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.

Couldn't think of a title: Post #6

There was a bit of minor confusion at first because I initially downloaded a Pollan article that was about animals. As I scrolled through the 12-page word I was wondering why it wasn’t 5 pages like Professor Leake said it would be in class. I then went back to blackboard and found the right article and thank god it was the right one because I don’t have the patience right now to read 12 pages. Either way I found the Pollan article that we had to read for this post very interesting because I'm interesting in this kind of thing. He try to chalk up our poor eating habits to a few symptoms that he explains in the article. For example he explains that people in this country are too concerned with their carb count rather than what they are eating. I liked how he uses the koala bear as an example because eucalyptus leaves are their primary diet, unlike humans who have thousands of options of what to eat each day.

What I found most interesting was when he was talking about his mom and what she ate for dinner as a kid, and what she made for dinner for her kids. In particular I thought this quote where he explains American culture was the highlight of that part. He says, “In America, each generation has been free to reinvent its cuisine, very often more than once” (Pollan 3). This is true in my life too because my dad has told me that he used to eat bowls of cottage cheese as a kid, AND THAT HE LOOKED FORWARD TO IT! Not only do I find this disgusting because I'm lactose intolerant and bad things would happen if I ate a bowl of cottage cheese, but the look of it has never been appealing to me, it’s just too lumpy. I also began to think about other cultures and how this doesn’t really happen. Take oriental people for example, meals are tradition in their family and so it the food. I have a friend who knows her grandma’s tempura batter recipe because it’s important for them to keep that part of their heritage alive.

Finally, I pretty much eat whatever the hell I want. I'm lucky enough to have a fast metabolism so there aren’t that many things that are out of the question, except for milk and many cheeses. Although I'm able to eat the widest variety of food, I choose to eat healthy when I can because I know it will only help me in the long run. Its important to keep a balanced diet and I've known that since middle school so I make sure to incorporate more than one food group at each meal.

Oreo Cookies

Sam Blinderman

Professor Leake

WRIT 1133

4-24-12

Oreo Cookies

When is the last time you sat down and had dinner? I’m not talking about eating in college where food is inhaled rather than eaten, I'm talking about having a set time for dinner, sitting down with friends or family and eating. During this meal you should talk with them, see how their day went, if anything is bothering them, at least pretend to be interested for the duration of the meal. Dinner, and furthermore meals in general are becoming shorter and shorter as time goes on. We are turning into unhealthy eaters by shoving food in our face whenever we have a second free. The lack of time that we have today is transforming how we eat into something it never should’ve become. This change doesn’t take place until college though. Bear with me for a second and imagine your life is an Oreo cookie. Each part of the cookie represents a stage of life. It’s no coincidence that two of the layers, the outside cookies, are the same because in these stages your relationship with food is similar. The outside cookies represent a relationship with food in which you organize your meals around others. For example, when you're really young, you're mom screams up the stairs that it’s time for dinner, and when you have a family of your own you scream up the stairs to your kids that it’s time to come down for dinner. During this time you are focused on eating with your family rather than when you can. This brings us to the cream filling of the cookie or independence stage, which represents the middle years of life where you are busy with college, work, and everything else. In these years you don’t have time to sit down and eat dinner because your schedule is based around yourself rather than a family. During this stage you are not focused on sitting down and having dinner at the end of the day, but rather how much work you can finish before the hunger overtakes your brain and says, “go eat something quickly.” Eighteen year olds everywhere are realizing there are no more family dinners at college, and they’re shifting the way they eat to become more convenient eaters. They’re disregarding the set meal times they used to know, and starting to eat when they are free. This is a problem because they are messing with the cream filling of their Oreo or independence stage of life by creating bad eating habits that will stick with until they move on to the final cookie stage of life. College students are impacted by this change because they have little time during the week to sit down and take an hour for dinner.

In an article titled “What Causes the Freshman 15,” which lists causes of the weight gain usually experienced by first year students I chose to focus on the relationship that incoming freshman have with food rather than the outcome of weight gain. Many of the causes have “Eating” in the title so I focused mainly on those to see if I could understand where the different eating schedule comes from. Under “New Eating Habits” I found:

When you’re living with parents and going to high school, many of the details of what, when and how much you eat are already planned out for you. Getting to college and having unlimited choices (and limited cooking experience) can make a diet of fast food, chips, soft drinks and pizza at 3 a.m. commonplace. (Scott)

This is the essentially the first mistake someone in the independence stage makes. Rather than trying to maintain a healthy eating schedule many students end up altering their schedule because they don’t know what to do with all the freedom they’ve just been given. In college you are free from parents and the lure to go out and party on a Monday because it’s Karaoke Night at the bar has never been so high. Of course after you're done singing your heart out you might want to eat late at night and then go to bed. This is another way students are changing the way they eat because they are demonstrating something Taco Bell calls fourth meal. Eating four meals a day throws off your eating schedule entirely because you may not wake up hungry in the morning from all the stored fat from the night before.

