Final blog post, for real this time.

Over the past ten weeks we've been looking into food production and the flaws that come with it. We've responded to articles that look into the specifics of certain foods like tomatoes or chicken. Of everything we learned about food, what I found most interesting was what we learned from Estabrook's Tomatoland. In her article she noted that there isn't really such a thing as a fresh tomato sold in a grocery store anymore. They are all chemically ripened and virtually unbruise-able so that consumers can see a perfectly round, red tomato sitting on their grocery store shelf. After reading this I am going to try to grow my own tomato's rather than buy the fake ones at the store. It's important for people to grow their own food also because then they realize the true value of food, which people tend to miss these days. Everyone just goes to the store and grabs a bushel of bananas having no idea how long it took to grow them, whereas if you grow your own tomato over the summer you'll know exactly how long it took to ripen when you're eating it. I can try to convince my friends to do the same thing as me to build upon my knowledge of tomatoes.

Pollan + Dupuis = Thought

After reading articles by Pollan and Dupuis here’s the similarity I can see. One article is written by Pollan, the other mentions him in the first sentence. As for the contemporary food issue, well, Pollan sounds like pollen. Pollen is in flowers, and there are some flowers you can eat so that just about does it. Ok just kidding there was more than just that in common about these articles. The contemporary food issue that I'm going to elaborate on for the next two to four hundred words is that food isn’t just food anymore, it’s thought.

To set the stage a little we’re going to travel back in time a little, and by a little I mean to the Stone Age or around the time fire was first discovered. Before fire food was not that abundant (I'm just making this up so please roll with me), people ate what they could find without cooking it. Although they could’ve caught animals for food, they couldn’t cook them to eat without fire. The discovery of fire then allowed them to be able to cook the animals they caught and because there were so many other options for food it became abundant. There are ways to eat like that today, all you have to do is go camping you may not be living the same way they did because they didn’t have your Patagonia Gore-Tex boots, Marmot Jacket, and ten-person North Face tent, but you’re catching your food and eating it just like they did. Back then, and in this way of living, eating was simple. If you caught it, you sure as hell ate it because you don’t know when the next time you were going to catch something. You definitely don’t care if the fish you pull out of the stream has too much mercury in it you just want to eat.

That was back then (and in select situations now) though, nowadays if you don’t know exactly what you're eating you almost seem ignorant. Dupuis notes not the ignorance but the aspect that you have to now think about food rather than just eat it. She lists a few popular food authors and then says they “have turned our food choices into moral choices” (34). To me this stands out because it’s not even just a personal choice about food anymore, but now there are morals involved? You’ve got to be kidding me. In today’s day and age you can offend someone you’ve never met at the grocery store if they walked past and hear you order hamburgers from the counter and they’re a vegetarian. We’ve focused a lot on this issue in class already but more about where out food comes from, not what is in our food. I’d be curious to see if anyone in our class actually knows what a calorie is, and saying it’s the stuff in food doesn’t count.

"That was such a good orange."

As I noted in earlier posts as well as my most recent food log, oranges are a great snack that are becoming increasingly more popular around campus. My only assumption as to why I’ve started seeing everyone eating oranges is that they have been put out ‘to take’ in dining halls around campus. People also associate oranges with warm weather and now that it’s nice out on a consistent basis, the number of oranges consumed by students are going up. If you didn’t already know oranges are a great source of mainly vitamin C, which, “Helps the body develop resistance against infectious agents and scavenge harmful, pro-inflammatory free radicals from the blood” (Orange Fruit Nutrition Facts). Of course this is what orange sellers all over the world constantly advertise about, but what most people don’t know is that oranges also contain a good amount of potassium, which plays an important component of cell and body fluids that helps control heart rate and blood pressure through countering sodium actions as well as calcium (Orange Fruit Nutrition Facts). Being lactose intolerant I need to find other ways than milk to get my sufficient amount of calcium. By no means does orange juice replace milk but it’s important to have some form of calcium in my diet. As a university I would also put out fresh fruit to try to promote healthy eating around campus. I might even consider the same approach the DU currently takes now by placing apples, oranges, and bananas in separate bins, but is there a better way?

