HW# 6
Breakfast#1:

6 Grapes=50

Capri sun=75

On the morning of the first day I woke up late. I do not feel good unless I eat breakfast. The lack of time that was provided is what led to the decision to eat the grapes. My lack of water led to the Capri sun.

Lunch#1:

Luna bar=180

Coffee=200

This lunch was rushed. I needed to get back to school quickly and I had a budget. To be honest I often buy food just because it is cheep. I did not fully think through. Looking back at it I only pretty much only eat unhealthy foods when I am in a hurry.

Snack #1:

M&M=250

A friend of mine had been craving M&Ms all day. She and I split the bag.

Chowder

Chowder=325

What is the reason I ate this?

I ingested this chowder because it looked delicious. Also it is what my mother had cooked. It was corn chowder with bacon in it.

Total Calories of the day=1080

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Breakfast:

Toast=75

Lunch:

Luna bar=180

Coffee=300

If you haven’t noticed I have a slight addiction to coffee. This is one thing that I need to get past. This addiction to coffee started a few weeks before school started.

Diner:

Cheese burger=400

Union Rings=200

It was the first night in a while where I was aloud to cook. So guess what my stingy self did. I went to the supermarket and purchased the cheapest meal I could and pocketed the extra grocery money. I do regret being so stingy about the food but it was so good. When my mom cooks it is usually far healthier than this.

Total=1155

HW 5 - Dominant Discourses Regarding Contemporary Foodways in the U.S.

            After doing farther research I found that dominant discourse means the specific people who have ideas that often overpower other people’s specific opinion. Prior to thinking about the topic it seems that the dominant discourse is held by the media, government, and doctors. As thoughts over the topic of dominant discourse of food continue I find it is a shared discourse. The American people who continue to eat fatty, unhealthy, fast food, consist of over half the country. Doesn’t that put them some how in the dominant discourse of “foodways”?

            After reading the article, “Told to Eat Vegetables America Eats fry’s” from the New York Times, It becomes apparent that the American people do pick what they eat. The people control the food industry by only eating fatty foods. It is a shared dominant discourse. The food industry being discussed in this article is the baby carrot. It says that the people only eat the foods that they are told are unhealthy. The baby carrot company decided to label itself as junk food so that people would feel better about eating its food. The other discourse is the food industries. They have a shared dominant discourse with the people. They are always trying to alter there food to make it seem as fatty or American as possible so that people will buy it.

            When looking at “food as medicine” you see a similar shared Dumont discourse. Medical professionals are always telling people to eat healthy. I am not positive if that counts as food as medicine but it makes scene. It is confusing to me when I see so many doctors who are 300lbs. They control most of the discourse of the topic of food but not the actions required to be healthy.

           

hw #4

Luckily my family putts an effort in to eat what they consider healthy. I observed this in my mom and my grandmother. What seems to constrict there ability to cook completely healthy food is gender norms, economic class, and culture.

My mom tells me that when she was a child her mother taught her to eat a healthy “balance between crabs, proteins, vegetables, and fruit.” My mom says that her mother did follow this but she always loved to fry everything in “lard.” As a child my mother ate “beef stew baked potato, fried chicken, fried fish, and fried eggs in lard for breakfast.” I believe this is because of her culture. She was raised in southern Indiana where seemingly everything is fried. My mothers child food cuisine was “delicious and tried to be healthy”

The food that is prepared for me at home is “balanced” according to my mother but we do not have nearly as much fried food as my grandma cooks. When I asked my mom if gender norms effect the way we eat she says, “YEA!! I do all of the cooking and shopping. I don’t do dishes though.” This could be one of the aspects holding back the quality of our diet. When asking my mom what is more important, taste, price, or health value, she said that ideally it would be health but sometimes healthy food is too expensive for it to be the complete priority. She says that when times are hard she tries to find cheaper alternatives to the food she is used to. My mom, like her mother, has things holding back the way that we eat.

