My community and food

I wanted to focus my personal essay on how food helps us to build a community. I feel that this community can start when we are in preschool or elementary school, we sit in our classroom groups

or with our friends and eat lunch together. In those groups we always are trading our lunches for things that we like better. I think this can build a community. Families can build cultures around food, so why can't children build a community around it? This to me was really influenced by going to one of my placements for a class, where I am a lunch buddy for children and I watched them interact while they eat. Seeing them clump into their groups of friends and talk about something other than class is a good thing. But even when children go through the lunch line or pick their food choice for the day they consult with their friends. This to me is creating a community.
I live in a sorority house, we all have built a community around food. We all eat dinner together, it is something that I would not trade for the world. We all talk and laugh and bond, we all talk about how we hate meatloaf or how we absolutely love Tacos. Its a time where we all can decompress from our day. This is my community and I spend so much time with them, but dinner is where we just focus on us.
Food plays a big role in my social life, I think at least once a week living in a sorority house I am asked to go on midnight snack runs. Being as busy as we all are this is one of two times that we have together so we all socialize around food. My house loves to cook and bake so food is a big part of who we are. It makes me sad to know that just because my house isn't a tiny person like a stereo typical sorority that we are called fatties or A-O-eat another piece of pie. Its because be aren't afraid to indulge in somethings that we want. I think that this has also helped us to form a community just because of a negative stereotype that comes from food.

Coffee or Black Gold

I am one of those people where I cannot function without my morning coffee. That is why this documentary was so interesting to me, I wanted to know what my coffee obsession was doing to those around the world. I also was looking for ways to make my love for coffee more sustainable and see if there was a way for me to get it in a better way.

The documentary starts by asking farmers how much do you think coffee costs in the western world. None of them knew, but coffee where they were cost $0.12. It costs them 12 cents for

 coffee, yet in the western world it costs $2.90. The laughter that came from the farmers was shocking, it hit me, why do we have to charge so much for coffee while in other parts of the world coffee can go for 12 cents. We can make 80 cups of coffee from one kilo of coffee, that is just insane. These farmers are coffee farmers, they make if they are lucky $0.57, when they should be getting about $230, why are we doing this? No wonder these farmers don't want to work, or farmers are committing suicide because they want to settle their families debts. It makes me mad as a Starbucks and Biggby coffee fan to know that coffee is going for so little in these places, we charge so much for this but yet the guy who's doing the hard work is getting squat.

The farmers call coffee gold, we hear about it all the time, we see it advertised everywhere. There is a Starbucks inside Targets, and we joke that there is a Tim Hortons on every corner in Canada. Through out the movie you see Starbucks everywhere, the workers in the factories make less than a dollar a day and the World Trade Organization won't do anything to help them, they care too much about the trade than they do about helping the little guy out. We see these farmers struggle and we watch the process that the coffee goes through and yet we cannot seem to wake up and see that we are the ones that are killing the little guy in the coffee industry. 

We need to wake up and smell the coffee

Banana Republic.... Not just a clothing store

When I first started reading my second set of 100 pages in Starved and Stuffed by Raj Patel I was confused because he was talking about Banana Republics, I kept thinking about the clothing store. I wondered if they would still call themselves that if they knew what it could mean to other countries. As Patel points out, bananas were one of the first products to enter into the new food system. Yes the food system and trade treaties that lead to catastrophe for poor farmers.
Something that makes bananas so great is they can survive long shipping periods without going bad, therefore it was the best product to test on. In 1899 the United Fruit Company was founded as the largest banana merchant, but when governments or residents tried to take down the company, it struck them down. One of the biggest incidences with the United Fruit Company is when they accused the Guatemalan President for being a communist because he wanted to buy countries (Click the link and read about the Banana Massacre in Colombia) that went through this same situation with the United Fruit Company, they are not called the victims, they are called "Banana Republics". This term ruins the name of these countries.
their unused (yes, land that was not being used!) and give it to poor farmers and peasants. This caused an outbreak of war! There were over 200,000 lives lost in almost 40 years! All of this because a man wanted to buy unused land to help the people of his country. There are many other
So you haven't heard the name United Fruit Company... did you wonder why? Well it was renamed the popular name that we all know, Chiquita Banana. In the United States we barely acknowledge the horrors that have been caused by the United Fruit Company, the U.S. erased the history that it ever happened. Yet there are so many countries that are struggling to get a reputation back, or recover from the violence that occurred. We all now play the blame the victim game in the United States, I think that the U.S. should be trying to help others too, not just help ourselves.

The United Fruit Co.

