HW 2 - Food - Initial Thoughts

There are 6,870,243,998 people in the world and nearly 1.02 billion people are malnourished.

For about 10 months now I have been eating as a pescatarian. Meaning I don't eat meat only fish, vegetables, fruit, a lot of soy and dairy products... when I was younger my mom was a vegetarian so I was as well. However when she decided to go on the Atkins diet she had to shift her whole eating habits around and start eating meat again. Now my parents eat poultry and I'm the odd ball. I don't have some cliche answer as to why I don't eat meat, I honestly just realized whenever I ate meat I felt sick and I never thought it agreed with me. On January 1st I decided that my new years resolution was to stop eating meat. Every year I made some resolution but I never kept up with it. It would last a couple of days or a week or two. The first two weeks of being a pescatarian were hard, I gave in twice once because I forgot I stopped eating chicken and the other time because my friends chicken cesar wrap looked so good! After taking a bite of it though I realized I wasn't missing much. What's really weird though about not eating meat is sometimes I have dreams where I am offered it and I get so close to having it but then my dream turns into this strange nightmare... I think by eliminating meat from my diet I have started eating healthier and exercising more. I think the way we eat reflects our lifestyle choices as well.

Living and growing up in a country that has the mindset to always be one step ahead and watch the other guys wait around has a huge affect on the masses way of eating. The phrase "Patience is a virtue", flew out the window years ago and if we don't have something in front of us the second we want it, we all become big complaining babies. Thankfully though our country has an answer to all of our huge "problems", the fast food industry! "Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk in, get on line, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, place your order, hand over a few dollars, watch teenagers in uniforms pushing various buttons, and moments later take hold of a plastic tray full of food wrapped in color paper and cardboard." (Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.) My problem isn't that I wish all food tasted like fast food it's that any ability to be patient for food is long gone. I rarely eat fast food and if I do it's like a special occasion... which I find kind of weird. I think being surrounded by people who are a step ahead makes me feel like I need to be a step ahead. So when I am waiting 10 or 15 minutes for a meal that was actually cooked during that time period I become very impatient.

My grandmother is catholic, she has angel statues all over her house and refers to g*d very often... she says grace at every meal. Whenever I visit her I always feel like I am in one of those movies where grace is being said and the character looks up and looks around at everyone with kind of a funny confused look. I have nothing against people being thankful for their food I guess I just don't ever say it aloud. However, I think that by having this grace my Grandma feels much more sacred about her meals than I do. When I think of things being sacred it almost seems like a ritual to me, something that people appreciate. A time where a person or people can be together and have a moment to realize how lucky they are to have food. So even though like my Grandma I don't say grace at every meal I am not unaware of the billions of people around the world who are constantly worrying about the next meal or the next time they will have clean water.

The things that come the easiest to us are also the things we over look the most. This is very general but in my experience as a teenager the discussion usually revolves more around materialistic things than the actual important stuff. If we have so much time to worry about if we are getting the new gadget why don't we have time to worry about eating better? Why don't we have time to worry about all of the other people who won't be eating today? Why don't we have time to recognize the food we are putting in our bodies? Why do we forget that without this food we wouldn't be here?