Food Around the World

When you think of different cultures or various places around the world, a wide range of varied foods comes to mind. For this blog posting I decided ask people around the University of Washington and the Seattle area what foods came to mind when they thought of certain places that I mentioned. Some of the most common and interesting results are below:

China: noodles, mushu, dogs, rice, pork, beef, soy sauce, bok choy, shitake mushrooms, MSG, fortune cookies, dumplings, pot-stickers

England: tea, roast beef, scones, crumpets, muffins, biscuits, jam, jelly, marmalade, turnovers, pudding, eggs, mini sandwhiches, toast, things that rot your teeth

Italy: pizza, lasagna, ravioli, gelato, past, wine, coffee, CARBS!

Japan: sushi, rice, seaweed, yakisoba, teriyaki, sake, green tea (ochya), bento, mochi, tofu, ramen, things you eat with chop sticks, soup

Mexico: chicken, burritos, beans, corn, flour, tortilla, enchilada, salsa, cheese, chile peppers, spicy things, carne asada, churros, nachos, guacamole

New York: pizza, hot dogs, greasy, steak, bagels (n' shmear), lox, corned beef, pastrami, pickles, street vendors, corner delis, cheesecake,

"The South": BBQ, fried chicken, anything fried, rolls, butter biscuits, collard greens, crawfish. sweet potatoes, gumbo, cajun, corn on the cob, anything fatty, big portions, spicy, tobasco, hot sauce, peach cobbler

While these answers aren't necessarily accurate and may seem stereotypical, they show both that 1) place is an important and telling factor in what people eat (or at least what people who aren't from that region believe they eat) and 2) this is acknowledged, even if only subconsciously. I hope the results were interesting to you.

--Zak Rosencrantz

You Eat Where You Are...What If You Are Homeless?

In his story "On Dumpster Diving", Lars Eighner chronicles what it is like to feed yourself when you are living on the streets. Eighner's main form of sustaining himself is by rummaging through dumpsters to find other people's leftovers or throwaways that are edible. While one might assume that Eighner would struggle to find enough food and avoid hunger, his story tells otherwise.

Eighner was able to acquire enough food to avoid hunger, and even found that while he was homeless and practicing dumpster diving, he was susceptible to gaining weight. How is this possible? Isn't he just struggling to get by? Well, Eighner had located a pizza shop that discarded the day's unused pizzas into its waste at the end of the day. He frequented grocery stores that had to rid themselves of day-old baked goods and fruit that was no longer fresh. He was near a college campus where the students were extremely wasteful when it came to food. Eighner was not hungry at all!

Not being hungry does not mean that he was properly nourished. He was consuming lots of simple carbohydrates that were satisfying his hunger, but not supplying his body with the nutrients its needed. As Dr. Pena pointed out in his December 4th lecture, there is quite a difference between not being hungry and being nourished. He gave the example of the "Big Mac Diet", which is similar to the diet that Eighner was consuming. But Eighner's needs did not require a healthy diet, he just wanted to have a diet. He just wanted food in his belly. You eat where you are, and when that is the street, you eat anything. Beggars can't be choosers. Where you are shapes your food needs and wants. In Eighner's case, he was living on the streets, and his needs and wants consisted of satisfying his hunger. If he were living in a mansion with a personal chef and he was obese, or if he was training for a marathon in the desert, his needs and wants would be quite different.

Eighner, Lars. "On Dumpster Diving." 75 Thematic Readings: An Anthology. McGraw-Hill: New
York, NY: 2003. 509-521.

--Zak Rosencrantz

corn addict

USDA photo by Keith Weller

Our professor loves to show us different variaties of corns he grows, and I was amazed by the diversity of corn here. My grandma is a fan of corn. She insists on eating corns everyday because corn is a nutritious and has medical values. According to Chinese traditional medicine, corn is good for liver and gall, and can postpone senescence.

But corn is actually an American crop which has beening growing on this continent for thousands of years. In mid-16 century, corns began to be grown in China. The present data shows that the top corn producing countries are USA (over 40% of world's production), China, Brazil, Mexico...

Corn's popularity depends on its diverse uses, from food to industry. Actually only 5% of maize production are used as food, and most of them are practiced from their industrial values.
http://www.ontariocorn.org/classroom/products.html
This website shows zillions of uses of corn.

In Global Warming class, we learned that corn is also an important biofuel source. Even though it has a lower efficiency than sugurcane, it is still considered to be cheap and green that is used in many countries.

After getting to know more about corn, I feel like planting some colorul corn myself now.

