HW 6 - Food Diary

Please make a food diary for yourself that includes everything you eat for 48 hours. I'd suggest taking a cellphone camera shot of everything before you eat and writing up the major meals right after you're done.

Please count calories for a day and consider where you're at compared to the "official" recommendations. You could use this site, or this one, or another - but pay extra attention to serving size - if its 300 calories per serving it really makes a difference whether you ate a half serving or 2 servings.

Please also focus for a day on the actual sensual experience of the food - tastes, textures, smells, colors, tanginess, wetness, etc.

Post a few excerpts (descriptions of the food, and the circumstances of your eating) along with photos for 2 or more meals. Please also include several paragraphs of analysis - you could focus on:

a. examining the nutrition angle

b. your physical experience of the food (not just what you enjoyed the most or the least or barely noticed - which is description - but analysis - why, connections, theories, questions)

c. your thinking and feeling about the food you ate over the 48 hours - why did you pick that food? Do you feel good about the food you ate over the 48 hours?

As in all posts, please edit, proofread, and revise for clarity, readability, beauty, and insight.

Due Friday, October 1, at 8:30pm.

HW 5 - Dominant Discourses Regarding Contemporary Foodways in the U.S.

You've learned what a "dominant discourse" might be and you've thought about contemporary dominant discourses regarding foodways in the U.S. (BTW - I find online definitions of this key concept at the following places - a, b, c, d - I would argue with all of them, but I like the definition on page 4 of c best, and I like the site d the best. For your blog post please reword the explanation I gave in class in your own way perhaps enriched by looking at the above definitions). I argued that we can simplify much of the current dominant food-related discourses as focusing on either "food as medicine" or "food as poison."

Investigate this terrain more carefully.

1. Read some of the following links from the NY Times

Told To Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries

Doctor's Orders: Eat Well, To Be Well

Fresh Vegetables Where Fast Food Reigns

Salmonella At Egg Farm Traced to 2008

Fixing A World That Fosters Fat

Senate Bill on Food Safety Stalls

2. Search food related topics in other dominant mass-media - you can either navigate to their site and type "food" or "eating" in the search box - or you can type in the name of the source and "food" or "eating" or something else in Google's search box.

newspapers Wall Street Journal USA Today

magazines People, Reader's Digest, National Geographic, Time, Sports Illustrated

TV stations like CNN, ABC, etc.

3. Does it seem to you that the people writing (and quoted) think we are living in a time in which significant reform of U.S. foodways might occur or has occurred?

4. What do you imagine might be the food practices of a reasonably well-informed member of our society whose worldview gets sculpted by mass-media-propagated dominant discourse? What does she eat, where, when, with whom, why? How does she think food?

In 3-6 paragraphs please describe contemporary dominant discourses in the U.S. regarding foodways. What topics seem most frequently discussed? Who gets included and quoted in the conversation? What problems require what solutions? What preoccupations or frameworks seem to contextualize debate? Please use quotes and paraphrases (accurately cited or at least hyperlinked) from your web-research to evidence your description.

Since we're in the "Citizen" phase of our Food unit, I'm not asking you to evaluate the dominant discourse - just to map major themes, positions, ways of conceptualizing, problems/solutions, participants, and stakes in the current mainstream discussion. But don't feel anxious - we'll get to critiquing before we finish the unit.

Due 8:30am Wednesday, September 29.

HW 4 - Your Families' Foodways

Our families affect how we approach food - but how much? Foodways, as we discussed in class, include not just what gets eaten, but how it is eaten, how food is understood, how it is prepared, produced, and contextualized within daily practices. Foodways relate to ethnic cultures, gender norms, and economic class.

Please discuss food with the adults who raised you. You're looking for areas of overlap and contrast between how they approach food and how you approach food. Please ask them also about the foodways of the people who raised them. What do you (and they) imagine are some of the factors leading to generational differences in foodways?

While you're at it, take an inventory and a picture of the inside of your fridge - or a picture and a menu of a meal that your family ate together (or both). How does this evidence connect to your theories about the foodways of yourself and your family?

A strong post will be well-organized - each paragraph focusing on a single main idea, contain lively original ideas and perspectives, avoid or nuance clichés, and demonstrate a solid ability to integrate the concept of foodways with your own experience and with change over time/place.

Please post your 3-6 paragraph mini-essay by 8:30am Tuesday, Sept. 28.

HW 3 - Food - Fast Food Insights and Green Market Realizations

Please publish 2-4 paragraphs of insights, interesting questions, and perceptive observations from our visits to the Union Square Greenmarket and a fast food restaurant.