In another article titled “More Students Eating on the Run; Dorm Food No Longer the Norm” that was written in 1996 the author focused on how college students have very little time to eat and that when they do its usually on the run. This goes to show that even though this article was written just over fifteen years ago, college students still have the same problem today. Mari Lee was a student who was interviewed for this article and explained her various eating habits. She says, “In between, I basically graze, I might have a muffin in the afternoon and some fruit later. . . . It depends how busy I am" (Grad). College students everywhere are feeling what Lee feels as well. I personally know what she’s saying. When I'm busy it’s hard to find time to eat, and other times it’s usually just my laziness that prohibits me from eating.

Take my Tuesday and Thursday mornings as an example. My first class starts at ten in the morning so I set an alarm for 8:40 with the hopes to wake up not feeling tired so I can spring out of bed to get breakfast before Nelson closes at 9:30. I have to leave a lot of extra time because I have a habit of pressing the snooze button a few too many times. What happens more than 50% of the time is that my alarm goes off and I hit snooze until I can roll out of bed and walk two minutes to my hospitality class. By skipping breakfast I’m throwing my body out of its normal schedule. I get back from class and have an hour where I usually shower before statistics. By the time I finish stats at 2 p.m., and haven’t eaten all day, I'm pretty hungry so I have to wolf down a late lunch. Depending on the size lunch I eat I may not be hungry again until 8 p.m. after the dining hall has already closed. Being too lazy to wake and eat or too busy causes students to eat when they can as opposed to when they want to. Katie Johansen, a nutritionist at UC Irvine’s Student Health Center states, “A primary concern of students is time. When they get stressed, their priority is not on eating. They tend to grab what is convenient” (Grad). This is exactly what students everywhere are feeling. When finals roll around, I don’t think about when I'm going to eat lunch I'm thinking about when I'm going to study and if I can eat that’s great.

The lack of time that all college students have leads them to change their eating habits dramatically and shift to eating when they can. John Urry is a British sociologist and describes this habit as the “de-synchronization of time-space paths” (Horwitz 42). At first this sounds like something that Doc Brown would say in “Back to the Future,” but looking back at the article, Urry precedes his statement by saying: “The increased significance of grazing, not eating at fixed meal times in the same place in the company of one’s family or workmates” is what leads to this de-synchronization (Horwitz 42). This is exactly what college students are going through. By having no set eating habits they continue to mess up the cream filling of their metaphorical Oreo.

Due to the lack of time college students have, their eating habits are changing. Rather than eating when they want to, they eat whenever they can, and it usually doesn’t matter what it is it’s still viewed as substance. A bag of chips on the way to class can take the place of lunch sometimes and this will then result in an early dinner and most likely a late night snack before bed. The irregularity of eating habits is changing the way people eat to the point where they may start to become the norm. Getting back to the idea that our lives are modeled after an Oreo it’s clear that if you mess up the cream filling too much you wont have much of an Oreo left. I would urge college students everywhere to stop eating on the go because all you get after shoving your face full of dorm food is a stomachache that lasts a few hours. If we change the way we manage our time to accommodate the extra time we need for meals everyday we can take a big step towards the second of our two outside Oreo cookies. College students are at the perfect age to start creating good eating habits for when they become adults, and I for one am going to make sure that I start eating on more of a daily routine rather than out of convenience because I don’t want my adulthood cookie to crumble everywhere.

Works Cited

Grad, Shelby. "More Students Eating on the Run; Dorm Food No Longer the Norm." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 17 Sept. 1996. Web. 23 Apr. 2012. <http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-17/local/me-44600_1_food-court>

Horwitz, Jamie. "Eating at the Edge." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 9.3 (2009): 42-47. Print.

Scott, Elizabeth. "What Causes the Freshman 15?" About.com Stress Management. 21 Feb. 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2012. <http://stress.about.com/od/studentstress/a/freshman15cause.htm>

Family Dinners

Horwitz uses a series of arguments to create her theory of eating on the edge and how Americans are changing the ways we eat. She uses examples from social media as well as the government to show that American's aren’t really eating together anymore and it has really start from TV Dinners back in 1954. Luce Girard tells us, “The table is ‘social machinery’ where settings inscribe the order of a meal and seating arrangements mirror social power” (Horwitz 44). This is the way it was in my family growing up. We sat down most every night and ate dinner. It wasn’t written down that we all had “spots” at the table, but nobody sat in each other’s spot. My dinner table growing up was an oblong oval. My brother and I sat across from each other where the table was shortest and my parents across from each other where the table was longest. The only minor disruptions to our seating arrangements was when we had guests, in that case the guest sat in the chair awkwardly placed around the bend so we didn’t have to change our seats.

The thing about our seats was that they really only were our seats during meal times. During other times of the day I wouldn’t be so careful as to only sit in my seat because there were other options. I would sit in my brother’s seat if I were going to watch TV or dads if I wanted to look outside. My options were not so limited when I was eating meals at home alone, but once the group dynamic of my family was together it was take your and only your seat please. As my family separated through divorce, I noticed we all starting doing our own thing for meals. As I got older and tried to sit down and have meals with family members, it just didn’t work out. We all started developing our own meal habits although on occasion would schedule to eat together.

