Urban Agriculture

Teresa Mares gave our class a great presentation, handout and field trip on Urban Agriculture and
a tour of nearby P-Patches this week. I was surprised about the size of the gardens in the urban
neighborhoods. The I-5 bridge was in the background of pictures I took. I was also surprised
about the long waiting list and long time it took to get a spot in the garden.
The history of Urban Agriculture and recent struggles in California were informative.
There should be real estate made available for Urban Gardening. I think it raises the value of the
neighborhood it’s in.
Even though we were warned of the bee’s nest on the North side of the garden, I walked
by and freaked out when I saw I was right next to it. As long as you don’t bother the bee’s they
won’t bother me! I hope more Urban Garden’s come to fruition. There are lots of places a
garden would look better than concrete in the city.

Human and Animal Boundary Shift

After reading Pollan and Taussig, I think there are many ethical concerns we should think about it
our power to alter the genetic code of other species including cows we eat and drink milk from.
Genetically modifying cows to fix a problem may cause other problems we didn’t have before.
The line between animal and human is changing because the boundary between them is beginning
to shift due to new bio-technologies.
The original line between humans and cows was organic. The line is changing because
new machines for production of milk and bio-technology changes cows genetically. This is a
concern and is important because humans and babies drink the milk from the genetically altered
cows. Diseases that we were once able to kill may become immune and attack humans if we
biologically change animals we eat. I believe in un-tampered, natural milk for those I love and my
consumption.

Homegrown and Respect of Food I Eat

I went away on Memorial day weekend and missed last weeks blog entry. The entry suggestion
was discussion of Pollan and if it has made an influence on me about my ethics of eating meat.
My relationship with food has changed because I pay more attention to labeling of products I buy
in the grocery store. Organic vegetables, hormone free cows for milk and meat and cage free
chicken are labels I now understand better.
I’ve made resolutions about changing my food habits by planning on growing a garden and
growing my own vegetables to eat. Onions, strawberries and green beans are going to be my first
products. Any vegetables that I can’t grow myself I’m going to buy at locally grown fresh fruit
and vegetable markets. It may be slightly more expensive but after class discussion, I agree its
OK to spend more money on food because its important to my health. Locally grown fresh fruit
and vegetables will taste better.
I thought class discussion was interesting about before eating meat, acknowledging the
animal is respectful. It’s not necessarily praying, but thanking the animal for providing food and
sustenance for myself is a acknowledgment that could be made. I certainly think animals raised
for human food should be cared for and raised and killed without torture. I recommend “A Day
No Pigs Would Die” as a book I thought of during class discussion relevant to this issue. It’s a
good book that I read when I was younger.

Commodified Chinese Food Express

The appeal of Safeway’s Chinese Food in the deli section is irresistible for me. I get the Express which is two entree’s, chow mein and pork fried rice. For the two entree’s I always get General Tsao’s chicken and sweet and sour chicken with the sauce on top. I love the deep fried chicken entree’s and after eating them all up you still have sauce left to eat with the chow mein and rice. It’s delicious although I don’t think its an entirely healthy meal. Its also an American commodified meal of producing Chinese food for profit which is available in most all Safeway Stores.

What are the ingredients of the sweet and sour sauce and where are they manufactured is a question I now have after reading Ettlinger’s “Twinkie, Deconstructed” in class? I’m sure there’s a high sugar content causing addictive qualities in the consumer. There has to be a red dye in there. I remember when I was younger there was a warning of a particular dye in foods at the time that should not be in a humans diet. Red 40 or yellow 5 or something like that. Please respond if you have a response to this?

This is a addictive meal humans are made for to eat this product. Safeway stores that have been remodeled are pretty nice and the deli is one of the main attractions for customers. Safeway’s commodification of Chinese food is a fast food to get on the go which fits our American lifestyle
and some people’s diets. This is unfortunate because it may be less healthier than fruit and
vegetables, organic or not, which are also available to go at the grocery store. But the
convenience and draw of fast, tasty, easily accessible Chinese food is addictive and may force a
change in your lifestyle if you cannot resist it’s allure.