You could focus on one or two of the following topics or identify a related topic of your own:
1. Differences and similarities between the two locations.
2. Some reasons fast food is so successful.
3. How is fast food responding to the sort of health-consciousness that the Greenmarket represents, and what do you think about it?
4. How did various people you met today approach food - what's their orientation to food? Is food a commodity or sacred or both?
5. Which of the two locations do you normally visit and why? What do you think about that?

Again, I recommend that you write multiple drafts to figure out deeper levels of insight and to clarify and beautify your writing.

Due Friday, Sept 24 @ 8:30am.

HW 2 - Food - Initial Thoughts

Please write 2-5 paragraphs about food. Use questions and thoughts from your notebook and class discussion to get you started. Feel free to choose an area of focus - better to write 3 meaningful paragraphs about 3 aspects of food, than to make a list of questions and answers.

Particularly interesting to me - What are your priorities in food and what do you think of those priorities? In what ways does your typical meal fail to meet the desires of an ideal meal, and what do you think of that? Is food sacred (and what does that mean)?

Please collect your best thoughts from the notebook, write a draft (perhaps on Word), print and edit, then revise and publish. Even though this is "initial thoughts" and can't be wrong it could be more (or less) excellent, profound, beautifully-written, or insightful.

To achieve insight try this process:

1. Write down what you think.

2. Think about what you think. Could you take it a step further? Figure out why you see the world that way? See something most people don't realize?

3. Repeat.

To achieve beauty try this process:

1. Get your ideas out.

2. Re-write each sentence so it says what you want, better, shorter, sharper.

3. Make up new metaphors or find short funny anecdotes to illustrate key ideas.

4. Use sensual language - color, motion, shape, feel, sound.

5. Read the piece out loud and change it where it feels confusing, slow, or boring.

Due Wednesday, 22 September, 8:30am.

How to make a blog for this course

How To Make A Blog for This Course

First, take a deep breath. This is not going to be that hard for most of you. Only about 10% of the people who do this meet massive frustration and at least half of them will be suffering the forgetting of their log-in info.

1. Keep this page up as one tab and open another tab for the following steps. You may find it hard to follow sequential directions. You may want to ask the teacher. You may want to ask a neighbor. But try to follow the written directions, which is a useful skill.

2. Create a google identity. Here. This will help you in life. If you don't already have one I suggest that you pick one that wouldn't be embarassing to a professor. So - BBallerFlyBoyYoMama might not be the best choice - even if it weren't already taken. Something like ASnyder is better. But don't use that one either. You can do something that isn't a gmail account using your existing email if you choose.

3. Create a blogger account. Please make sure that you use ONLY your first name and first initial of your last name. Please do not post any photos of yourself likely to fascinate stalkers. Please also include what section you're in. Feel free to make the title "Normal is Weird by (your first name and first initial of your surname)". For the address pick something "respectable." Do not link to anything that reveals personal information about yourself. Please select a color scheme with black letters and simple light pastel background (no pictures or shapes), that will be highly readable for the poor schmo who will be reading 96 of these at a time.

4. Click "view blog" and copy the URL (the webaddress at the top of the page).

5. Go to the UTFL Messageboard and IN THE CORRECT SECTION reply to the addresses thread to offer your address together with your first name and first initial of last name. If you find that your blog address has your last name in it please begin again with step 3. If you find that you have posted the link, and written your last name in the post, please repeat step 5, as the mistakenly forthright post will be deleted.

HW 1 - Intro Email

Please send me an email with the following questions copied into your email and answered. My email address was given out in class - its my first name and then the anarchy symbol and then the acronym of "undo the folded lie" dot net. Send it to me by Thursday at noon, please.

The first four questions are crucial - the rest will help me know you a bit better. Me knowing you a bit better might help me make the class better for you, but please feel free to write "Pass" to any question you don't want to answer.

1. Your first and last name.

2. Your phone number.

3. The name of the guardian/parent who most concerns herself with your education.

4. His/her email address (generally this person would only be contacted for something good - and if negative you'd have already been given a chance to take care of it yourself).

5. A favorite movie.

6. A favorite book.

7. A favorite song.

8. What you mostly did this summer or what you did this summer that was the best part.

9. Which of the following DON'T you have? Library card, computer, internet access, flash drive, notebook, pen, google account?

10. Something you do between school and sleeping that you feel good about (taking care of a sibling, working, learning guitar, etc.).

11. A goal you have for this course.

12. Something you think I should know in getting ready to teach the course this year - your particularly sharp skills (writing, video, singing, art, etc), or something you particularly struggle with (shy, hard-time maintaining motivation, hard time accomplishing work, etc) or something related to food, illness, death, birth, care of the dead, or prom (a relative who's a professional, a particular experience or interest), or someone in your section you'd absolutely not want to be paired with, etc. Write a sentence or a paragraph, up to you.