This all relates to Horwitz because I am one of the people who have been through his eating on the edge theory. I have seen the group dynamic of my family change and go form a very ritualized family dinner time, to an individualistic time where we all plan to eat in our spare time. I think that for the world to slow down a little we have to shift back to the ritualized family dinners, or at least I'm going to.

Sunday Funday, Except for Nagel

Sundays are a great days. It is the day of rest for Jews because God created the world in six days and then took it easy on Sunday. Depending on the time of year, they are usually reserved for football, good food, friends, family, and often a good time. This past Sunday though, I was sitting in Nagel, from 6-7, taking copious field notes on my surroundings and judging anyone that walked in the door. What more could I ask for?

I was surprised when I walked in and saw a line at Salsa Rico. I mean really how many people would go to Nagel on Sunday? I’d been there many times before because I like to mix it up between Nelson and Nagel, and by mix it up I mean when there’s nothing to eat at Nelson for dinner my friends and I collectively decided it’s a Nagel night. After waiting in the short line of eight people in front of Salsa Rico and getting my food I walked back to a table that would allow me to see the majority of Nagel. I began to look around and observe the people around me. I didn’t want to stare at any group or individual for too long or else it would be awkward so I kept my head on a swivel observing things like what they were eating, how they were eating it, who they were eating it with. Here’s what I saw.

The less than booming scene of Nagel on Sunday night consisted of roughly a 50-50 ratio between people who were there to eat, and people who were there to study. The studiers filled up the booths that lined the walls and the rest of the eaters were spread out in their respected groups at open tables. Groups of five and three were eating dinner, a few of them had quesadillas, some had a meal swipe, and some I couldn’t see without being too nosey. The meal swipe combo consists of one scoop of rice and beans each, and one soft shell taco. For anyone that is hungry, it’s not enough food. This is why I’ve developed a workaround to the traditional meal swipe combo. It comes in the square-cardboard-to-go-oyster type box, so the trick is to order something larger more substantial than a taco, rice, and beans, and to make sure that it comes in the same square container. Anyways, the groups eating dinner seemed to be purely social. Just as my friends and I are when we are there. They also probably didn’t feel like eating Nelson that night so they walked the distance to Nagel. I couldn’t peg down the exact genre of music that was playing because it was more a combination of things than anything, but it didn’t matter to me I tuned it out and kept to my notes. I didn’t want to go as far as to eavesdrop into other peoples conversations, but I may have heard a few things as I walked by about some annoying residents.

Salsa Rico isn’t the only place in the Nagel Café, although it is the only feature open late and everyday. Along with Salsa Rico there are places where you can get pizza, chicken, and coffee from Starbucks. Usually I opt for the chicken and double mac and cheese for a meal swipe because it’s a lot more food for the same meal swipe combo, but they weren’t open. The staff at Salsa Rico was wearing their usual white Sodexo chef coats and the cashier was wearing his usual blue Sodexo shirt. The cashier looked especially unhappy to be working that night. I could tell from his lack of interest and body language, but I don’t blame him I’d probably hate my job at that point too. While I was eating I noticed something that seems to happen in every eating location on campus. Among the people eating, there are always some that are studying. Whether it be at the Pub or even Nelson, I always see a computer open.

Within the specific community of DU, eating areas serve a double purpose. The first and most obvious is to eat, but the second and maybe the one that goes more unnoticed is that once the eating areas are cleaned up, they are a great place to study. They are quiet, clean, and there’s a lot of room to spread out depending on the table you pick. We are lucky to be somewhere where our cafeterias serve a double purpose. In 2006, Princeton, yes Princeton, decided to redesign their cafeterias to make them more student friendly. The article states, “The project is part of the University's plan to enhance the residential college system to better serve students as well as to provide them with more options” (Stevens). This is what DU has already accomplished by providing us with areas that we can eat and study at the same time because they recognize sometimes we are short on time and need to multi-task.

Works Cited

Stevens, Ruth. "Princeton University - Designers Chosen to Give Dining Halls Distinctive Look." Princeton University. 31 Mar. 2006. Web. 16 Apr. 2012. <http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S14/38/16G08/index.xml?section=topstories>

Source for SE #3

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S14/38/16G08/index.xml?section=topstories&path=/main/news/archive/S14/38/16G08/index.xml&next=1

this article describes how they are changing the dining halls at princeton to feel more comfortable for students and less like a standard cafeteria. 

Spread it on

Even the smell of food makes me hungry, reading about it in great detail makes it much worse. I don’t know how to explain it. There are days when I eat full meals and I walk past something and catch a whiff of something tasty and my stomach begins to growl. Food is a big part of my life, and I used to take it for granted, then I spent the better part of a day in jail. I’m not going to go into detail as to how I got there, but I got arrested this past summer and had to spend the morning in my town’s jail and then the better part of the afternoon in county because that’s where my bond hearing was.

