It's p-patch not pea patch

I didn’t know we had any p-patches around the u-district. I was quite surprised to learn there was one just down the street from my house. I’ve driven past it easily hundreds of times and always thought it was just someone’s garden. It was interesting to see that even though it was a p-patch most of the plants were still flowers. I figured it would all be fruits and vegetables that could be eaten.

Teresa Mares’ talk about p-patches was also very interesting. I guess growing up in Colorado, there is so much farming that I never realized that anyone outside of those communities wanted to grow stuff too. I actually like the idea of the p-patch, a public piece of land devoted to something other than development. In their current state, I can never really see them as more than just a hobby but if they were bigger they could definitely be used to support individual communities.

I think it would be fun to own one of the plots myself. I’ve always thought that cooking my own food tastes better than going to a restaurant and I would imagine that growing what I cook would be even better than that. Plus, knowing how to farm for yourself would just be a good tool to be able to utilize.

(Portfolio) Just leave it up to chance

Genetically modified foods kind of freak me out. Not because I think of it as some sort of mutant plant, but because I believe that if we have to power to genetically alter a plant and basically grow how we want it to, there is little to stop us from genetically modifying animals to do the same. Now I know we’ve been selectively breeding plants and animals for millennia, but selective breeding and genetically altering an organism are two completely different things.

With selective breeding, there is still the element of chance; with genetic modification, you eliminate that element and you know exactly what your outcome will be. I mean, forget plants and animals, what would stop us from genetically modifying humans to be stronger, to be faster? What would stop the military from basically growing an army of super soldiers (think Nazi Germany as brought up by Karen-Sue Taussig in her article)? Sure that sounds like science fiction but so did genetically engineering plants to be better than they ever should have been.

Are we even so sure that messing with the genetic code of plants isn’t some going to affect anyone who eats that plant? Do we even really know what we are doing, and are we positive we know the outcome? What if some scientist got the calculations wrong, like maybe they spliced the wrong gene; we could end up with something straight out of a low-budget horror film. I don’t know about you, but the ability to genetically modify something to your own specifications definitely freaks me out a little.

(Portfolio) To be or not to be... a vegetarian

I don’t know if I ever really made a conscious decision to eat meat, it’s just how I’ve always been; I love a good steak (in fact I just had one that was excellent). I don’t have anything against vegetarians or vegans, I just like red meat. If you choose not to eat meat, or any animal products for that matter, that’s your choice, but that’s not for me.

Vegetarians and vegans complain about the slaughtering of animals for the production of meat, yet they eat plants while they’re still alive and photosynthesizing. Just because plants don't have a mouth to cry out doesn't really make it any better. I know that sounds a little silly, but if you think about it, it’s true.

Michael Pollan poses the idea that as everything in today’s industrial world is highly dependent on fossil fuels (which of course harm the planet in every imaginable way). Therefore, possibly the most ethical thing is to eat animals, as more fossil fuels would be necessary to raise and transport vegetarian approved foods.

I do agree that the conditions in which the animals live and ultimately die are pretty miserable and I do think there could be something done about that, I just don’t think not eating meat all together is really the solution to that problem.

During our cooking adventure yesterday, we prepared vegan lentil soup and I’ll admit it wasn’t bad. I kept feeling like it was missing something though. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until one of our classmates said this would be good as a stew and that’s when it hit me; the soup needed some meat to it. Now I’m not saying that meat was a necessity, but I just think the soup would have been richer with some pieces of flank steak or maybe some tender chunks of lamb and of course maybe a little more spice.

Fast food nation

Yesterday in class, Ann treated us to a good ‘ol American meal, Diet Coke and Ramen noodles. In my last blog, I talked about commodified taste and you can’t get more commodified that Diet Coke and Ramen noodles. While we were enjoying this fabulous meal, Ann had us write down what was on our mind while we ate. For the Ramen, I wrote things like “doesn’t smell like it tastes,” “chickenized,” “salty,” and “gives me a headache after a while.” Now that’s probably not the best list of things to describe a product, but Diet Coke didn’t score much better. For that I had things like “watery,” “not a good aftertaste,” syrupy,” and “doesn’t go down very well.”

