HW 6 - Food Diary

I usually prefer not to keep count of what i eat because i feel that generally speaking, i eat too much. So instead i count calories and as long as what i ate was remotely healthy, then i can eat more as i get hungry. So this is my list for Wednesday and Thursday

I never eat breakfast, so that is that whole meal right out the window

Wednesday i had some of the buffet food from Emma's Dilemma for lunch, that included, white rice, sesame chicken, and some watermelon, along with that i had a can of seltzer. I estimate that meal was about 700 calories. Then after the soccer game i had a mini apple turnover from entenmann's which i estimate had 400 calories, and along with that i had bought a gallon of water which i drank through out the course of the game and hanging out with people after. Then for dinner, my mom made baked ziti and an arugula, walnut and apple salad. I had a generous portion of both, and i drank seltzer with dinner so i expect the calories from that meal to be around 800. That puts my total for the day to be 1900 calories, I base myself on a 2000 calorie a day diet, so for that 24 hours, i think i did quite well, and i got a little bit of exercise in too, albeit not very much because i am only the goalie so i don't do much running.

Thursday, or today, i had a slice of pizza from that new dollar pizza place and a spicy salmon roll and some other assorted sushi roll from the deli on 23rd and Lexington. and i had a bottle of water. I would chock that one up to 800 calories. Then i had a chocolate chip and a sugar cookie which had about 400 more calories, then i had Chinese food for dinner which included, pork dumplings, fried rice, sesame chicken, and spare ribs. I would then chock that up to 1000 calories because that food is drenched in grease. So that brings my total for the day to 2200 calories, which is about a full cookie above where i want to be, and i didn't exercise either which then shows that these calories didn't get burned like i wanted them too.

As i eat, i look for three things, whatever has the least calories, the most taste, and is the most filling. This is increasingly difficult to find because as the school year gets into full swing, i can't get to the gym as much because i have more school work that needs to be done and things like that. So as i eat, i am more calorie conscious. As i have discussed before, since i have a history with weight problems, i need to be very conscious of what i eat. The thing about my meals, is that in hindsight, there is almost no nutritional value in what i eat, it is mostly based on chicken that is drenched in some very heavy sauce. I mean from just those two days, the food looks terrible for someone who is supposedly counting their calories and is trying to eat healthier. When i eat, i want to be healthy, but I'm not, and i don't think this applies to just me, a lot of people try to be healthy, but it fails because we don't really know how, i know I'm not supposed to eat a lot and try to vary it up, but end the end, in a battle between my stomach and my brain, my stomach is going to win. Looking back, i don't feel good about what i ate, i feel like i have ability to be really healthy and i am not using that option because i don't have the determination that some people to. When it comes to food, I don't really have the option to eat what i want, the dominant discourse of America is that skinny is good, and because of that i need to be skinny, i need to strive to follow the dominant discourse, i need to be self conscious of my body and what i eat, and to go even further, it is to dress nice, and so on and so forth. In the constitution it states that we have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By creating and adhearing to the dominant discourses, we are stripping ourself of the pursuit of happiness. We are now changing it to the pursuit of acceptance, which gives us that false sense of happiness. So what if we can't eat the food that we want, we want to be happy and have everyone like us, so we can't eat like pigs and be as socially accepted. It's not even that our culture doesn't accept people who are overweight, because for the most part, we do, we have to. But we make games out of it, with television shows such as The Biggest Looser, or Dance Your Ass Off. These are all shows where people parade around all in the hopes of loosing weight and following the dominant discourse. We push ourselves so hard to be accepted by others that we are willing to sacrifice our own happiness for it. I guess that sacrificing our own happiness makes us happy after all, because otherwise, why would everyone be doing it?

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

Having touched upon this in HW#3, i am quite proud to say that i feel i have already a basic understanding of this topic, at least from what i already knew. I feel that there is no dominant discourse among the general public, at least when it comes to the entire general public because dominant discourse is the route or path of thinking that the majority of people follow. It is a social norm that people follow out of ignorance or lack of knowledge to other options. When it comes to food, people always read the reviews, or go where their friends tell them to go, because it is good or not. Zagats and YELP, have become the new Bibles when it comes to the restaurants we usually dine in.