            A three-person team of doctors examined if slicing a fruit such as apples or oranges has an impact on how much of the fruit was eaten. The study states, “Slicing increased the percentage of children selecting and consuming oranges, while a similar effect was not found for apples. The impact of slicing fruit was greatest among younger students” (Swanson, Branscum, Nakayima). How could these results be? Apples and oranges are both fruit. Does it have something to do with how appetizing the fruit looks when sliced rather than whole? It has to. For instance, when an apple is sliced, it looks plain, sometimes there is texture that you can see but it just looks like an apple. You have no idea the quality apple it is when it’s sliced, but if you see a big brown bruise on an apple you know what lies beneath the skin. There are no characteristics of apples that would give someone a heads up to knowing that it’s a particularly good apple when it’s sliced.  Oranges on the other hand are the opposite. A somewhat bruised orange could be the sweetest one you’ve ever tasted because the orange peel protects the inner fruit.

            I highly doubt that DU will start slicing their oranges because no one has ever told them that it might be a good idea, but if they do have some secret plan to alter the way we eat in a positive way then slicing oranges just may be the way to go.

Works Cited

Swanson, Mark, Adam Branscum, and Peace Julie Nakayima. "Promoting Consumption of Fruit in Elementary School Cafeterias. the Effects of Slicing Apples and Oranges." Appetite 53.2 (2009): 264-7. Print.

"Orange Fruit Nutrition Facts." Www.nutrition-and-you.com. Web. 15 May 2012. <http://www.nutrition-and-you.com/orange-fruit.html>

observations

When looking through the trends of our classes eating habits I found a few things. The first is that we all snack pretty consistently on a day to day basis, and second is that a lot of people go to breakfast or brunch as it's called on the weekends because its open late enough and is pretty good despite the lesser quality of some other meals.

What I Ate Thursday - Saturday

THURSDAY

9:43 am – quickly ate an orange to hold me over through my 10 am class

9:50 am – might have swallowed some toothpaste

2:15 pm – went to Nagel and got two pieces of pizza from Devin (The Dude). Ate one and put one in my fridge. Had a medium sized water.

·      Pepperoni, red and green peppers, black olives

3:49 pm – other piece of pizza from Nagel and ≈ ½ Nalgene of water

3:57 pm – piece of gum. Nobody likes pizza breath.

4:47 pm – finished that piece of gum

4:49 pm – stole a handful of chocolate covered raisins from my roommate

7:30 pm – my friend’s mom took like 10 of us from the hall out to H Burger for dinner

·      Appetizers: fried jalapenos, truffle fries (French fries with parmesan cheese and truffle oil), and something with artichoke hearts.

·      Entre: H Burger – sesame seed bun, beef patty (medium-rare), bacon, cheddar cheese, hatch chilies, lettuce, tomato, onion

·      Lots of water

FRIDAY

11:15 – grabbed a banana while waiting in line for Nelson to open. Once it opened I toasted a plain bagel and put some peanut butter on it. Had a glass of water with a little lemonade in it to keep things interesting.

3:45ish – bought a bag of Lays Classic from the shwayder art building snack machine when I was working on ceramics. Also bought Twizzlers but didn’t start them. I had to break a $5 in the Pepsi machine and get all my change back in quarters.

4:00-4:30 – ate the better two thirds of the pack of Twizzlers that I was trying to save.

4:45 – still hungry. Went to Nagel to pick up dinner.

·      Fajita bowl: chicken, black beans, rice, lettuce, pico, and chips

·      Side of mac and cheese to put in the fridge

12:03 – side of mac and cheese from Nagel and some more chocolate raisins (thanks Harry).  

SATURDAY

12:30 – went to nelson for breakfast. Eggs, potatoes, and some cantaloupe that wasn’t very ripe

4:15 – last few Twizzlers

4:42 – left over fajita bowl from Nagel (roughly ¼ left) and one of the best oranges I've had from Nelson.

6:45 – went to Nelson for dinner. Very happy it was spaghetti and meatball night because it isn’t half bad. Asked for extra meat balls (6 total) because they were the size of gumballs.

Oranges

SE #4 – Oranges

Did you know that 7500 people faint due to heat exhaustion while harvesting oranges each year in Florida alone? Ok, I might have made that up, but I bet I have your attention now so I can tell you all about the foggy origins of the orange. I chose to investigate oranges because I noticed the increasing number of DU students, myself included, taking them from dining halls now that they have been conveniently placed on our way out the door. They serve as a great snack for in between classes and sometimes I eat them in the morning to postpone breakfast until I’ve finished my first class at 11 a.m. Much to my surprised the quality of these oranges is actually pretty high on the taste scale, but since I don’t know where these particular oranges are coming from I'm unsure of the actual quality. Of course it’s nothing like a fresh one right off the tree, but for Sodexo I’ll take it.