After reading Cate’s article on how inmates made “spreads” out of ingredients they’d collected throughout the day I thought to myself “That probably would’ve been smart,” but I never stayed overnight so there wasn’t much time for me to fashion a spread. To the inmates who are in CJ5, making spreads is a means of expression and a social activity. They can make it in larger portions for many inmates, or for themselves when they are hungry late at night after a bland 4 o’clock dinner. I found the part of Cate’s study where she compared making spreads as a way for inmates to feel free of authority. She states, “Spread, on the other hand, reflects personal taste and individual access to resources. As such, it is an inmate’s product of choice, not under the control of any authority” (20). This was most interesting to me because people who are stuck and suffering in jail are looking for an excuse to do something they haven’t yet, in this case it may be create an elaborate spread

O’Donnell’s study covered the shifting in China’s post-Mao eating habits. Southerners eat fish because it is the most readily available item and northerners stick to more beef because cattle graze in the northern part of the country. O’Donnell explains, “In fact, eating is central to the Chinese understanding of what it means to be human” (32). This basically means that food plays a vital role in Chinese society. Food also plays a large role in American society, and I see many similarities in the ways food plays into both our societies. What I found most interesting was that O’Donnell noticed that shared meals “Deepened friendships, greased business deals, and reaffirmed hometown identities” just like it does in American (34).

Advertising Without Words

http://847cuisine.blogspot.com/2012/04/advertisements.html

Well this was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Maybe I'm just lucky but the first thing I looked at on the first essay I chose was "Wildfire does not have to advertise, their food and reputation does that for them." The same goes for Blentec with the exception that they do advertise, but they don't say anything and let their product speak for itself. This is the same concept Nick was illustrating because neither of the companies need to say anything and people will still buy their products.

Sierra Mist and Blenders

Blendtec and Sierra Mist are the two companies whose advertisement I chose to analyze. It’s clear that Sprite is a staple beverage in our country, and everyone knows who they are, so I chose to see how an opponent of their, Sprite, advertised. Blendtec is a company that makes blenders among other kitchen appliances. The blender they make is one of the most sophisticated in the world, and it has something like three horsepower. You're probably thinking three? Are you kidding? But I’m going to flip the question on you and say THREE HORSEPOWER?! It’s a blender not a horse drawn carriage what in the world would you use three horsepower for in a blender. For the rest of this short essay I will give a breakdown of both ads and then a conclusion on what it means to us.

Sierra Mist ad: playful music, attacks the opponent, perfect looking can of soda, shine on the ice cubs, and perfect images of carbonation. These are the basic components that make up this ad. The ad starts with a fairy dull can of Sprite and then states that Sprite uses artificial preservatives. Then out of nowhere, a can of Sierra Mist drops down as if it was just pulled out of the cooler on a hot sunny day condensation and all and gives such a strong gust of wind from how it landed that the sprite can falls over and turns out to be a cardboard standup. The catch phrase “Get real” is stated by a friendly sounding woman and then the can is poured over some very shiny ice cubes and all the words on the screen says is real sugar and nothing artificial referring to how it was sweetened. The main strategy of this ad is attacking something we all know, mainly sprite. This is clear form the very opening of the ad, and if sierra mist was confident enough in their own product they might not have to attack sprite from the very beginning. Their appeal is to try to make their product seem real, and made from all natural ingredients. Why anyone would believe them I'm not really sure because all soda’s are made pretty much the same way in a factory. I feel that the ad could be targeting parents who don’t want their kids to be drinking artificially made drinks or kids who should try a different drink. Either way, I can see that from the approach they make towards this ad strategy that they are trying to promote a natural or real drink to the public because everyone seems to be fixed on what is naturally or even locally made these days.

Blendtec ad: no spoken words, pump up music, artistic camera angles, artfully engineered, and slow motion clips. I felt like I was watching an episode of How It’s Made on the discovery channel for this ad. I felt the ad was pretty effective because I sat on the edge of my seat waiting for some big punch line and all I came out with was a silent commercial and the words artfully engineered, which is exactly what Blendtec tried to portray in this commercial. In my opinion they did a pretty good job because they built up the blender to be much more than it is. I mean seriously, after watching that commercial, if the super slow motion strawberry clips were taken out you wouldn’t believe that this was a promo for a blender. It looked like it could be a commercial for GE everything was so sophisticated looking. I took a look at some of the prices for those things and it gave me a clue as to which target audience they are going after. Rich people. These blenders range from 300 to 1000 dollars, for a blender that can supposedly destroy a cell phone. Based on all the high-class preference put on this ad, I think its just shows a more negative side of our country. It shows that people do engineer a blender instead of a playground or something much more useful. The worst is that they turn around and then sell these things for hundreds of dollars and people love to buy them. The ad appeals to the rich because only they can afford something so ridiculous.

Food cultures and values have changed a lot in recent years. Food used to be something that was always local. There were times when towns would supply food for the people that lived there and if there was a food that wasn’t there you didn’t eat it. That’s just how it was. Now everything has been enlarged and people eat whatever they want. It is only now starting to be cool to use local, natural ingredients so ad campaigns are designed after that. Take Sierra Mist for example, their ad is based upon the fact that they aren’t using anything fake. They are trying to let everyone know this so that they form a different opinion on them. If Americans stopped being so foolish when it came to food then they’d realize that being natural is the only way we are going to survive so it’s much of an advertising campaign if we all need to be doing it in the next 10 years.