When it comes to the way we eat, we all follow the ever present media. They guide our lives with claims of healthier and longer lives if we only follow their advice and cut trans-fats out of our diets, or stop ingesting so much sodium. These are ideas instilled in our head by the powers at be and because they said so, we do. "They say jump, we say how high." Just by looking up food in the New York Times or Thomson Reuters search boxes, you see the ever present big brother guiding our lives. In Reuters the 3rd article down is titled "HOLIDAY FOOD AND DRUG INTERACTIONS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH" (http://thomsonreuters.com/content/press_room/tsh/mdx_HolidayFoodDrugInterXns) We all know that we eat excessively and some people drink excessively, and we all know it is bad for us, but to make it seem like people are going to overdose on turkey or holiday ham is ridiculous. We all have to relax and be able to see that we are more then capable of managing our own diets. I don't need mayor Bloomberg telling me that restaurants now need to monitor their trans-fats and sodium.

I can't even begin to comprehend what a person's view of food would be, had they not been affected by dominant discourse. There would probably be a lot of eating that wasn't censored by counting calories or looking at ingredients, and there would probably be more physical exercise or none at all. They would most likely have food that tasted good all the time and not worry so much about drinking soda. If they were to start reading newspapers and watching the news, they would probably change their diets slowly, with subtle things, like counting calories and maybe cutting out unnecessary foods. Then move on to eating healthier leafy vegetables and then more natural foods, it is a slow and toxic chemical, the news. It turns the most staunch people into believers.

Me personally, i am pretty affected by the dominant discourse. I have said that i count calories and watch my diet, the only reason that i dont eat natural food is because i can't afford it. I want to eat food that makes me feel good about myself and makes me feel better as a person. It makes you feel healthier, or so they say, maybe thats what happens if you read these articles, and they tell you that by doing this you will feel good, you will think you will feel better, but only because they told you so. Its a placebo. It is all a lie to get you to endorse their own news agenda and make all us suckers eat like them. They have to eat healthy bland food, so we have to suffer with them. Thats what i think at least

HW 4 - Your Families' Foodways

When it comes to food, we all have our own approaches, in my family at least, we all have the same goals, we want to eat healthy so we can stay in shape, but if we can eat whatever we want and not gain weight, then we eat whatever we want. My mom has always been very keen on healthier eating and living. She wants us all to eat healthy because by eating healthier, she believes that we will be living healthier. We always look at what is in a food before we eat it. And the calorie count is always important. But sometimes you just need that chocolate bar. Me and my brother both stopped drinking soda because it is bad for us and we wanted to loose weight. For me, it had nothing to do with drinking all those weird chemicals, we all need our little vices, i guess that just wasn't mine. Mine is that i like to eat a lot. Whether it be of healthy food or fatty food, i like to eat a lot of it. Which is something that i get from my dad, because he used to be a runner and he used to eat a lot, and when he stopped he still ate a lot because well some habits are hard to break

My mom is a wonderful cook, mainly because she learned from my grandma who was an amazing cook. She taught my mom how to make ritz cracker chicken, which is chicken breaded in broken up ritz crackers. She taught her out to make ice box cake, which i can't really explain, but its it like cookies which heavy cream that you put in the freezer. Now neither of these meals are healthy, but thats because my grandma didn't want to cook meals that needed to be steamed or anything like that. She believed in the flavor of food and how it should taste rich and full, usually because she put a lot of butter in it. So for most of my life, i grew up with food that was cooked in oil and had butter in it, or something else that was terrible for me, but tasted amazing.

Now when it comes to cooking, everything my mom learned was from her own mother, who cooked, as i just said, in a very unhealthy way. Now how do you change the way you cook to make it healthier, when all you know and learned, from your own mother, is unhealthy? There isn't much you can do. Its hard to start again from the beginning and abandon what you knew when it was your mother who taught you. So when she stopped frying things and suddenly our food tasted... Healthy.... We were all confused. We didn't really know what to do. We were also used to the fatty food that she had been cooking forever. And now it was gone, we have chicken that is grilled and not breaded instead of cooked in oil. We have pasta with some garlic sauce instead of potatoes or french fries.

