Service Learning Reflection 3

The last few weeks in the Castanea garden have been a little different than normal. We did our usual routine of picking weeds but two weeks ago we had to tackle a big problem. A very invasive plant had been grown in the garden on accident a few years ago and it had spread all over the garden, so we had to take it out. We started by digging around the plants and locating the roots. Once we found the roots, we took a pickaxe and broke the roots. Then came the hard part. We had to get down in the hole we dug and pull the plant out of the ground. The plant we pulled out is the big one in the bottom right corner of the picture of all the weeds. After this, we headed behind the garden to a greenhouse. A few years ago, the greenhouse was functioning but because of a problem with the plastic on the outside, it fell apart. This year, the garden coordinator is trying to make the greenhouse functioning again so we went to go paint it.

These past few weeks in the garden have been interesting because they have showed me that gardening is a lot more than just planting fruits and vegetables and harvesting them. I learned that you have to do a lot to keep a garden tidy and functioning and I probably wouldn't have really thought about it if I didn't do it. These past weeks have also taught me a bit about working in a community. I had honestly never really given much thought to who does things like paint buildings or pull weeds. I think that working in the Castanea garden has possibly made me a bit more thoughtful about my community and overall, I'm very happy I did it.

Ron Finley TED talk and Biotechnology Isn't Saving The World

I thought Ron Finley had a great TED talk. Finley made his TED talk very entertaining but also informative. I think what he is doing is great. In this growing world, space for living is starting to become a problem, but Finley proves these claims wrong. Finley's idea of utilizing extra city space is genius and I think it's a method of gardening that should be reproduced in more cities in America.
In the reading "Biotechnology Isn't Saving the World", I think the author had some similar points to Finley. Lappé brings up points about eating healthy in today's world and also talks about healthy food deserts. One of the differences between Lappé and Finley's discussion is that Lappé focuses more on politics saying that democracy is the key to solving world hunger as opposed to biotechnology.

The Omnivore's Delusion and Real Food, Real Farming Reading Response

I agree with Pollan that corn is to blame for a lot of America's health problems. I hadn't thought about it until now, but I've realized that most of the cheap food we consume these days contains corn or corn syrup or is fed corn. I never really saw corn as "unhealthy" but I guess it's just the way that Americans use corn that is unhealthy. I have to disagree with Hurst's argument that using corn is ok because thats what farmers have been using for years. Just because something is a tradition doesn't mean it's a good thing, especially if that tradition is one of the suspects for the obesity epidemic.
Even though I didn't completely agree with all of Hurst's ideas, I enjoyed reading his article, The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals. I thought his rhetoric was a good blend of informational and humorous. For example, in the first paragraph when he says, "He's talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume" (Hurst, 204)

"The Only Way to Have a Cow"

This may have been the first article I read for this class that I'm not a fan of. First off was the rhetoric. The author, Bill McKibben sounds extremely stuck up. He speaks in a way that sounds like he thinks he's better than everyone else just because he doesn't eat red meat. For example, the first sentences of the article are, "May I say - somewhat defensively - that I haven't cooked red meat in many years." Why does he say "defensively"? Does cooking red meat make you a bad person? Is it a sin punishable by death? He then goes on to say, "I haven't visited a McDonald's since college" and "If you asked me how I like my steak, I'd say I don't really remember." At this point, I'm not even halfway through the first paragraph and I don't like the author. Later, when he is talking about cows and red meat he even says, "And the fact that the product of this exercise "tastes good" sounds pretty lame as an excuse" Right here, it sounds like he is specifically targeting red meat eaters. I don't get offended very easily, but when I read this sentence I could tell that he was trying to offend anyone who didn't agree with him. I can tell that this article was definitely written for vegetarians who share the same views on red meat as he does. I could tell that McKibben's purpose for the piece was to persuade people, but since his rhetoric was offensive to people with different views as him, his point did not get to me. 

Another thing; I'm not sure if I just didn't understand what he meant, but it seemed a little ridiculous that he directly blamed the consumption of red meat for global warming. Sure, cows produce a lot of methane gas, but you can't blame the consumption of red meat for global warming. That's like blaming the person who invented the computer for a virus that you got on your computer.

Service Learning Reflection

This week in the Castanea garden, I worked on a variety of things. I started out by pulling weeds to make room for vegetables that we would grow in that area later. After that, me and a few other people planted some garlic. We had to go get compost from the compost pile and bring it over to the area we wanted to grow the garlic and lay the compost down. We dug three inch holes six inches apart, put the garlic in the holes and then covered the holes with dirt. The garden coordinator Page gave us all some passion fruit to try. It tasted a lot different than the passion fruit juice I drank as a kid. After taking a little break, we went to harvest fruits and vegetables. First, we harvested some tomatoes that looked different than any tomato I had seen before. Instead of being perfectly circular, they were shaped like pears or eggplants. Finally, we began to harvest grapes. These were seeded grapes, unlike the grapes you get in the grocery store, and to my surprise, they were very sour.
Working in the garden this week was definitely a much different experience than the past few weeks. While I have been doing some research on permaculture and sustainable agriculture for a little bit, I've never had any experience planting or harvesting anything. The past two weeks at the garden I've mostly been moving dirt and pulling weeds but this week showed me that the hard work of gardening pays off. Harvesting tomatoes and planting garlic showed me the "result" of the work that goes into gardening. This week I also learned that most of the food that is harvested in the Castanea garden goes directly to the community. I thought this was really interesting to see how students at UNCA could have an impact on the community of Asheville.
I would love to continue working at the Castanea garden even after I get my twenty service hours. I'm a very impatient person and I would like to become more patient and I think that gardening can help me with that. since theres a lot of waiting involved in gardening.