Blendtec Ad:
http://www.blendtec.com/?gclid=CMryp8LSpq8CFUZgTAodLhJSYg 

Sierra Mist: In the upper left hand corner of the page click "see the ad"
http://www.sierramist.com/ 

Wish my family had a secret recipe

It was clear from reading these articles that both these authors bring much more to the table than just food. They are both bringing cultural and personal significance to the table with them. I’m not going to specifically quote what they says but I’ll explain it so you could understand if you took the time to read the article. Nicholson writes about the personal significance his mother had to white food and how she liked having everything be pure on the plate if possible. The cultural aspects he used was when he described her English cooking style of meat and potatoes. The author had the way his mother used to cook implanted into his brain so that he also was pleased by white foods.

Ahn was much easier to figure out from the get go because he stated that he was connected to his mother through her Korean culture and cuisine, although she never formally taught him anything. The way he grew up having two fridges help personal significance for him because it made him realize that there was a distinct different culture in his garage.

Both authors use memory to convey their significance of food. Luckily for me, I already wrote the short essay that is supposed to come after this entry so I too used memory to associate different people to different foods. Instead of answering the last portion of this entry in paragraph for I'm just going to say yes. Yes, reading these pieces reminded me of my own connection to food and it’s listed just below in the short essay titled “You Remember What You Eat.”

What a Surprise

Today, I had the best sandwich I've ever made from Nelson Dining Hall. I can’t say it’s the best thing I've ever eaten from there because omelets on the weekends and some occasional dinners can outrank this sandwich, but not by much, except for the omelets those are way better. This sandwich most likely tasted better because I was a bit hungry after only eating a croissant for breakfast around 10 o’clock and it was almost 3 PM. I decided to get bread from the bread drawers rather than from the bags that lay near the sandwich station and rather than attempt a Panini I went with toasted bread approach.

Something on the toaster must have been broken because I had to put my bread through 3 times to get a decent toast and it was on the darkest setting. In my frustration of the toaster not working I decided to pile up the makings of my sandwich on my plate. I grabbed some turkey, salami, provolone cheese, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Why no lettuce you ask? Well just as I walked in to check out what was still there for me to eat I saw the old sandwich guy digging his hand around in the lettuce bin, without a glove, so I skewed away from the lettuce today.

Finally my bread had finished its transformation into toast. I went back towards the sandwich area and grabbed the mayo and spicy mustard. A little bit of those on each piece of bread and the construction began. To make a long story short I made a damn good sandwich. I know this because when I sat down to a virtually empty Nelson dining hall, the only other person who was in their and on her way out stopped and said, “That looks like a good sandwich” and then proceeded to ask me what I put on it.

Once she was done asking me questions, I was finally able sit down and enjoy all the work I had just put in between those two slices of whole wheat bread. As I sat at the very first large table in Nelson, alone, I thought to myself this is kind of nice. Sure company would be great but I was tired and didn’t feel like talking. All I wanted to do was eat the sandwich I just labored over because I was hungry. When I walked to put my empty plate on the dishes conveyor I glanced at the desert table. Yellow Jell-O with whipped cream, no thanks. On my way out I grabbed my usual red hard candy from the bowl near the front door and was on my way to JMAC. 

Potato, Potato

Well this is a little awkward, the last blog post I wrote was titled “Final Blog Post,” I guess I can chalk this one up to the fact that I was already registered for a different writing class and only recently switched into this one. I think I’ll live and according to Sullivan, once I’m really through with this blog no one is really going to read it again. Either way I’m back to blogging, and am pretty excited about it. The previous topics I wrote about were the news, and not to say the news doesn’t excite me all that much, but the news doesn’t excite me all that much. There are topics that are interesting but I find that food unlike the news is something you can talk to anyone about because there is little to no prior knowledge needed.

This relates to the article we just read about how different advertisers use different levels of language to attract different social classes to buy their chips. When I made the statement that anyone can talk about food I wasn’t challenging the hypothesis we just read about, but rather stating the obvious that everyone can really talk about food because everyone has undoubtedly had a potato chip in their life. It would be funny to see a politician trying to talk to a bum about a bag of Terra’s Yukon Gold chips and see the bum have no idea what he was talking about because he only knows lays because it has fewer words on the bag.

In this article they connect the language levels on the bags to different levels of society being able to read them. And then because they can read them, they are more appealing whereas if they cared about saving money they might go with the chip that costs them roughly 20 cents less per ounce. I found the health aspect they explored most interesting because all of the chips they did research on contained no trans fat. But when they looked at the bags only two of the inexpensive brands of chips advertised there was no trans fat compared to all of the expensive chips advertising that there was none.

I’d expect to see the same kinds of advertising with fast food chains. It already shows with their burger ads that have been going on for the last few years mainly between McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy’s. Whether the ad is saying “I’m lovin’ it” to pretend as if anyone actually enjoys a Big Mac or saying “Fresh Never Frozen Beef” to try to make you believe that burger isn’t heated up in the back of the place you're ordering it from the ads are all trying to appeal to different people. The only major difference from the burger and chip ads are that the burger ads mainly use TV and images instead of text, but in the end you're still getting the same crappy burger, there’s actually a difference in between potato chips.