Xiyue Sally Zhang

Confronting the Global Food Crisis: Advocacy for Farm Worker Rights

Logo from the event

This weekend, I attended the Community Alliance for Global Justice's Confronting the Food Crisis: Cultivating Just Alternatives to the Corporate Food System teach-in (it was nice to run into you there, Dave!). The workshop that stuck with me most was called Farmworker Victories and Organizing in WA State. It featured an immigrant clam-digger and organizer who lives and works in Shelton, a farmer from eastern Washington who runs a non-profit that prioritizes justice for immigrant workers, and my friend Stephanie, who I was surprised to see representing the Student Farmworker Alliance, a group I didn't know she, or anyone else at the University of Washington, was involved with.

First, we heard from each of the activists. Julio, the clam-digger, told us in Spanish about the hard work he does digging for clams at night (when the tide is low) in winter, and how little he gets paid for it. Clayton, the farmer, told us about his organization's successes at empowering workers, and how unjust the system can be for people without documents. Stephanie described the campaigns and victories of the Student Farmworker Alliance over the last eight years.

Then, we split up into groups to discuss and come up with questions about the topics in the discussion. My group addressed organizing around farmworker justice. We came up with a couple questions we could provide preliminary answers two, and one that keeps re-asking itself in my head. To How can a consumer engage in the struggle for farmworker justice? and What ways are more effective at reaching the corporations that make the situation unjust? we answered solidarity and using our privelage as citizens to defend immigrants' rights, and also be careful of identifying changing consumption patterns as the only option, because the injustice in the system is not the consumers' fault and listen to human stories - look horizontally for power.

I also found myself asking What is the end goal of labor organizing in the industrial food system? The system is based on injustice - food can only be as cheap as it is if the people who tend and harvest it are paid very little. Workers can win demands for one penny more per pound of tomatoes, like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers which the the Student Farmworker Alliance supported with its campaigns, but they can't really ever find justice within the existing system, without completely transforming it. But it doesn't make sense to abandon the workers the system abuses while we focus all our enegry on alternatives to the system, either. What should our goal here be?

After the workshop I talked to Stephanie about her work with the Student Farmworker Alliance, and found out that although she knows a lot about what's been going on with the group and has participated a little bit through the Student Labor Action Project on campus, our school is pretty tuned-out of farmworker issues. We decided to try to engage the environmental group I lead, the Sierra Student Coalition at UW, in these issues. I left the workshop with more questions than ever, but feeling ready to make change anyway.


Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley

You Eat Where You Are...but Are You Eating Enough?

You Eat Where You Are...but Are You Eating Enough?

Four researchers at Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry recently conducted a study that compared twenty-six mothers of children with non-organic failure to thrive with another group of twenty-six individually matched mothers of healthy children. The eating habits and patterns of the mother’s, and the foods that they fed and allowed their children, were closely studied, as were the mothers’ views of their child’s weight and shape. The researchers found that the mother’s of the children with non-organic failure to thrive had elevated levels of dietary restraint than the comparison group, and also that despite their child’s low weight, these mother’s were restricting their child’s intake of “sweets” and foods that they considered to be “fattening” or “unhealthy”.

These findings suggest that maternal eating habits and attitudes have a contributing role in the origins of non-organic failure to thrive. They also raise concerns about how unhealthy or disordered eating patterns can be passed on from one generation to the next. Young children are extremely impressionable and when the first thing they learn and are surrounded by is a mother with unhealthy eating habits and attitudes, these habits and attitudes are what is hardwired into their brains as normal and healthy. Where you are affects what foods you eat, but also how you eat them, and how much of them you eat. Children in environments with mothers who have unhealthy eating patterns are more apt to have unhealthy eating patterns as well.

<http://adc.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/70/3/234>

Zak Rosencrantz

Seattle's Local Food Action Initiative

In April of this year, Seattle's Local Food Action Initiative was passed. The initiative promotes and strengthens local farmers markets; expands resources for food banks, as well as providing an outlet for food that would have otherwise gone to the dumps to be regenerated as compost via a relationship with Seattle Public Utilities; strengthens the connections between those that produce food and those that consume it; makes nutritious, fresh foods accessible; reduces environmental impacts; secures food in times of disasters and much more.

The initiative stressed regional cooperation, community and connections by getting many institutions (Seattle Public Utilities, food banks, Seattle Tilth, Port of Seattle, etc.), and the public involved in the sustainability conversation. These terms were being used a lot, for instance strengthening the direct transaction of produce by the farmer to the consumer would thereby build connections between the community and the farmers and promote a tighter-knit community, and through the community, consumer supported agriculture (CSA) would increase the local economy, and so on and so on. Its a great initiative because it makes Seattle more self-sufficient, it increases social equity by increasing access to local foods and encourages food to be grown within the Seattle area.