Downsizing Supersize and Why Shame Won't Stop Obesity

I thought James Surowiecki had some great points about Bloomberg's large soda ban in New York. Before I read this, I thought the ban was pretty ridiculous. I actually first heard about it on the daily show with Jon Stewart where he compared the illegality of a large soda and the recent legality of medical marijuana in New York City. This seemed pretty ridiculous to me at first because marijuana, a drug, had been made legal while it was basically illegal to get more than 16 ounces of a beverage in a cup. However, after reading the article "Downsizing Supersize", I have a different perspective on the matter. This situation really sheds light on the nature of people in today's world. Most people won't make big changes to their lifestyle unless these changes are forced upon them. Like Surowiecki says, "in countries where people have to actively say they don't want to be an organ donor, most are donors" (Surowiecki, 123). If it wasn't for Bloomberg's large soda ban, I don't think most people would ever make that change in their life. I really enjoyed the rhetoric of this article. It was very informative with lots of references to other studies and laws in the world but it was also slightly humorous. For example the last line was, "but at least there's a good chance we'll be thinner rats" (Surowiecki, 125)
While I agree with the three points Dhruv Khullar makes at the end of the article (making healthy food more accessible, minimizing junk food advertising and educating the youth on health), I don't necessarily agree with some of his other points. I agree that shaming people into eating healthier is not the way to go, but unlike Khullar, I think responsibility and knowledge are the only ways to fight obesity. When it all boils down, the only person making a decision on what they eat is the consumer. If someone chooses to eat something unhealthy, they made the conscious decision to do so. If people are informed about the health benefits of food, they can make better, healthier decisions about what they put in their body. The rhetoric of this piece was very informative but it felt a little harsh. I felt like the authors opinions where being imposed on me.

The Pleasures of Eating and Food Justice

Wendall Berry's first tip to eating more responsibly was to try and grow as much of your own food as you can. I completely agree with this and I think this is the best way to be more responsible about the food you eat. The only way you can know exactly what is in your food is if you grow it yourself. Berry also makes the point that growing your own food is a great way to learn how the energy cycle of food works. While I don't grow any of the food that I eat, I think Berry makes some great points that make we want to try growing my own food in the future.
Berry's second tip was to prepare your own food. Cooking your own meal is a great way to eat responsibly and just like Berry says, it allows you to eat more cheaply. Once last year, I decided that I was going to make chili. I went to the store and bought all the ingredients which added up to be about twenty five dollars (a little pricey) but the chili lasted me about a week. Another bonus was that I had control of how much of each ingredient I put in the chili. While I prepare some of my own food, In the future I would love to be able to prepare most of my own food. However, living in dorms on a college campus makes that a little hard.
Berry's third point was to learn about the origins of the food you buy and to buy local food. Eating locally grown food is pretty new to me, but so far I support it. I would love to one day be able to buy only fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables. My only critique of locally grown food is that buying it can sometimes be more expensive than the non-local option, which as a college student is usually the option I have go with.
His fourth tip was to buy food directly from a local farmer. I think that doing this leads to even more responsible eating than simply buying food from a store that is marked "locally grown". In class, I heard a statistic that fresh food loses 30% of its vitamins and minerals if it isn't eaten 3 days after it was picked. If you're buying food from the store, chances are it isn't going to be as fresh as if you buy it straight from the farmer who grew it. If I had the option, I would buy fresh fruits and vegetables from a farmer, however I don't know any local farmers. Also, living on a college campus makes cooking your own meals a bit hard.
Wendall Berry's fifth tip is the only one I don't agree with. It's one thing to be informed about what goes into the food that you eat, but I do not think that knowing about the economy and technology of industrial food production makes you any more of a responsible eater.
Berry's sixth and seventh tip can be discussed together. Learning about farming and gardening as well as the species of food that you eat can be very important if you want to be a more responsible eater. How can one strive to eat only the healthiest and freshest fruits and vegetables if they don't know anything about how they were grown? I don't know much about farming or species of foods, but I'm hoping that working in the Castanea garden on the UNCA campus will help me learn more.

I think that Food Justice was a great passage to compare to "The Pleasures of Eating". While both promote the idea of eating fresh, locally grown food to be more responsible about eating, one passage was much more realistic than the other. While Berry focuses on what people can do to eat more responsibly, he neglects the fact that everyone doesn't have access to fresh food and some people can't afford it. Gottlieb and Joshi focus on the reality of the economy of food. While there are many opportunities to eat locally and know your farmer in places like Asheville, in contrast people don't get the same options in big cities like Chicago and New York City. In Food Justice, Gottlieb and Joshi bring up great points about the struggle between responsible eating and the economy of food.