You Remember What You Eat

After reading the articles by Ahn and Nicholson I gained a new take on what significance food has in our lives. Before the articles, I viewed food as something everyone needed to sustain their lives with. It was used as a means of energy, which would put it high on the scale of significance because it’s something that is daily necessity. After reading the two articles I not only kept this view but was also realized that food has a large part in your memories. Whether it’s the food that your English or Korean parents always ate or just something you can associate with a member of your family, food links different people, places, and events. Certain foods can hold more significance because you can associate them with someone or something that you value. The remained of this short essay will explain the foods I find significant and what memory I associate them with.

I have to start with a personal favorite, and a favorite that everyone on my mom’s side of the family seems to love. My grandpa was born in Georgia and since I was little he's raised us eating Brunswick stew. Around the time I was nine years old I had my first bowl, and at first it was too spicy for my taste. I only struggled through small amounts because I didn’t want my cousins to notice I wasn’t having any. As I aged and began to enjoy the heat that came along with the stew I began to associate the stew with my grandpa. When he died, we had Brunswick stew and Gazpacho at his Shiva because those were two of his favorite foods. Every time I'm at a family occasion on my mom’s side, there is usually a container of Brunswick stew that has been thawed out and made with dinner.

There are two places for every event that was help there, I would say 95% of the time we had the same two meals at each of the houses. I can associate a big tray of deli meat along with usually two types of salad one being either pasta or potato and the other being lettuce and a bowl of potato chips to my Uncle Bruce and Aunt Joy’s house. Technically Bruce is my mom’s cousin, but we all just call him and his wife aunt and uncle. And two large casserole pans with a regular and barbeque brisket along with a bowl of fruit and usually some sort of cake for desert at my Grandma Barbara’s. No matter what the occasion was, the meals consisted of that. On birthdays, Hanukkah, and after Passover ended there was the same meal at each of my respected relatives houses. Eventually we all got sick of the same meal, but no one said anything, it was the time we were spending with each other that everyone cared about so the meal of cold cuts and chips became bearable for all of us. That is why I hold a tray of mediocre cold cuts and brisket, cooked the Jewish way in the oven, significant in my memory, because of all the fun family events that took place at each of those dinners.

A few other foods that hold value because of my memory are pancakes, corn beef sandwiches, and this one sandwich called the bacon Loretta from a local high school favorite joint. There was a family favorite restaurant in the neighboring town that I grew up in, Highland Park, called Walker Brother’s Pancake House. My family of four, my cousins family of four, my two grandparents, and usually my uncle would all go on a Saturday or Sunday and enjoy a big breakfast. We all ordered the same thing, and rarely needed to look at a menu before ordering. To this day I still get a kids menu to do the word search and since I’ve completed the same puzzle year after year I can complete it in a matter of minutes. Another restaurant that I hold a special place in my memory for is called Manny’s Delicatessen. It offers one of the biggest most delicious corned beef and pastrami sandwiches I’ve ever eaten. Once again I grew up eating at this place because it was on the way to the airport when we flew out of Midway airport to go to Florida each winter to go visit my grandparents. When I was young I could barely muscle down half of the sandwich and then be too full to continue, nowadays I finish the entire thing without a problem except that I feel as if I have a small food baby after finishing. A final place that is specific to the suburbs surrounding Chicago where I’m from is called Sarkis Café. From the outside, the place looks like a run-down, dumpy place where some illegal drug could have probably been produced at some point. On the inside it’s not that much different; the place is small but legendary. You order at the counter and within ten minutes your food is in front of you. Orders vary on the type of Loretta you get. Whether it is from bacon to turkey, I’m sure they’d all be good if only I tried something other than the bacon Loretta with an egg and cheesy hash. This meal is made up of a sandwich made on French break with bacon, egg, mayo, cheese, and a mix of diced tomatoes, onions, and green peppers. A big pile of hash browns to the left or right with more provolone cheese melted on top and you’ve got my order ready to eat. The place only takes cash and sometimes it is so busy you have to order to go and eat in the car. It’s infamous for being the breakfast place for many high schoolers to go if there is every a day off or delayed start. It’s incredibly bad for you, but that never seems to stop anyone from going there.

Food can cause you to go back to a certain time in your life just from the smell. It holds a physical and mental value that I feel is one of the most important things in our lives. Not only does it sustain our lives, but it enriches it with new experiences. It can spark conversations if multiple people have ever been to or had the same thing as you and become a tradition if you make it into one. Now I have to go do something I’ve been waiting to do since I started writing this, eat.

Final Blog Post

What I found most useful was that we talked about current events almost every day at the beginning of class. I found it most interesting because it made me start to realize how important it is to be caught up with current events. As I remember reading in one of my classmates’ blogs, not keeping up with the news makes you feel like a tourist in your own country. As an adult especially its important to know what is actually going on so you don’t seem disinterested in the general public and welfare of our country. I would apply this knowledge of following the news beyond this course so that I start following news more carefully and reading newspaper articles whether it be in print or online. I don’t want to be that guy when I'm older who doesn’t really know what’s going on in the world. It’s always good to know about the news because it can be used as a means to start conversation as well.