Like the Taco Bell that I mentioned in my last blog, Diet Coke and Ramen noodles are another of America’s commodified tastes. Alison Leitch talks about the Slow Food Movement in her article as a way to try to move away from these commodified, fast foods. I pulled up the Wikipedia on the Slow Food Movement and here is what it says, “The Slow Food Movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a resistance movement to combat fast food. It claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion.” This is pretty much the exact opposite of Diet Coke and Ramen. The exercise today was not only a fun way to illustrate the Leitch article but it actually is a little bit of an eye-opener as to not only how commodified our taste has become (taste about more in the previous post) but that we really have become a “fast food” nation.

Mmmmm… Taco Bell

Let's talk about commodified taste. So what really is a commodified taste? In class we talked about how food, and thus taste, is becoming more and more produced for the consumer instead of produced by the consumer. The Haden article talks about how technology has made food easy to obtain and convenient. You can freeze whole meals in a factory and a consumer can take it home and heat it up and have a representation of a home cooked meal. You can go to fast food restaurants and get whole dinners for less than a couple of gallons of gas. You can even have it all delivered to you if you don’t want to move at all. Food is convenient, food is cheap, and taste has become a commodity.

I think fast food is a great example of this and that is where Taco Bell comes into play. I absolutely love Taco Bell. I eat there at least once if not twice a week and it never gets old. I’ve had probably everything on the menu multiple times and I still go back for more. Sure just about everything tastes the same; the burritos taste like the tacos and the chalupas taste like the crunch-wrap supremes. But that taste has been commodified and is now being sold to millions of people. I know it’s probably slowly killing me, but it’s cheap and easy…and isn’t that really what food and taste is about now-a-days. Who has the time to cook home-cooked meals every day? With school and work, I’m lucky if I even eat dinner at a reasonable time. I try to cook as much as I can but the allure of cheap and easy is just too great sometimes.

Man, those Johns are Hoppin!

Today in class, our group worked on preparing a southern dish called Hoppin' Johns. It is a one-pot dish made with black-eyed peas, onions, garlic, and vegetable broth. Having no ancestry in the south and actually not knowing that many people from the south either, this dish was completely new to me; as was the other dish we made in class, collard greens. Now both of these are southern dishes but to be honest, I’ve always associated them with slavery and actually I believe that is how they got their start. I did a little research and according to epicurious.com “throughout the South this humble dish of ‘peas’ and rice is eaten on New Year's Day for good luck, with a plate of [collard] greens, cooked with a hog jowl and plenty of corn bread to sop up the pot likker.”

I was pretty fun to cook today in the kitchen; I can just imagine how it would be down south. Our group would taste the Hoppin’ Johns every now and then to see how they were doing and if we needed to ass anything. The funny thing is that none of us had ever had them before so we really only were adding things that would make them good to us and probably not keeping with the southern tradition of it all. It was funny because we would ask each other what it needed as if we actually knew but in the end, they actually turned out pretty good (could have used a little spice, but that’s ok…sorry Annie).

(Portfolio) Racist food

Food definitely has a race, a gender, an ethnicity, and a class; well maybe not so much a gender, but the other three for sure. I also believe that food has a specific region as well. There are stereotypes that exist for food with regards to race and there are certainly so-called ethnic foods. As for food and class, there are foods which only the upper class can afford and vice-versa for the lower classes. There is soul food, Asian food, Indian food, and even white food.

The Rouse/Hoskins article touched on “soul food” but I think their ideas can be expanded to talk about all food. All food has been given a race, an ethnicity, a class, and by default of where it comes from, a region. Rice is Asian and spans all classes. Collard greens are southern and started as a lower class food, but have since moved to be a more middle class dish. Curry is Indian, corn is central American, the list goes on.

I feel like there are even foods that I relate to better than others because of where I grew up and what food I grew up with. I love spicy foods, especially Mexican food, and I think that has a little to do with growing up in Denver. I would imagine if I grew up in Seattle, I would feel the same way about Thai or Vietnamese. Food is regional and the region also gives it it’s race, it’s ethnicity, and it’s class.