To learn more on this initiative you can download the podcast with Richard Conlin, President of Seattle's City Council and Diane Horn on demand. Or visit KEXPdotORG and check out KEXP's other episodes on their Mind Over Matters Sustainability Segment in the podcast achieves.

Vera Tran

noodles and legacy

Noodle food has been an important part of Chinese diet, especially in the Northern part of China. Even though I'm from Wuhan, a southern city, my grandpa is from Hebei Province (Northern part). He used to make noodles himself, and that was my favorite part when I was a child. Fresh noodles were made from flour, and he used a small machine to cut the flour cake into long noodles. He always says he cannot live without having noodles, and I almost inherited this habit from him.

Typically, noodles from North are made of wheat flour while noodles in South are made of rice. It's obvious because the South grow much more rice. To think of the history of noodles, even though both China and Italy declare that noodles were their invention, the oldest noodle was discovered in Qinghai, China. It has a history of 4000 years. In the past, noodles were considered to be a clean food that would reduced gastointestinal diseases. This is one of the reasons for noodles' popularity. Depending on different ingredient and seasoning, there are thousands kinds of noodles in all parts of China. The amazing diversity has contributed to the splendid Chinese food family.

Among thousands kinds of noodles, I'd like to mention a very popular kind call Re Gan Mian (Hot Dry Noodles). This is a typical breakfast fare of Wuhan, my home town, in central China. I know a friend who can eat Hot Dry Noodles for three meals a day! It is made of hand-pulled wheat noodles, with seasoning (soy sauce, sesame paste, veggie, etc.) poured over it.

I really like that fact that every community in China has their own distinguished food. Trying local cuisine has always been an important part of travelling in China, and people are fancied by this. Even though we're facing the inevitable globalization today, we still see the local cuisine flourishing all over China. Maybe it's because eating is so important, especially for a country that has thousands of years of history. Lots of local food are under the protection of people so that they will not disappear.

Xiyue Sally Zhang

Pesticide Restrictions: Good or Bad?

Although chemical pesticides for farming uses are becoming more popular for safeguarding crops and improving productivity, they are also becoming feared for their potentially dangerous residues and harmful effects on the ecosystem.

According to the November 19 edition of the Seattle Times, Washington state farmers must restrict the use of three popular pesticides in order to protect salmon. A new law forbids any of these pesticides from being used within 500 feet of streams that carry salmon.

Chlorpyrifos, one of the pesticides, is often used on golf courses and malathion, another pesticide, is used to kill mosquitoes. Because of these restrictions, farmers will have a harder time saving their crops from pests like codling moths and cherry fruit flies. If pests turn up in farmers' fields, they risk having their shipments blocked. Though these pest concerns will be reviewed again, it is uncertain whether the law will be revised.

Consumers may positively benefit from this law because it will limit the amount of pesticides in their food and help the salmon. They may also experience negative consequences like more expensive produce if farmers' crops are ruined.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008408557_pesticide19m.html

Who Eats What, Where, When, and Why?

In each culture, certain foods are deemed acceptable and unacceptable. Some foods are looked upon as healthful or luxurious while others are seen as unhealthy or repulsive. Take the United States for example. Certain meats like dog, turtle, and frog are regarded as unacceptable by many American people. In other cultures, however, these meats are not only acceptable, but also regarded as delicacies. What a person eats is also determined by political, social, religious, economic, and environmental aspects of his life. Foods fluctuate between acceptable and unacceptable depending on region, culture, and time period.

During different time periods, different food trends arise which sway people to eat one way over another. For example, in the 1940's Americans made due with less - rationing and substituting certain foods for others was popular. In the 1960's, however, the idea of vegitarianism became popular and backyard barbeques were a norm.

Farms and agriculture are directly connected to this principle because they aim to supply what is in demand and what is in demand is determined by these societal characteristics.

Today, Americans seem to obsess over health. With dieting competitions on their TV's, slim-down competitions at their gyms, and organic, whole-grain, enhanced-nutrient foods in their refrigerators, Americans are encouraged to eat healthier than ever, which is a beneficial trend for today's farmers.

http://www.faqs.org/nutrition/Diab-Em/Eating-Habits.html
http://www.foodtimeline.org/fooddecades.html

You Eat Where You Are: Seattle

In Seattle, there are many places to purchase produce. The most famous is Pike Place Market.

