Since the beginning of the school, Gever has been teaching us "Montreal class", in which we imagine a scenario in which we are college students living with a roommate in Montreal, and how do we juggle finances and feeding ourselves with real food and surviving without (gasp!) parents.
Regrettably, due to my attending a different school during the rock arc, I missed what feels like a very significant chunk of the lessons, but then again so did Cassandra.
At my old school, (obviously) they never taught us how to use and manipulate spreadsheets or how to calculate budgets and plan for the future. As naive as it may sound, I've seen Gever do in a couple of keystrokes in Google Sheets what I feel like it would take me weeks to get the hang of to the point where I could use it practically.
Asking for help in front of everyone is hard and embarrassing to say the least. I confess that most of the time it's difficult for me to focus on the point Gever is trying to make about finances in class when I don't have all the spreadsheet commands and formulas memorized just yet. And it doesn't help that I don't have a job that I could keep track of, an advantage that some of my bandmates have over me even this early on in the game. Montreal class is, subjectively, quite overwhelming and, at times downright hard to swallow and process.
The topic we were mainly focused around last Thursday was the benefit of a bank account and the wonderful concept of interest rates. If I'm being perfectly honest, I already knew the formula for compound interest but the mechanics of the spreadsheets continued to intimidate and frustrate me. It's just so foreign and... not intuitive for me.
Plus we are trying to plan an actual secret-not-secret trip to Montreal which feels totally out of reach and unachievable but I'm still trying to be supportive but its all very internally distressing when I don't know the steps and I feel like dead weight to the team. Useless. Holding them back. A disappointment.
But that's a thing I'm grappling with anyway. Which is harder? Knowing what to do or how to do it? Is it okay to gauge my self-worth by how I perceive my average progress?
Then I remind myself, the only way out is through. And I will get through, even if that means asking for help, admitting that I am struggling, and that I'm a more than bit scared.
stay tuned, space rangers
Monday, November 23, 2015
hello, mendel
So you know GMO's right? like genetically modified organisms?
Like 'em? Hate 'em? Don't really know what they are and not really willing to commit to either side until you're convinced they're worth discussion? Well, look no further friend.
Tuesday before we were let out, Amanda gave us one final piece of homework: read and annotate the first chapter ("Against the Ways of Nature") of Mendel in the Kitchen by Nina v. Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown.
Certainly this flashes us back to the blogpost about last Monday where we looked at the issues revolving around bananas, a huge controversy all its own. The first chapter of the book opened with an introduction to the case of Golden Rice, what was once a huge protest topic for anti-GMO activists.
Basically the situation is this: A lot of kids in poorer countries eat rice, and a lot of it. Rice, according to the chapter, accounts for sometimes more than half the calories consumed in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, and other countries, and is a staple food in nearly half the world. The problem is, it doesn't have a lot of vitamins and nutrients in it, and developing children don't get enough vitamin A in their diet, which assists eyesight in the early stages. This often leads to a lot of the children going blind before they reach adulthood, with about a million of them dying from the deficiency.
What scientist Ingo Potrykus decided to do with this information was try to put a gene that would tun into vitamin A in the body, into the rice, and after about ten years of deliberation and hard work, he and his colleagues succeeded. Golden rice was created, rice with implemented with the gene that give daffodils their vibrant yellow color, and kids in worse off countries lowered their risk for blindness and respiratory disease due to vitamin A deficiency. pretty cool, right?
Unfortunately, it faced very harsh backlash from people claiming that Golden rice was "a source of genetic poulltion", an abomination and a sellout act. One reviewer of the story even said it was "worse than telling them to eat cake".
What scientist Ingo Potrykus decided to do with this information was try to put a gene that would tun into vitamin A in the body, into the rice, and after about ten years of deliberation and hard work, he and his colleagues succeeded. Golden rice was created, rice with implemented with the gene that give daffodils their vibrant yellow color, and kids in worse off countries lowered their risk for blindness and respiratory disease due to vitamin A deficiency. pretty cool, right?
Unfortunately, it faced very harsh backlash from people claiming that Golden rice was "a source of genetic poulltion", an abomination and a sellout act. One reviewer of the story even said it was "worse than telling them to eat cake".
Other accounts in the chapter detailed similarly interesting methods of genetically modifying organisms, including irradiation, somaclonal variation, and tissue culture cloning, which we've seen happen with the cavendish banana.
Okay, but how is this applicable to real life current events? Well....
The last ingredient! Beta Carotene! Right here in my "natural" dessert! These white people are probably shoveling this stuff into their mouths faster than kids in Asia are going blind because Beta Carotene, GMO's and Golden Rice are being protested for how unethical it is. Oh yes, let a million already disadvantaged children lose their eyesight but don't dare mess with God's plan. God probably has a plan for that army of blind kids to spread his message too, doesn't he.
Beta Carotene is a gene that turns food yellowish and activates/carries vitamin A in the body.
Basically glorified food coloring. That is good for you.
