HW 18 - Health & Illness & Feasting

For the past 5 years, my family and i have spent Thanksgiving at the New York Rescue Mission. Thanksgiving day we go and help set up and serve people who don't have homes on thanksgiving and then after they leave, we serve the people who live in the mission, and we eat with them. Afterwords they all share stories of things they are thankful for and their back stories. This year a minister who works in another church came and ate with us. He was friends with the people who ran this one and even though he wasn't homeless, he was allowed to come. He told us about how his wife and children had just left him, but he had been sober for over 23 years. But he said that because god was with him, he would be strong and god would pull him through the fire he was engulfed in now. Other stories from past years include a fireman who fell through a roof of a burning building, broke his back and got hooked on painkillers, which escalated to heroin. His family had left him, and now he was homeless, but Jesus had found him, and now he was on his way to recovery. These were men who had lost themselves, and then found it again through religion. They tried to live better lives because they needed to be able to please someone else.

To me, being with these people is a normal thanksgiving. Every year i come out of there with a sense of purpose and fulfilment. These men have danced with the devil and lost everything, and now they were starting again, and they had a place to sleep, and a "family" to eat with. It is in no way a "typical" Thanksgiving, but we weren't alone. We were all there, volunteers, and residents, to celebrate and enjoy a warm meal. We didn't care about each other's past mistakes. We didn't judge each other on what we were wearing, or how much we ate. We did't care about the quality of the food. We were there because we all wanted to be in a place like that, and whether of not going home was an option. That was the place to find it. To listen to a grown man cry because he knows that he shouldn't be allowed to see his own children because of the things he has done is a humbling feeling. But the even more humbling feeling is the low echo of "Amen's" that come from throughout the room as the other men there feel his pain, because in one way or another, they have all been there.

After my family and i left the shelter, we went to my Dad's mother and sister, and then my Mom's Brother and his family. After leaving the shelter, and then visiting my family, i was brought back to light how hostile a family environment really is. Everyone is laughing and joking, but there are awkward silences where we are all silently judging. We ask each other for things, and we are forced to entertain. To me, that doesn't sounds all to much like the Thanksgiving we are told about. But i guess its because we are used to it. Not everyone can experience what it is like to volunteer in a homeless shelter, so instead they just go through the rituals of eating until they can't physically eat anymore. I guess it is about repressing emotions and hiding disdain. We all know we are going to die eventually, so on holidays, the family wants to be close together, so we can "bond." Maybe it is just because we have a small family, but i think the bigger picture is because we want to fit in with what everyone is doing. By working in the shelter, we have broken that, and now we can see things from the outside. That is more liberating then unbuckling your belt after your meal.

HW 17 - First Thoughts on the Illness & Dying Unit

I find dieing to be a scary concept because what happens to us when we die. Its really the biggest uncertainty in someones life because there is no way to avoid it. The biggest problem is when it happens, what will happen to you? What happens when our heart stops beating? Do you dream? Is everything just black? There is no way to ever know until you are there, and if you don't like it, there is no going back. That is scary, that is something to quite literally, live in fear of. As a person i can say i am scared of uncertainty and the unknown, and death is no exception. All i can relate it to is sleeping, and i relate sleeping to darkness.

Jim Morrison of the musical group The Doors said: “I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD. I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen once. I don't want to miss it.” We quite literally live to die. It is one of the most important things about life, is dying. He wanted to experience it, and that was ironic because he ended up dying of a drug overdose. Dying is something that you do only get to do once, so it seems fair to want to experience it. To want to, as weird as it may seem, really live death, isn't something that is to far fetched to want. I don't think that if i was given the option to know when i was going to die, i would take it. I don't want to know. The point i am trying to make is that death is something that each person only gets once, so the mystery around it is what makes it so interesting and scary. We only know what it brings to an extent, we don't know what happens to us, only what is left.