One thing I concluded from this assignment was that all caring parents think that they are feeding children healthy foods. My grandma tells me that the definition of health food has changed sense my mother was a child. The fact that any one has the best diet in the world.

HW 3 - Food - Fast Food Insights and Green Market Realizations

            Entering a restaurant that is made to serve many costumers at once at such a grim time for business is depressing. Typically when I walk into a MacDonald’s it is full of teenagers after school and there is a more blissful mode. This time as I entered the same location as usual except it was full of old people. It was a disappointment when compared to the experience of walking through the farmers market seeing all of the bright and vibrant collars of fruits and vegetables. Added to all of the lively pedestrians walking around can put a person in a completely more up beet frame of mind than the MacDonald’s. I spent most of my time at the MacDonald’s observing the menu. I noticed that they had a salad menu. It appeared that most of the costumers were not leaving with salads or the healthy alternatives featured in the menus.  This was unlike the farmers market because it seemed that you had to search to find something unhealthy. By no means am I saying that the food at the farmers market was not good because it was healthy, but in opposition to MacDonald’s there was only one table of deserts for sale. Being in a MacDonald’s wile not ordering something was a new experience. At that point I was not in the mood for oily fried food or one of there watery, soggy salads. The differed from the farmers market because wile I was roaming around the market asking questions about what all the organic farmers were growing, I was sipping on a cup of cider I had just purchased. The only true similarity between the MacDonald’s and they booth sell food.

            Is food a commodity? There is no reason why food should not be. At the farmers market both the farmers and the costumers seemed to be using food as a commodity. The farmers were using food to there advantage by benefiting from the financial commodity. One can even argue that the customers of the market were taking advantage of a nutritional commodity. After being told how low the United States life expectancy was compared to other developed nations I saw that only owners of MacDonald’s and other fast food companies are getting a commodity from the deal. If I was asked this same question before the activity or before I was told about the life expectancy of Americans I would have probably written something like, The customers at the MacDonald’s were using food as a commodity by taking advantage of the low priced food. Although I see the anti MacDonald’s point, It would be hypocritical of me to say it is what is bringing our life expectancy down because, I chose to indulge in MacDonald’s once and a while. Food can be a commodity depending on how the consumer and the seller chose to go about sale. 

HW#2 SarahT                                                                                                             9-21-10

  

            Food is what we need to survive as animals. We eat whatever we are exposed to.  Michel Foucault’s idea of daily life being controlled by institutions, not only the government, can be related to food. This can mean that people are controlled by the food industry. It’s inevitable that someone will run across an advertisement for some sort of food. This can include supermarkets and fast food restaurants. I personally love the taste of fast food, pizza, and oily foods. This is because of how I have been taught to love these foods. Not by my parents because we usually eat healthy, but because of the rest of the world. I grew up spending a lot of time with my grandparents, friends, and other family members who love to eat the foods listed above. Foucault’s idea that small nongovernment groups of people have so much influence on the social norm is demonstrated in the way most of the world chooses to eat their food.

            Last year I decided to become vegan for an entire week. At first I craved meats and dairy. By the third day I started only craving the foods that I was allowed to eat. So instead of ice cream I craved vegan deserts. As a replacement for meat I was fulfilled by rice and beans. I was fine with eating vegan food. The reason I quit veganism was because my family was concerned I was not getting enough of the correct protein. My personal experiment farther demonstrated how Foucault’s theory on institutions controlling our daily lives applies to the way people choose to eat food. The reason people think they need meat and dairy is because of the social standards. Which according to Foucault are controlled by the “institutions.”

            I do not actually believe that it is healthier to not eat meat or dairy but I wanted to see if it was possible for me to be content without being dependent on it. What sparked my interest in the idea was a documentary on the way animals are treated. The animals, particularly cows and chickens, were forced to live in condensed spaces forcing them to be saturated in there own feces. This leads to the live stalk becoming infected with e coli. I thought that if I was able to live off of no meat for that long that I could live off of only organic dairy and meat that can not be infected with e-coli.