Final Food Assignment Including More Resources

Please choose one or more of the following resources and consider its connection for industrial food. If you are time limited the Dana White song is the quickest and funniest.

A Mother's Tale by James Agee - novella
Cows with Guns by Dana White - music video
The Worst Mistake In the History of the Human Race - by Jared Diamond
Iron Filings in your Cereal - Click "Watch the video" for a pretty surprising demonstration
Industrial Food In Japan 2.0 - They take "Our Daily Bread" a few steps further towards disconnection from the Earth.

Foraging For Fruit in Cities - A rare moment of something nice for a curveball.

Now connect this new resource to the videos you've seen online, "Our Daily Bread, "VROOM - Farming for Kids", the essays we've read, our experiences with food (recipe, sprouting, food journal, etc), and Omnivore's Dilemma.

Make one 700+ word paper on Industrial Food & Your Own Foodways that reworks some of your previous assignments, and your additional and evolving thoughts. To make it particularly good, use outlines or concept maps, write a draft, edit it, post it, get feedback from an ally, and repost a second draft. Due Wednesday at 3:10pm.

Final Extra Credit Opportunity

Wildman Steve Brill will be leading a walk through Central Park May 31. If you participate please take a few photos, consider bringing in some of the wild food, and post a blog description of the experience - including connections to the feelings and understandings you have of industrial foodways. Done well this effort could add up to 5 extra credit points on your quarter grade.

Food # 8 - Industrial Food

Virtually all the food you eat is industrially produced - fossil-fueled machines transform the planet into a factory-like production system - once sacred rituals of harvest and joyous eating now reduced to their crudest essentials ("all that was sacred is profaned").

You've now been exposed that insight in several forms - especially in considering your own foodways and the dominant foodways around you. Many people especially object to the industrialization of non-human animals as food sources - and perhaps that's right. But the same model of producing food applies to cherry tomatos, potatos, and sunflower seeds. Your whole life you've been hearing from advocates of industrial food - what do some of the intelligent critics of this system emphasize?

Please write a 2-3 paragraph response that addresses 2 or more of the pieces from the following websites. Be sure to connect your analysis of the media-piece with your evolving understanding of your own foodways and this culture's dominant foodways. If you don't want to be limited to the websites below please find some of your own and suggest them as comments to this post.

Meatrix -
Industrial Food Isn't Cheap -
Pollan vs Colbert -
On Obama's Agricultural Policy -
Animal Cruelty -

Optional Exhibition Week Assignment

1. Read Omnivore's Dilemma chapter by chapter.

2. Respond with blog posts for each chapter - including the following 3 parts.
a. What were the two to three most interesting/important/insightful ideas in the chapter? Please quote and paraphrase.
b. What questions do you still have?
c. So what? How does this affect your understanding of food, our society, our lives?

3. Respond in a paragraph to two other peoples' blog posts on that chapter. Cut and paste your comments from their website to your own (in the same chapter post).

For each chapter that you do these three things well you'll get 1 point extra credit on your semester grade.

What to Do in 101 Today

1. Make up missing work from last 2 weeks.
2. Add second drafts if you have some interesting thoughts. Post as separate second draft.
3. Put thoughtful and specific comments on other peoples' blogs - post a copy of them on your own blog.
4. Food Assignment 7: Find a simple and delicious sounding recipe using one of your favorite foods - one with easy-to-find and not-that-many ingredients. Could be a dessert, appetizer, soup, or main course. Post it up online now, and then gather the materials and make it. Post a picture of how it turned out and your (and friends) response to it. Bring it in to class and share it with a few people for a couple points of extra credit on the assignment.

Food # 6 - Response to Pollan 1

For this assignment please respond briefly to Michael Pollan's argument, in the first few pages of Omnivore's Dilemma, that we as a culture lack a stable food culture like the Italians or French, are obsessed with health, are confused and anxious about food, and therefore easily succumb to various expert-directed food fads.

What food experts do you and your family pay attention to - scientists, journalists, chefs, commercials on tv, doctors, nutritionists, health officials, book authors?

Food # 5 - Grocery Store and Habitual Food

Please write a post about how your family uses grocery stores and the variety of vegetables, fruits, roots, grains, and nuts that you eat in a typical week.

You should include your insights about how grocery stores "push" particular types of products, how you learned (or didn't) to eat a variety of foods, and information about your favorite meals and habitual diet pattern.

May Day

May Day - made in the U.S., celebrated all over the world, forgotten in the U.S.

The basics from Wikipedia:

Primary sources - speeches and texts from Marxists.org

Please write a short (1-3 paragraph) response to the holiday connecting it to either the American Way of Life or living a good and meaningful life.

For instance (AWOL) - How does the forgetting of a workers' holiday commemorating an American labor struggle show fundamental aspects of the American Way of Life?

(LDH2BM) - Is a sense of history - of past struggles - necessary to live a good and meaningful life?