The cultural experience aspect is interesting because you are getting a supposed foreign meal to experience at a reasonable price. You may keep coming back because you like the food and because it’s different than American fast food like cheeseburgers. Safeway’s Chinese food is a cultural experience over and over again!

Recently I was in line to get Chinese food behind a female in the armed forces. While she was waiting for her order she commented I ordered the same meal as her. We talked about how
good our choices were and she told me some of the others offered were also good choices. She’s
had the orange chicken before and said it was great. This American mass produced, commodified
Chinese food has gender equality for consumers. This food has many allure’s that fit in American
society lifestyle that make’s it hard to resist.

The History of My Life and Pizza

Pizza is the food myself and my immediate family has an affiliation to in terms of identity because of family stories. Pizza is my families comfort food and it’s what we usually have when we gather socially. Little Caesars Pizza in Bellingham, Washington used to have a dine-in restaurant we used to eat at but due to a recent downsizing remodel the dine-in area is gone. So we pick up orders to go for take-out for dinner.
Does pizza have a race? A gender? An ethnicity? A class? are questions we have
contemplated and delved for answers in reading Rouse and Hoskins and in class discussion. When I eat pizza I think I love Italian food. Pizza is a fast meal you can get on the go but it’s higher class than fast food drive-ins. The preparation and cook time is longer and you have to have patience waiting for it to come out of the oven. You better let it cool down or you’ll burn your mouth from the melted cheese and hot pizza sauce.
A couple of stories about pizza and my family are, my Mom and Dad came home with a
car full of pizza they picked up from Little Caesars at half price. Apparently when they went to
pick up our order and the pizza’s were available because they cooked a wrong order. My parents
took all of them. Eight pizza’s including our order of two pizzas. My parents came into the
house and asked if my sister and I could help them bring in our order. We couldn’t believe our
eyes when we saw the pizza’s stacked on top of each other in the back seat.
My sister and I had friends over to the house after high school events like basketball
games. My Mom usually fed us and our friends a couple of pizzas. I think our group of high
school friends had an affiliation to pizza because that’s what we ate when we got together. My
friends still comment and are appreciative of my cool parents for paying for pizza and having a
trouble free environment to stay at and have fun. My sister and her girlfriends and me and my
friends co-existed in the house playing ping-pong, watching t.v. and movies and hanging out
together. Some even ended up dating.
Guy’s could always eat more pizza than the girls. We ate and ate and 3/4 of the pizza was
consumed by the guys and the girls had only had one piece. We ate faster than the girls. This
happened on a couple of occasions before my sister had enough. When we first opened the box
to a new pizza we each filled our plates but then my sister halved the remaining pizza and set it
aside. The guys could always finish all the pizza in one setting but that wasn’t fair to the girls.
Jessica wrapped up her half and put it in the refrigerator for the next day. I was shocked. If the
pizza was there, we should eat all of it. But my parents agreed with her and she was able to save
and keep her share for her to eat at her leisure.
We also have Little Caesars with my Grandparents so pizza maintains a identity with my
family through generations of my family. There are other foods we have an affiliation to in terms
of identity. My Dad and I are both really connected to Mexican food. When we returned from
China and my parents just got back from touring India, the food we ate after coming home was
Mexican food. Getting home and getting back into a comfortable schedule coincides with eating
a meal you are used to eating in your regular schedules. Our friends at our regular dine-in
Mexican restaurant definitely greet us by our first names and joke and create a great eating
environment with great Mexican food. Pizza and Mexican food are our Soul food.