Then again, when we order take out, all the rules are off. We get chinese food, or burritos, or anything that will clog our arteries for us because, well, we can.

When i asked about the sudden healthy approach to food, they said that we all needed to start watching our weight because we were all getting a little big. There wasn't anything that i could really say to that because i wanted to be skinny too, but i wasn't yet willing to sacrifice the good food that my mom had always been cooking to do that. Its one of those things that we have to take in strides. It all goes for the things that we have to give up in order to fit into the american vision of what we should all look, we can't all be supermodels, but we should all try.

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

I wasn't in class on Tuesday because I was listening to a man talk about a place where i would spend the next four years of my life. I have been to the Green Market and McDonalds and various other fast food restaurants in my lifetime. When I am hungry, I'm hungry for a certain type of food. Whether it be for meat, or salad or something else. When I think of what I want, there are always two different types of places I can consider, fast and cheap, or fast and expensive. As a teenager, I prefer not to sit down to a meal in a restaurant. So if I want expensive food that isn't so heavy and doesn't make me feel sick, then I go to somewhere like a green market, but if I'm hungry and want a big meal, then I go for the greasy fast food.

I can't vouch for the rest of New York, but i think that the people who go to the Green Market feel the same as I do when I go there. There are also the people who want "organic, or naturally grown food." They believe that because it is like that, then it will be healthier for you, and they are for the most part, correct. Fast food on the other hand, attracts those who want food that fills you up for a cheap price. And to be honest, things that are full of fat and grease usually do taste better, in my opinion.

Now to move on, the question is, why do people choose food that are full of trans-fats and carbohydrates if they know that heart failure is the number one cause of death in the U.S.A? Its the same reason that people smoke even if they know that smoking has side effects that are just as bad, because it feels good. People eat food that is bad for them because it feels good, it tastes good, it pleases you. We drink soda because we like it. Quitting the things that are easy is always the hardest thing to do. If the Surgeon General suddenly told us that running was terrible for you, then almost everyone would quit. Being healthy is hard, thats why healthy foods are always more expensive and don't taste good as their greasy counterparts. Thats why McDonalds is always the easier choice. Who can turn down a burger with french fries for a raw organic salad. It just doesn't sound as appetizing, at least not to me. I guess thats why we have so many options.

HW 2 - Food - Initial Thoughts

When we discuss food, i think of endless buffets, with every type of food included. I don't know if that is because of my size (both vertically and horizontally), how i was raised, or where i was raised. I know personally, my family doesn't eat a lot, i am rather big, but as a stereotype, Americans are depicted as over eaters and generally overweight. I love to eat, I eat anything i can and that is usually a lot, but i don't eat like that anymore, i need to be skinny, or in shape because not only does it make me feel better as a person, it makes the people around me look at me as more of a human being and it gives them one less thing to pick on me about.

Food is meant to be something that satisfies us, but when we compare our typical meal with our ideal meal, it isn't all that satisfying. Today i had a salad for lunch, i would have loved a cheeseburger with french fries and a soda, but i don't drink soda anymore. Just another way i am trying to keep myself in check. How much time do people spend everyday planning their next meal? I know that in the period before i go to lunch, i think about what i want and all the options. We feel as if every meal needs to be eaten as though it is going to be our last. Truthfully we are going to eat again in a few hours.

The real question is, Why is food so sacred? I understand that everyone loves to eat, but what does it say about our society if we put our food on a pedestal. Why is lunch the best period of the day? Because we don't have to learn anything? Or because we get to eat? What is my favorite food, what do i like to eat. Those questions don't mean anything, they won't tell you very much about me, Do i eat with my family every night? That will tell you more about who i am and what my family life is like.

I understand that this isn't the direction you really wanted, and i know that there is much more finesse and depth that can be added to this, but i just need to get back into my groove. Enjoy