Why are the origins of the orange foggy? Because there is no set country where oranges came from. I of course checked Wikipedia for some background information on oranges and they don’t know either. On the oranges page Wikipedia uses the word “probably” to describe where the orange originated, as in probably from Southeast Asia. In another source I used the author wrote the oranges came from Asia, he just didn’t know specifically which part. The author tried to trace the roots of the orange back by examining where they came up in history. For example,

The Chinese mention them in their earliest writings; the word is Sanskrit: naranga. Some say they were grown in Mesopotamia; some say the Egyptians ate them; some say there are oranges in the Bible, but some say those are not oranges at all. The Romans got them from the Persians, and built the first greenhouses with sheets of mica to protect them: "orangeries." (Weinberger)

The list goes on and the only thing that we can be sure of is that there is no one spot where oranges just popped up. One of the main reasons we have oranges in the states is because Columbus brought them over on his second trip west to America.

            I'm going to fast-forward quite a bit now and focus more on the production aspect of the modern orange that we have all come to love.

Just after the Second World War, three scientists working in central Florida surprised themselves with a simple idea the resulted in the development of commercial orange-juice concentrate. A couple dozen enormous factories sprang out of the hammocks, and Florida, which can be counted on in most seasons to produce about a quarter of all the oranges in the world was soon putting most of them through the process that results in small, trim cans, about two inches in diameter and four inches high, containing orange juice that has been boiled to high viscosity in a vacuum, separated into several component parts, reassembled, flavored, and then frozen solid. (Mcphee 7)

Although this quote is very lengthy it describes in great detail how an orange becomes concentrate. I personally didn’t know that it was so complicated and that chemistry was involved with the formation of the new frozen substance that we can all buy at our local grocery stores. I don’t think this new bit of knowledge will impact my orange juice drinking habits because I usually try not to buy the concentrate since I’d rather not but the work into making it a juice.

            The relationship I’ve had with oranges goes back to when I was incredibly little. My grandma lives in Florida during the winter so each winter my family would travel down to see her and for about a week we could have the freshest orange juice I've ever tasted from a local citrus store called Albritton's. We could also pick clementines right off the vine from the tree she had growing in her backyard and eat them immediately. When I think or oranges I think of my loving grandma and all the times I've gone down to Florida to see her. Knowing how orange concentrate is made in no way impacts my relationship with oranges mainly because there is nothing inhumane about how oranges become concentrate. If I had researched something like chicken or beef maybe I would be hesitant to wolf down my next burger.

Works Cited

McPhee, John. Oranges,. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. Print.

Weinberger, E. (2009). Oranges & peanuts for sale. The Southern Review, 45(1), 148-IX. http://search.proquest.com/docview/206068909?accountid=14608

Meat, Poultry, and Fruit

After reading each of these articles I realized the authors all took a different to how they wrote the essay. Pollan’s article was long and he went with the “I'm going to tell you everything about a subject” to make my point. I also found his article the most boring. Maybe because it was 12 pages, maybe because I'm still a fan of eating red meat and will continue to be for a while, although now I'm going to try to notice where it comes from. I enjoyed reading the Tomatoland article a lot because I'm from an area that grows tomatoes in the summer and I appreciate a really fresh tomato right from the garden. Estabrook took the approach of using a personal story to then give background information on the production aspects of tomatoes. The infographic by Cook used the fear approach. It told us everything bad about chickens in a span of 2 pages. It crammed everything in and there was little information left unnoticed.

The Estabrook and Cook piece focus a lot on the production side of the food. Estabrook focuses a lot on the Florida tomato laws and pre-production as well as production. I found it interesting how the laws in Florida calls for an unblemished, round, hard, green tomato so that it can then be pumped full of chemicals and turned into the tomatoes we eat during the winter. I also liked the series of events the author used when describing the indestructible tomato.

In the infographic I found a rather long quote at the top of the second page to be very interesting. It reads

"Inedibles'' such as the head are transported by auger to the "of- fal room," where they are ground up and then poured into a gi- gantic vat to cook. The few unlucky souls who tend this room must endure sweltering heat and remain ever mindful that the horrible fumes released by the decomposing blood can, in rare cases, become poisonous in a confined space. Of more immedi- ate concern are the augers, mixers, and blenders that crowd the room: workers must avoid getting caught in the machinery and dismembered. What comes out of this room? Chicken feed. (Cook 79)

It was more that I was shocked than interested when reading this until the last words. The fact that chicken heads and other assorted parts made chicken feed made me laugh a little. By the definition of the word they are cannibals because they are eating their own kind. Either way that article was a little on the messed up side.