with a Dr. Pepper kind of girl. It came in a cardboard box with fun drawings and games and, of course, you can’t forget the awesome varieties of gender-specific toys that came with it.
He's everyone's favorite red-headed clown, but it's a sad fact of life his happy meals contribute to deforestation, waste, and litter across the United States!
In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, author Michael Pollan remembers the same excitement I got as a child from unwrapping McDonald’s items, as if they were “little presents.” Even though McDonald’s fell out of favor with me, new Ronald McDonald enthusiasts are born every day, explaining its sales of over $5.97 billion, exceeding the $5.94 billion expected revenue. It’s easy to forget that as fast- food chains continue to grow, the need for wrapping up those “little presents” grows as well.
According to No Free Refills‘ (NFR) 2008 Fast Food Packaging and Production report, the Southern forests in the U.S. are the world’s largest paper-producing region, and the place most fast-food companies get their brand-specific packaging. The report claims 43 million acres of forests have been converted to pine plantations. The U.S. Forest Service states that now, nearly one in five acres of Southern forest are devoted to pine plantation.
Fast-food packaging isn’t only affecting Southern woodlands, though.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that in 2008, 32 percent of all waste came from packaging and containers, the highest contributor of waste accounting for 77 million tons. According to the NFR report, the average American eats fast-food more than 150 times a year and 1.8 million tons of total packaging waste is from fast-food.
To be fair, even NFR verifies that 83 percent of McDonald’s food and beverage packaging is made from some form of recycled paper or wood-fiber material. McDonald’s also reduced its waste by 1,100 tons from 2004 levels simply by making minor adjustments to french fry boxes in 2005. While I don’t mean to belittle such efforts, it seems as if McDonald’s overlooked perhaps the simplest recycling tool used in almost every school, office building and park-recycling bins.
According to a 2009 study conducted in part by Rutgers and Indiana University, the presence of a specialized recycling container reduced waste by 35 percent. So when children find items wrapped in McDonald’s packaging six times more appetizing than identical snacks in plain wrapping, as this 2007 Stanford University study found, it’s obvious what kind of recycling power McDonald’s could have.
Without recycling bins, one of the most recognizable signs of environmental responsbility, McDonald’s mission to be greener than the rest is very much underminded. While McDonald’s has implemented incredibly successful recycling bin programs in Japan, Canada, and Europe, such initiatives are severely lacking in the U.S. I know I’ve never seen a recycling bin in a Lawrence McDonald’s, at least.
The beauty of locally franchised McDonald’s though, is that customers have a lot of input. If local McDonald’s eaters decide they’d rather recycle than throw their paper bag, wax-lined cup, napkins, hamburger wrapper, french fry container and ketchup packets at the end of a meal, let the owners know. We may just find that all our fast-food friends need is a little nudge.
-Kayla R.
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Filed under: Food + Health, J500 Week 7, Society + Media, Waste + Recycling | Tags: California, compost, compost law, composting, food waste, landfill, methane, scrape your plate day, university of colorado
Studying food and the environment lately makes mealtime a bit different than in my past 21 years of life. My thoughts have been consumed by where my food comes from and what it does for my body. I feel like a can’t even enjoy food anymore at times, because I have been so worried about the harmful pesticides and damage that the environment has been through just so I can eat my dinner- I feel guilty. After breakfast I poured the remains of my oatmeal in the drain, turned on the faucet and pushed the disposal button to make my leftovers disappear. I do this at least once daily without even thinking about it, but for some reason this morning I started to think about where that food was going; down the drain and into the sewer system- it was not just disappearing. Nothing about this process ever seemed wrong to me until today; why waste food that has enough nutrients to support even the human body?
Leftover oatmeal as I dump it down the drain to "disappear".
My mind wandered for a while, questioning the amount of waste my roommates and I, the University of Kansas campus, the Lawrence area, the U.S., the world produces. That is when I found an article explaining that food waste and other organic waste take up almost half of the landfill space in the U.S. and release an unruly amount of methane, which is 34 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. This article also explains a law that was passed in California in 2009 requiring businesses and residents to compost food scraps.
I looked further into composting to find out what exactly could be composted and what it takes to compost food waste, in residences and in businesses. This website walked me through the basics of composting. I was surprised to find that composting really is not that expensive or difficult, but for some reason I still cannot see myself composting- at least not at my own home. I think part of my reasoning is the fact that I don’t want a smelly bin or pile of waste in my yard. Yeah, I realize that my reasoning is shallow in some sense, but I’m kind of a “neat-freak”.
If I wasn’t going to compost on my own, maybe KU would. I looked at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Environmental Center to see what one of the most environmental-friendly universities is doing. CU hosts a “Scrape Your Plate Day” each year and in 2008 collected 1,760 pounds of food for compost from 5,887 people in the dining halls. That got me to thinking what KU could do to help and the answer to that is a lot. Individually, people like myself do not want to take the time and deal with the smells of composting, but a University could make a huge difference, like CU has done.
Becca N.
J500 Media and the Environment 