The concept for Pike Place Market developed in 1906, when Seattle citizens became fed up with overpriced produce. Thomas Revelle, a Seattle City Councilman proposed a public street market that would connect farmers directly with their customers and bypass the middlemen that were the cause of the skyrocketing prices. Pike Place Market officially opened on August 17, 1907, when eight farmers brought produce to sell. By noon the produce was completely sold out and many hopeful shoppers left empty-handed. This chaotic day of success sparked the fire that has kept the market thriving today atop nine acres of land.

Now Pike Place Market is recognized as America's premier farmer's market and attracts approximately 10 million visitors every year. Thanks to past citizen's persistence, Seattle residents today have access to amazing produce and other food varieties at Pike Place Market.

-Kendra Dautel

Local Harvest

Although I myself would like to purchase organic, locally grown foods more often than I do, I find myself using the all too common excuse that finding places that sell organic and local foods is hard, tedious, and often out of the way. However, I came across a fantastic resource on the Internet called Local Harvest, which has listings of farms, markets, restaurants, and grocery stores that sell local and organic foods. The main page of the website even has a map and search engine so you can easily find places to buy these types of food near your own home. I was actually surprised to see how many local farms and restaurants that use local products are located quite close to where I live in the suburbs of Seattle.

There is also a link from this website to Slow Food's Ark of Taste, which "aims to rediscover and catalog forgotten flavors by documenting excellent food products that are in danger of disappearing." This deals with the GMOs we have been discussing in class that lead to the endangerment of the original crops. It's shocking to look at the list of products they have deemed as in danger.

Beyond this, you can find a calendar listing various local farm events, reasoning and surveys concerning why you should eat local foods, and education on the importance of eating organic produce. I do know that this cite does not feature all local markets and organic restaurants, as there are some I know of that are missing in the listings, but overall it appears to be a very useful tool. The website can be found at http://www.localharvest.org/.

-Ryan Sharnbroich

Eating Where We Learn

The Student P-Patch Garden at UW

I want to take a moment to talk about where food is growing closest to us: two on-campus gardens. The (slightly) older of the two, known as the Urban Farm, grows near the two Botany Greenhouses on the south end of campus. Anyone interested is welcome to garden there - just join the email list or check out the website to hear about opportunities - and all gardeners share in the harvest.

I spearheaded the creation of the Student P-Patch Garden, shown in the picture, last spring, with the help of the Urban Gardeners and students in SEED, the residence hall environmental group. In this garden, each student or group of students tends one garden plot. This garden is intended to give residence hall students a sense of ownership over a place that they wouldn't otherwise have in the dorms.

Both of these projects, along with the dozens of other school farms across the country, yield a substantial amount of produce, but their main product is food for thought. Student gardens open students' eyes to food issues and teach them the basics of growing their own food. We need more gardens like this for food sovereignty and sustainable food systems to take root again in the United States.


Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley

The Farmer and the Ideology

Closing circle at the Gathering - I am on the far left

Last weekend, I attended the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture 2008 Leadership Gathering in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. Being very new to the sustainable agriculture scene (and professional conferences), and never having seen Missouri, I had no idea what to expect. Fortunately, everyone I talked to was friendly and warm, eager to share what they were doing and learn about my project. The activists and farmers I met impressed me with their insight and inspired and energized me to join the sustainable agriculture movement.

I learned a lot about food policy in the workshops, but even more in between them. Two farmers who became my friends over the weekend, Sandra and Melynda, helped bring to life for me the debate over the value of organic certification. Sandra raises certified organic poultry and produce in Kentucky. She is a staunch advocate for organic certification, and expressed frustration to me about farmers who claim to follow organic standards but aren't certified. Organic farming, for her, goes beyond forgoing chemicals: it is about replenishing the soil and protecting the land. The certification ensures that farmers go to this level in conservation. And, she says, the certification process is easy and affordable, contrary to what seems to be popular belief.

Melynda, on the other hand, sustainably raises a small herd of cattle without organic certification, in Connecticut. For her, organic certification would mean she couldn't treat her cows with antibiotics when they get sick, something she views as inhumane. She also finds certification unnecessary, because she already has a loyal base of customers who buy milk and meat directly from her farm and can see for themselves how sustainably her cows are raised.

How can these two valid perspectives directly contradict each other? Part of the issue might be differences between cows and chickens, although the debate does exist within the dairy community as well. Differences between the ways the two farmers market their products (farmers' markets v. selling directly on the farm) might also play a role. Maybe, though, both perspectives are limited. Perhaps Melynda does unwittingly cut corners in the stewardship of her land. And maybe Sandra underestimates the weight of the antibiotic issue for larger animals. Probably, both farmers went home with an increased understanding of the other side of the issue. I know I did.