Now what do we write about? Jeremy Lin Essay

Sam Blinderman

Professor Leake

WRIT 1122

3-4-12

What’s All the Linsanity About?

Over the past month Jeremy Lin has picked the NBA up by its heels and shook it violently. He came out of nowhere to save the Knicks’ more than disappointing season, but does anyone really know the truth about him? For starters, he’s an Asian American from the Bay Area of California and graduated from Harvard after four years. His NBA career, however, has been less than stellar up until this February. He was undrafted out of college, and worked hard in the Development League for a twenty game stretch where he averaged roughly 18 points and 4 assists a game. Finally the Golden State Warriors took notice and signed him only to cut him roughly ten months later to open up salary cap space. He was then picked up by the Houston Rockets and cut again for the same reason. The New York Knicks picked him up on December 27^th of last year because he was six foot three, athletic, and has great agility. In an article from the New York Times, Mike D’Antoni was quoted, “If somebody wakes up with a cold, he’s playing a lot. If not, we’ll see” (Beck). This goes to show when he was originally signed not many people in New York had faith in his talents and he was seen more as an insurance policy than anything.

The phenomenon dubbed “Linsanity” begun after a breakout performance by Jeremy Lin against the New Jersey Nets. He scored 25 points, dished out 7 assists, and snagged 5 rebounds in his NBA debut as a Knick to help lead the them to a 99-92 win. Since this game he has remained in the spotlight of many news sources and been one of the most highly criticized and complimented players at the same time. The compliments he's been getting is that he's off to the highest scoring start any player in has had in their first seven games since the NBA/ABA merger in the seventies, even Michael. Criticisms of Lin as a player attack him as a person, and many writers use the race card to rationalize the reasons for Linsanity. When following the progression of Linsanity, one can’t help but notice the different ways in which people write and speak of him. The remainder of this essay will analyze the short time span Linsanity has been around, and attempt to identify the different views used to describe it by different media sources and people.

Since there have been so many stories written on Jeremy Lin in such a short period of time, it’s challenging to find articles that display radical differences of opinion. Luckily Jeremy Lin is Asian, a subject that is very easy for people to pick on in the game of basketball. Playing in high school and college he was subjected to many racial slurs and picked on in almost every visiting arena by opposing fans. Now that he's in the NBA and showing everyone that he can play at a high level, people still find the need to deny him the respect he’s earned. Heavyweight boxer Floyd Mayweather, a notorious loud mouth who always seems to speak his mind on controversial issues decided to stir up media attention when he posted this to his twitter: "Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the same praise," he responded later that night with more, "I'm speaking my mind on behalf of other NBA players. They are programmed to be politically correct and will be penalized if they speak up” (Begley). Here Mayweather is attacking Lin for being Asian and completely discrediting his basketball abilities. It seems as if Mayweather is upset with the news coverage of Lin because he doesn’t see black players getting the same credit. It shows in his tone and arrogance when he claims to be speaking on behalf of other NBA players, a field where he has little credibility seeing as he's a boxer. Granted that Mayweather has a reputation for being a trash talker but he may have a point. How much of Lin’s popularity is because he's Asian?

In a survey on Bleacher Report that I took, the question read: “What role is race playing in Lin’s popularity?” The three responses were: “Huge,” “Some, but not enough to be a big deal,” and “None.” Out of the 3,849 votes, 49.4% voted “Some, but not enough to be a big deal,” 40.1% voted “Huge,” and only 10.5% voted “None.” The survey was featured in an article that was posted on February 16^th just twelve days after Lin’s breakout game, and shows what a portion of the public thinks. Philadelphia 76er’s forward, Andre Iguodala chimed into the conversation by saying when you see Lin doing what he does you are surprised. He went on to compare Lin to a black person doing well playing hockey. He closes with, “Race does play a role in it but at the same time you have to respect it, that’s how I feel.  You have to respect it whether you like it or not. It’s a feel-good story” (Wells). From what Iguodala said regarding Lin, he believes that race definitely plays a role in his popularity, but doesn’t go as far as Mayweather to not respect Lin’s rise to fame and ability as a player. I think because Iguodala is a fellow NBA player he filters what he says more about his colleagues and understands the situation Lin is going through because all players had to work hard at some point in their career.

 The author of the article that features Iguodala’s comment briefly scolds him for becoming a part of this conversation, and then goes on to counter that race does not play a major role in Lin’s popularity. He writes:

Has anyone actually stopped to think that Lin is getting all this hype, not because he is Asian, but because he plays in New York and the team is on a seven-game winning streak? If Lin were putting up the numbers he has and the team was losing, would anyone care as much? Of course not. The hype machine is coming because of the New York factor (Wells).

This shows Harris’s move of countering because Wells takes what Iguodala said, and completely disagrees with it. He takes the fact Lin is Asian and counters it by explaining that the reasoning behind Lin’s popularity is because he is in New York, the media capital of the world, not because he’s Asian. He elaborates:

Not every success story in sports has to be followed up with talk about someone's race, religion, creed or anything else. Just enjoy the player while they are on the court or field, and stop making things into a bigger deal than they are (Wells).