The other day i woke up and i had a sore throat and a stuffed up nose. I don't remember how i got sick, but i just was. I hate being sick because it doesn't happen often and it makes me really uncomfortable. I have never been seriously sick though, i have never had any illness that caused me to go to the hospital. So what do we do when we are told there is something really wrong with us. What happens if we went to the doctor and he told us that we had a disease that would ravage out bodies and leave us gaunt and frail bodies when we had once been strong and well built people. How do we accept that these sicknesses are real and can have real consequences. Every day there is a new report on the news about how a certain action can increase your risk of cancer or decrease it. So do we live in fear and try our very best to avoid sickness so we can live healthy lives in hopes that we can avoid death for another year? What happens to the people who don't smoke but got lung cancer from the dust from 9/11, and the people who have been smoking for years, but still have a mostly clean bill of health. What causes that? I have been taught by my family that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, and that the body has a tendency to work its problems out. So if i hurt my wrist, but it isn't debilitating pain, then i will wait it out until it goes away, or gets worse. I can accept this and respect this because it does make me feel stronger as a person to not have to go to a doctor all the time to tell me what is wrong with me. I adhere to my own health standards, but i am worried because i don't know if my cell phone will give me brain cancer, or the sun can give me skin cancer, or ground zero having some other negative health effect on me. I don't live in complete fear of it though. Some people are scared of getting sick because they don't want to die and they don't want to be faced with the news that they might me. What i do know is that the unknown scares me, but it doesn't rule me.

End Of Food/Super Size Me Review.

The End of Food by Paul Roberts

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very similar to Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, Roberts is very heavy on the facts. This book is over 300 pages of hard to digest facts which point out the obvious flaws in the food industry. By having so many facts in his book there is a blatant disregard for the reader. He doesn't take into account that there are over three hundred pages and through out them he berates the food industry for all of its flaws. An industry that is under the weight of a nation that is at three hundred million and growing. They are at a crossroads between needing to make the most profit possible and producing enough food to feed all the people who live here. Roberts does do an excellent job of pointing out the weak points where the major companies do take liberties with their products and because of that millions of lives are put at risk. He does what he sets out to do, which is point out the flaws in the corporate giants who run the food industry and explain how our current consumption will outweigh the supply of food in a matter of years. The biggest flaw i find in his book is that it is all about the facts and what is going to happen, no alternatives are suggested. He does what the movie Food Inc does, it shows you the bad and the good, and they leaves the end result up to you by saying and making you want to buy home grown organic products. They leave change to the readers, i think it is a noble cause and a very strongly written book, but i feel that he didn't do all he could, he told us about the end of food, but that's it. Still left me feeling hungry.

View all my reviews

After watching Food Inc, it seemed inhumane to let someone eat McDonald's and only McDonald's for a month. The amount of mistreatment of animals and just overall processing of their meat is astounding. The chicken nuggets aren't actually nuggets of chicken, they are a paste that is made of all parts of the chicken ground up so it looks like pink play dough, it is then colored white, stamped into shapes, breaded, fried and then shipped to a McDonald's near you. The ground beef that comes from those plants isn't from one cow, but from up to 1000 different cows. The narrator and main character Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's for 30 days for 3 meals a day. I thought some of the best points in this movie were how he would feel low if he didn't eat for a while and then feel better when he did eat. He noticeably gained weight, just by living an exaggerated version of the American Lifestyle. When he tried to reach anyone at McDonalds to talk, he could never get anyone on the phone. This movie points out how we as Americans live. We live in a society where we can buy a 72 ounce soda at 7/11 or a cheeseburger for a dollar. We never think of the ramifications of these actions, we just know that it tastes good and is cheap, which is all we really want. The biggest problem that i had with this movie is that he took it too far. He ate it for three meals a day for 30 days, it is clearly unhealthy, but for what we thought would happen, it wasn't that bad, his cholesterol went up and he gained a lot of weight, but he also didn't allow himself to work out which he used to do on a regular basis, so he lost muscle too. I just didn't feel that the results of his experiment weren't the same as what they were hyped to be. But he did get a great message across and did cause the food companies to change their ways, which in itself is an achievement. My favorite part from the movie was when he put the different burgers from McDonalds and the fries all in different jars, and then got a hamburger and fries from a restaurant and put them in jars too. Then watched as they decomposed. And in the end they all did in one way or another, except for the fries. As the Big Mac turned to mold, the fries still looked the exact same as they did the day they were bought. He then raised the question, is it healthy to put something that cant be broken down by nature in our bodies? I thought no, it isn't, if mold can't grow here, then what is going to happen when if i eat it? This is the world we live in. Where we eat what is available for a cheap price, and because of that, we eat things that are terrible for us. Its all because we live in a Fast Food Nation, we just all need to realize that.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/usercomments-408