Ariana Rose Taylor-Stanley

Evolutionary Anthropology Research

In my research of our blog topic, I came across a fascinating study performed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, comparing human diets to that of other apes. They fed distinctly different diets associated with either humans or apes to laboratory mice, and within only two weeks noted significant differences between the mice that are also noted between the genetics of humans and apes. The implications of this experiment are overwhelming - if only two weeks of eating a certain diet can produce such noticeable results in such a short amount of time, imagine what the effects of a lifetime of eating a certain way may be. We may not exactly be what we eat, but what we eat surely does shape who we are and what we may become. You can follow this link to read the summary of this experiment and its findings:


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130092139.htm


-Ryan Sharnbroich

Other Side of the Red Line

Supermarket Red-Lining is generally seen in low-income, minority dense areas and marked by the absence of supermarkets in a region.

Whats the problem? Well it encompasses our blog theme: you are what you eat, you eat where you are.

This red-lining is troublesome because it limits the range of food that people in these supermarket-deprived areas can consume. Basically the range in what they can eat goes from everything nutritious, fresh and good to just strictly processed, full of preservatives and high fructose corn syrup canned/frozen/boxed foods etc.

Food is purchased at mini-marts that are found at every corner flanked by liquor stores or fast food restaurants. Their food that they consume is strictly because of where they are. Many of these people do not have means (i.e. money, transportation) to get to these supermarkets where fresh-produce could be found. This had led to many studies done in where residents of red-lined areas are suffering from malnutrition and health problems.

The New York Times briefly talks about the support and opposition to a one year moratorium that was passed in South Los Angeles that bans new fast food restaurants from opening and gives incentives to those prospective owners who open a grocery store or non-fast food restaurants. Although it does not explicitly speak towards redlining, South L.A. is subject to it, as hinted in the article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09ban.html?hp).

Vera Tran

Recycle

I came across this documentary in a summer course that I took, World Hunger and Resource Development. I wanted to pass this along because I feel that it touches on a few issues that we have talked about in class.

It touches on the idea of having a sense of place. Miguel Diez, the man in the film, left his home and wife and opted for a new way of life. With the creation of the garden, he was able to to create a special relationship to the place in which he inhabited, which then tied him to the land. I think this is even more important when considering that people have this innate affiliation to nature. It's a culture that everyone can relate too. Miguel found peace in creating this garden directly in an urban matrix. Gardening, restoration or spending time with nature can mend the natural connection we humans have with the environment and lead to an understanding of a land ethic.

You can find this original short documentary here at, www.mediathatmattersfest.org/mtm_good_food/#
It has plenty of other great films on food, sustainability and the environment as well as other important issues that we face today on both a local and global scale. I encourage everyone to take a look at the website. .

Vera Tran

Undercover Investigations

A few weeks ago, a vegan organization on campus handed me some pamphlets about animal cruelty. I happened to come across on of these pamphlets the other day, and what I read was horrific. It discussed the multitude of inhumane methods that animal factories in our country use to increase efficiency and profit with no thought and absolutely no respect to the well-being of the animals. I read about the debeaking of chickens, cramped quarters of pigs and cows, various antibiotics animals are injected with to keep them alive in the inhumane conditions that actually effect the meat we eat, trickery companies use to convince consumers that their methods are humane when in fact they are far from. They included a link to some videos that undercover investigators have taken in various factories around our country. They are animal rights activists who accepted jobs at these factories to secretly take video of conditions for animals and workers. The link for some of these videos is http://www.veganoutreach.org/video/, they are incredibly graphic and show animals being tortured, beaten, killed without euthanasia. For any of us who eat meat from many of the big companies in our nation, like I have, it is incredibly eye opening to see what we are actually eating.

-Ryan Sharnbroich

Food Security vs Food Justice

I was talking to Prof. Battisti, my Global Warming professor one day, and he is a specialist on Food security. I have always wanted to know the difference between Food Security and Food Justice, and Prof. Battisti gave me a definition of Food Security:

“a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social
and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their
dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO 2001).

I found something online about this topic as well:

http://peoplesgrocery.org/brahm/peoples-grocery/why-we-call-it-food-justice

Through my conversation with David (our TA), the answer became clearer that Food Security is more passive while Food Justice is trying to help the people gain the initiative in the access to food. So even they all emphasize on people's access to food, we can see Food Security as a more science point of view while Food Justice a more anthropological one. I'm looking forward to Prof. Pena's lectures on Food Justice :)

--Xiyue Sally Zhang