Here Wells is trying to plead with his audience, which I believe is the general public or anyone who watches sports, to get them to see that, in this case, there is more sports than just race. Wells seems sick of everyone focusing on everything except the player who is doing well. I agree with him that we need to stop focusing on race and enjoy watching the evolution of one of the most promising players the league has to offer.

As everyone well knows by now, there are always two sides to an argument. Usually writers try to avoid bias because it shows favoritism and makes for some very questionable headlines. Jay Caspian Kang is an editor and writer for Grantland, which is apart of ESPN and covers mostly sports related issues. Rick Quan is a sports anchor in San Francisco, and is the first Chinese American television sports anchor in the United States, and one of the first Asian men to be a fulltime anchor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both Kang and Quan have covered the Jeremy Lin story, and it should be pretty obvious that these two have something in common with Jeremy Lin. All three of them are of some Asian decent. Not to be racist in any way, but when an Asian writer writes about an Asian athlete who has been defying all odds in any sport, there’s always going to bias in those articles. Luckily for Kang he writes for a blog and Quan submitted an opinion piece to CNN so the addition of bias in this situation is a good thing.

When Kang and Quan write about Jeremy Lin, their writing shows a sense of pride they have with being similar to him. In this case they are demonstrating two of Aristotle’s appeals that we use in writing today, ethos and pathos. The character of the speaker plays a role in the credibility of the story, and when I noticed the bylines of two articles were Asian names I paid closer attention to how they were written. Their sense of pride is where they demonstrate pathos; in their emotions and ability to convey to the reader what they feel about the subject. Kang wrote about Jeremy Lin once before while he was still at Harvard in 2010. In a more recent article he referenced that experience by stating, “What I was trying to describe was the very strange, specific, and rare pride one feels when watching one of their own succeed in a forbidden field” (Person of Interest: Jeremy Lin) The forbidden field Kang refers to is the game of basketball, which barely has any Asians in it, and through his writing he is showing bias towards Lin because he explains the pride he feel due to the two of them being the same race. I don’t blame him; he’s in a rare situation. African Americans can’t say they have pride in some black players in the NBA because basketball is not a forbidden field for them, but Lin is the exception. He’s the only Asian American in the league and that unifies a race of people to feel what Kang is feeling with his success. Rick Quan writes in a very similar way to Kang by saying things like, “That is huge” and “If a Chinese-American guy can hold his own against the best athletes in the world, wow!” (Is the 'Linsanity' hype caused by race?) These clearly show that Quan feels pride in Jeremy Lin’s success and that he relates to him because they are both Asian. Also one can tell from the way he writes that he feels connected with Asians in general because he says “we” to describe his race. Kang and Quan both use race as a way to make their articles more interesting. By relating to the topic through race their writing offers a unique opinion on the subject, which makes their audience more interested in their articles. It also allows them to write more freely and voice their own opinions, which add to the value of the articles.

The authors that we have explored have focused on Jeremy Lin being an Asian American in the game of basketball. Whether they have criticized that the American public needs to drop the fact that he is Asian and start appreciating him for the excellent point guard he is or explained the sense of pride they share with him for being the same race, they are all talking about the same thing. As an observer to the story, it’s interesting to see how different people write on the same topic, it gives the reader a look into who they really are. As for the rest of Linsanity, I project that for the remainder of this season the press will continue to follow Jeremy Lin and when playoff time comes around he will get to show us all what he's truly made of. After the Knicks lose in the playoffs there will be a few weeks of buzz on Sportscenter about what Lin will do next year. From there he will no longer be known as the Asian in the NBA, he’ll be known as Jeremy Lin. Writers will continue to write about him, but instead of questioning his ability as a player and his race, they’ll know what he's capable of and why’s he’s playing so well. The multiple viewpoints used to describe him by writers and people will mesh into one unbiased-accurate description of him that will follow the lines of an NBA point guard. Once and for all, people will stop going Linsane.

Works Cited

Beck, Howard. "Hit by Injuries, Knicks Add Former Harvard Guard." The New York Times. 27 Dec. 2011. Web. 22 Feb. 2012.

Ian Begley. "Floyd Mayweather Questions Jeremy Lin." ESPN. ESPN Internet Ventures, 14 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Feb. 2012. <http://espn.go.com/new-york/nba/story/_/id/7572690/floyd-mayweather-says-new-york-knicks-jeremy-lin-spotlight-race-not-play>

Kang, Jay Capsian. "Person of Interest: Jeremy Lin." Grantland.com. 13 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Feb. 2012. <http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7570431/jeremy-lin>

Quan, Rick. "Is the 'Linsanity' Hype Caused by Race?" CNN. Cable News Network, 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Feb. 2012. <http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/15/opinion/quan-lin-asians/index.html>

Wells, Adam. "Jeremy Lin: Andre Iguodala Puts Foot in Mouth with Disrespectful Comments." Bleacher Report. 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Feb. 2012. <http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1068806-jeremy-lin-andre-iguodala-puts-foot-in-mouth-with-disrespectful-comments>