HW 20 - Thinking/Writing Groups

Please send me an email with the following:

1. Your name, email address, and blog address.

2. Fellow-student members of T/W Team, their blog addresses, and their emails.

3. More skilled person's name, relationship to you, and email address.

4. Less skilled person's name, relationship to you, and email address.

Please also clarify with the persons you recruit (mentor AND younger person) that you are asking them to;

1. Read your 2-3 blog posts per week.

2a. Post a comment to one of your recent blog posts approximately 1x per week.

2b. Their comments should (please) focus on the BEST line or idea in your blog post. They could please quote or paraphrase your best idea, say why they like it, and then offer their own response or suggestions as to how you could further develop this particularly good aspect of your post.

Please consider what we discussed in class about the right way to approach potential mentors, about the importance of reciprocity, and respect for the time of others.

Please email me this by Saturday morning 8:30am.

HW 19 - Family Perspectives on Illness & Dying

Our families affect how we approach illness & dying - but how much? Our understanding of illness & dying, as we discussed in class, include modalities, categories, treatments, diagnoses, and ways of understanding illness & dying.

Please discuss illness & dying with the adults who raised you. You're looking for areas of overlap and contrast between how they approach it and your understanding of dominant culture perspectives. Please ask them also about the health/illness/dying practices of the people who raised them.

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 your ability to creatively and critically conceptualize dominant social practices around illness & dying in terms of your own experience.

Please post your 3-6 paragraph mini-essay by Wednesday 9pm.

HW 18 - Health & Illness & Feasting

Please write a 3-5 paragraph analysis of physicality over the break.

If you're involved in family feasting please make that your focus for most of the analysis.

How did your experience of this holiday fit into the "anti-body" vs "body-centered" practices of our culture? How did food-pleasure supplement, dominate, or focus the event? Were other pleasures also practiced (watching football afterwards?)? What "background" elements related to illness & dying (empty chairs, sick family members, the nutritiousness of the food, lack of movement, etc)?

Due Monday, Nov. 29 at 8:30am.

HW 17 - First Thoughts on the Illness & Dying Unit

Please write 3-5 paragraphs on your first thoughts about our exploration of illness & dying.

Some prompts you could use to get yourself started:

1. Your experience with the topics.

2. The way you've been taught to see illness & dying.

3. Social norms around illness & dying in our culture.

4. Your family's approach to these aspects of life.

5. Possibly unusual perspectives you have about being sick and/or dying.

Aim for exploration. List questions. Open your eyes up. You shouldn't be writing an argumentative paper (probably), instead try to get your own thoughts and insights and perceptions flowing. If you find yourself writing vague cliches (happens to all of us) finish the sentence and then write about why you think your thoughts circle around vague cliches on these topics.

Due Wednesday, 24 November, 8:30am.

Further Resources for Food

Anonymous Survey for Feedback on the Unit (please do by Wednesday AM):

Click here to take survey

Don't stop thinking and reading about food just because we're shifting focus.

Further Resources (I'll add more from some of the best sources cited as evidence from you HW 12 outlines):

Video:
Mark Bittman TED talk about "What's wrong with what we eat?" (pro plants)
7 More TED Talks related to food reform
Dean Ornish - World's Killer Diet (3 minutes)
The Meatrix - short and sweet

Text:
Math Lessons for Locavores (debunking some food reform claims)
Omnivore's Delusion (anti-Pollan)
Food Movement, Rising by Pollan (growing the movement for food reform)
Big Food/Big Insurance by Pollan (if huge insurance companies lose profit because of diabetes, maybe they'll join the fight for healthier food)
Common Kitchens for Local Farmers

• Food, Inc Activism Website
• Coalition of Immokalee Workers
• Reforming School Food in NYC
• Labels on Front of Food Packages Coming - NYT
• NYT - Chefs in NYC Schools
• NYT - New Method of Killing Chickens

HW 12 - Final Food Project 2 - Outline

Picking a Thesis Video

Over the semester you're going to write, piece by piece, an exhibition style paper outline based on the major focus of the course. Naturally, an exhibition style paper needs a thesis, supporting arguments, and lots of evidence.

So you will first select a tentative thesis for the overarching paper, and then write a supporting argument (including lots of evidence) from the food unit. Next unit you will write a supporting argument for the overarching thesis from the "Illness & Dying" unit.

1. So right now you need to select a tentative overarching thesis. Some options are below - but feel free to write your own, from any political perspective or angle. But make sure it includes the phrases ("normal routines" or "dominant social practices" AND the phrase some version of the phrase "nightmarish industrial atrocities").

Many of the dominant social practices in our society - practices that define a "normal" life - on further investigation turn out to involve nightmares and industrial atrocities.

Sustainable and humane alternatives to nightmarish dominant social practices in our culture fail the tests of scalability, achievability, and/or desirability.

Dominant social practices in our culture - nightmarish industrial atrocities they may be - evolved to fit this culture's demands and will not be replaced by voluntaristic feel-good tree-hugging utopian fantasies.

An individual living in our culture must recognize and respond to the nightmarish industrial atrocities at the root of dominant social practices in order to live a morally satisfactory life.

2. Using the food unit as a basis, outline a persuasive argument that supports the thesis you've selected. You can think of this as "Argument 1" proving your thesis. "Argument 1" will include its own major claim, several supporting claims, and several pieces of evidence for each claim.

Supporting Your Thesis Video

For instance, if I selected the thesis;
Dominant social practices in our culture - nightmarish industrial atrocities they may be - evolved to fit this culture's demands and will not be replaced by voluntaristic feel-good tree-hugging utopian fantasies.

Then my food argument would attempt to show that food practices in our culture haven't been and likely won't be changed by feel good "eat right" campaigns. So my outline would look like this;
Major Claim: The failure of the ongoing food movement to significantly alter U.S. food ways shows that voluntaristic fantasies can't resist the juggernaut logic of our culture.

Supporting claim 1: There has been a food movement, it's gotten a lot of press.
Evidence: Sales of Pollan, Schlosser, and viewers of "Food, Inc."
Evidence: Michelle Obama's campaign
Evidence: Sampling of titles from the last 6 months in the NYT.

Supporting claim 2: The food practices in our society keep getting worse despite the food movement's efforts.
Evidence: Still rising obesity rates.
Evidence: Still rising diabetes rates.
Evidence: Continued expansion of fast food restaurants.
Evidence: Continued increases or maintenance of per capita meat and corn syrup.
Evidence: Continued expansion of corn-based practices - such as fish farming.

3. Now please find the proof of all the related evidence that you've named so that you have at least one hyperlink or text citation for each piece of evidence. Put those in a works cited at the end of the outline and hyperlink the evidence that you have good sources for.

4. You don't have to write the paper! (at least not yet).

Due Monday, Nov. 1 at 8:30am.

HW 11 - Final Food Project 1

For your last experience in the food unit, please select one of the following modalities;

A. Experiential (change diet, change shopping, change how you prepare food, how you eat). Note, if you select a change in how you do food that includes your family or would be weird to your family, please get parental/guardian consent and support!

B. Academic (research a particular aspect of what we've learned, double check key claims from Pollan & Schlosser, research related material)

C. Activist (do something to build a movement for better food - consider the Food, Inc website, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Slow Food Movement, and the School Food issue)

Then write about what you did and learned in 4-5 paragraphs. Explore especially what you did, how it is connected to what we've been working on, what you learned from doing it (including what would help you do it more effectively next time), and why it matters (to you and/or others).

Due Sunday, Oct. 31 at noon.