Wahtcom County Raspberries

My Great Grandpa brought his family to Lynden, Washington from Van Buren, Missouri to berry farm many years ago. My Grandma Mary's brother, my Great Uncle Bobby took over Rhea farms and produced raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, cucumbers, carrots, and green beans in Whatcom county. I wanted to write this blog about my families history in farming food after reading Ozeki's book "All Over Creation" and watching "The Future of Food."
Along with many other berry farmers in Whatcom County, Great Uncle Bobby became an early investor Bellingham Cold Storage. Not very long ago I found out he probably made more money investing in that company than he did selling his crops.
I have lots of memories of his farms and his boxing facilities. One of the earliest was watching the conveyor belt move the raspberries down the line to be boxed. All of the workers wore Rhea Farms blue coats. My cousins lived next to the farm. The crops were rotated and so one time they lived next to carrots, and the next time cucumbers. We ate raw cucumbers with Lawrey's seasoning salt and carrots right out of the ground. Small one's, big one's, we didn't even wash the dirt off, we just wiped it off with our shirts.
Bobby's son-in-law was working with him for a while, but left because at that time raspberry farming wasn't as profitable. I'm writing this blog from Bellingham, I came home this weekend from Seattle. On the front page of the Bellingham Herald, "Cold dims harvest prospects" was the article title. There will be a reduction in strawberry, blueberry and cherry crop yield because cold stunted the growth. Also in the article, Whatcom County raspberries, about 50 million pounds on average, accounts for 65 percent of the total U.S. production. Crop yield also was down for a few years when my cousins and I rode dirt bikes and ate our way through the rows of fruit. Just Kidding!
My Mom picked berries in the fields. My Sister and I picked berries when we were kids. It was good work experience and you met a lot of people from the area. Someone in our class commented on one of the first days how they heard how important bee's are to our eco-system. We drove our motorbikes by crates of bees which were next to the raspberry fields. They didn't bother you if you didn't bother them, but this is the first time I'll admit we threw a rock at the crates just to see what would happen. We took off pretty fast after that. Apparently the bees were for honny, which I knew at that time, but also for pollinating, which I didn't know back then. In the Herald article, "the cold has deterred bees from pollinating her cherry trees' blossoms. Nearly 60 years old Kathy uses a ladder to crawl up to the lower branches and pollinate the blossoms herself with a feather duster!"
I'm conscious of the impact of lack of food on societies presently from watching the news. I'm aware of the importance of the future of food because of my families farming history, producing food by farming, packaging and distribution and after studying our class's media outlets on the future of food.

Sourdough

I have a memory that is not like Proust’s dark, limited frame of his childhood that lights up after
he had the sensation from eating. My food experience memory is clear because I bookmark the
memory in my head when I was creating it. I bookmark it because I was thinking about in the
future, if I stay in my driving job I won’t succeed in resisting eating at fast food establishments.
I was working “in the field” getting trained by my boss/friend and as he was talking on his
cell phone he took me to a Jack In The Box. I ordered a sourdough Jack meal. Scott didn’t
order anything to eat. Apparently he recently had lost 25lbs prior to going to his 20th high school
reunion. He spoke to me about stresses of the job and a lack of time to eat healthy at lunch. His
weakness was peanut M&Ms!
We drove out of the fast food parking lot to the next job site. I ate my cheeseburger and
fries standing outside of the car door in the parking lot at the job site. At that time I thought if I
stay at this job avoiding eating fast food will be a challenge. I’ve failed. I drink Starbucks and eat
at other drive-thru’s during my day at work.
The cheeseburger is a symbol in my memory of my consciousness to try and eat healthy. I
don’t think about that memory all of the time but I know where the location is and when I drive
by or if I’m eating at a restaurant that I’m not happy about my food choices the memory comes
back to me. I think of that time when I have buyers remorse from eating a cheeseburger instead
of taking time to make a healthy lunch from home. I have had good streaks of eating healthy
lunches during the workday. I love eating salads. But I can point to that moment which is my
memory of eating a cheeseburger as when I was concerned about my future and eating at drive
thru’s.