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
the Jehovah parcelled out the earth
to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the ’Banana Republics’
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martines flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.

Among the blood-thirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flow as though
on plates into the ships.

Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbours, wrapped
for burials in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of the dead fruit
thrown down on the dump. 

Pablo Neruda

Stuffed and Starved

On the cover of this book by Raj Patel it says THE HIDDEN BATTLE for the WORLD FOOD SYSTEM, I totally believe that this is the main message of the book. Just within the first 100 pages of the book I really do believe that there is a hidden battle and we need to help it end. A majority of the worlds population is now starving, and there are still a majority of people who are considered obese. This is where I feel the title of the book originates. This is a huge problem in our world food system, but no one seems to have an answer.



Chapter 3 hit me the hardest, it was titled You have become Mexican. As an American we hear about Mexican farmers, and we basically blame Mexico for being poor. We blame it on the corruption in the government and the drug lords, but Raj Patel believes that it is America who should be blames for Mexico being poor. Patel thinks that the problem starts with NAFTA (North America Free Trade Association), when America, Canada and Mexico all entered they believed that this would increase each countries wealth. Unfortunately Mexico's market was much worse off, we put the emphasis on consumers rather than the producers. The book uses the corn market as an example. The American government is supporting its corn farmers so that they don't end up going out of business and the Mexican corn market cannot compete with this, thus causing them to go out of business. This gives the upper hand to the American Corn Farmers while the Mexican corn farmers are down and out! The book made it seem to me that America is a bully and is pushing Mexico around by using NAFTA. In other words NAFTA is encouraging the Mexican Farmers to migrate to the city and it is stated that farmers have found themselves pushed off of their own land. The hidden battle in chapter 3 is more of America beating down the people that they thought they were going to be able to lift up.


Another thing that hit me from the book was the notion of farmer suicides. I know plenty of farmers from my home town and I had never heard of this before now. This is an epidemic that faces much of the Indian farming industry. Patel's book states that in 1990 rural suicide rates in India were 3.9 per 100,000 for men and for women it was 0.6 per 100,000, by 2000 the rate was 6.1 per 100,000 for men and 1.2 per 100,000 for women. That was a 9 year difference, the number of men almost doubled and the number of women doubled, it is becoming much more of a problem. The book tells the story of a Korean farmer, Lee Kyung Hae, his story stuck out to me with how much he went through. He was a farmer and he climbed a fence to be by where the WTO (World Trade Organization) were having a meeting, Lee pulled out a pocket knife he shouted "The WTO kills farmers" and stabbed himself in the chest. Lee did not die because he wanted to draw attention to himself, he wanted to bring light to the problems the Korean farmers were facing, "the plight of Korean farmers". Before there were free markets in India the government used to assist by giving farmers minimum support prices for crops so farmers can know what they were going to get as returns. With free trade the government has turned their backs on the indian farmers and neglected them.

These are the few things that have stuck with me from the first 100 pages of Patel's book. It has addressed many issues that I had never heard of, even though I have previously learned about NATFA and the WTO. I feel that these issues aren't brought to light, at least in the case of NAFTA the issues might not be brought to light because America is being the bully. I know I will read more than the required pages of this book because it is so eye opening.

Food and Me

My family has a culture, its a culture built around food. My mom when cooking dinner on any night of the year would cook for about 20 people. Once I asked her why she did this and she said "I cook like this because I never know who might show up, but I want to be prepared." It was like this everyday and even worse during the holidays. We would have desserts and treats around the house constantly. As a kid this was great because as a child your eyes are always bigger than your stomach. This is where I get to my second relationship with food, it was where food and I developed a negative relationship. This negative relationship was becoming someone who used food as an escape, no I don't deny it, because cooking and baking became more than just culture, they became a bad habit.I gained almost 40 pounds within two years, a culture built around food can be a good and a bad thing. I would not eat healthy food I would eat the things I call guilty pleasure foods. The things I baked or making my own sweet creations, they were never really healthy, they were just an escape. This is especially bad with the obesity rate rising in America, I eventually realized that this negative relationship was causing me to gain so much weight and being in middle school and high school the negative food relationship, between food and me, it became a negative human relationship due to bullying because of my size. I took matters into my own hands and changed my relationship with food, I looked at my culture with all the food, and just changed it to be a healthier one. Food went from being public enemy number 1 to my new best friend. I was able to not only change my relationship with food but my families relationship to it as well. My whole family has now gotten on track and eats healthier now.  I never wanted to get rid of food, but making sure the food was healthy made it easier for me to enjoy the food part of my families culture.