Anyway, if this topic interests you at all in the slightest, I highly encourage you, in fact I implore you, to please check out at least the first chapter of this amazingly, impressively sophisticated and simple book, Mendel In the Kitchen free of charge on google books and if you like it, read along with the Violet Band as we plunge the rabbit hole into the intricate world of genetically modified organisms in our food.
thanks for reading
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Why vegan diets suck: a introduction to a life (week) w/o meat, dairy, eggs, and honey
Last week Laurel suggested that this week we would go vegan as a band. For some reason we decided this was a good idea.
So, on Tuesday morning the Violet band got an email from our fearless leader with the subject line:
Oberskizzle was out, so she assigned us into four groups and sent us articles about veganism to read via email. So you can imagine how ecstatic Max and I were to find in our inboxes an article entitled:
( we weren't, btw )
Fun fact: Its okay to disagree with stuff you read on the internet. Immediately we started reading it, reservedly and objectively holding our opinions back until we each finished the entire article. We were checking to see if it was an opinion piece, a news article, or an opinion piece that just sounded like a news article.
Right off the bat we noticed quite a few invalid (or at least questionable) arguments laid out in the article. After a brief conversation with Max, sharing our ideas about the article and noting the parts that stood out to us the most, we compiled all of our content, the points from the article, our own reflections, and our counterarguments onto a nice, organized, old-fashioned poster.
Besides winning me some sideways glances around Brightworks, (since I live in the bay area and veganism is becoming increasingly common/popular) this poster was really helpful (at least for me) to organize ideas and present them in a seemly manner. As you can see, the article shared five reasons to not go vegan, each point with its own strengths and weaknesses.
1. Vegans are deficient in many important nutrients.
I'm not going to deny that this makes sense. After all, humans were evolved to be omnivores, so you could conclude that vegans are missing out on at least half the vitamins and nutrients that a meat-and-leaf-eating person would be getting. Arguably, this point highlights that veganism can be just as bad for you as only eating meat. Kris Gunnars, the author of the article, lays down that vegans are missing vitamins and supplements such as B12, amino acids, creatine, carnosine, testosterone, docosahexaenoic acid, saturated fat, and cholesterol. On the other hand, I'm no nutritionist, but would a little deficiency in these substances be all that bad? The real shockers on that list for me were cholesterol and sat fat. You hear so many horror stories about people with high cholesterol and risk of heart disease when you're old and frail that I can't imagine a lack of all these other bits and pieces to be all that vital if I'm being perfectly honest.
2. There are no studies showing that they are better than other diets.
That's also probably true, but again Gunnars' point is iffy at best. To give a very brief summary, he explains the case of the A to Z study, where people eating meat lost more weight that people on a vegan diet, and another study where a low-carb diet did as much for patients as a vegan diet.
He later admits in the article that the vegan diet is more effective than the American Diabetes Association's recommended diet. Hopefully, you can empathize with Max's and my incredulity and frustration when we were only this far in the article.
3. Vegans use lies and fear-mongering to promote their cause.
I can concur that some of veganism's current success is partly fad appeal and trace amounts of peer influences. Still, an unsustainable food source that's slowly but surely destroying our planet is pretty scary on its own. I don't see why vegans would have to do any work to make not being vegan any scarier (climate change denial alert much?). Plus, I feel like the "cause" he talks about is reasonably worthwhile if you break it down. If it's good for the environment, I say it's worth a try.
4. Vegan diets work in the short term for other reasons.
What this means is that vegans just happen to be healthier because they take in less added sugars, refined carbs, vegetable oils, trans fats, etc. Gunnars claims that this is the reason for their health benefits, not the omission of animal products.
I say 'whatever floats your boat'. If cutting out meat from your diet works for you then cool, by all means go for it. Besides, they put so many crazy things in meat these days, it's hard to measure how much of these harmful substances are making their way into your body, veganism is a really good way to just try to live simpler, if not necessarily healthier. It's also like compensating for the millions of Americans that don't get enough (or any) vegetables in their diet. The whole point is more of a sacrifice to the preservation of our planet and a protest against shady business practices than just the benefits to the individual.
5. No health reasons to completely avoid animal foods.
See previous point.
Again, Gunnars makes the infamous argument that humans have been eating meat for thousands of years, and repeatedly denies the existences of scientifically valid health reasons for eliminating animal products from the diet. In fact when you think about it, this feels kind of the same as point two. But it also kind of feels like all the other points.
I give this article two vegan eggplant emojis out of five. Redundant, mediocre, and ranty, but at the same time it was passionate and a good try.
To kick off vegan week, Jack, Josh and I made falafel and guess what it was delicious. But unfortunately, due to some circumstantial health reasons I copped out of vegan week later that night.
Now I have pretty mixed feelings about veganism, but at least I tried.
Regardless of what some expert has to say, vegan week was, if not fun and enlightening, then at least interesting
everything is interesting.
🍆🍆
The article in question: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/why-vegan-diets-suck
So, on Tuesday morning the Violet band got an email from our fearless leader with the subject line:
Oberskizzle was out, so she assigned us into four groups and sent us articles about veganism to read via email. So you can imagine how ecstatic Max and I were to find in our inboxes an article entitled:
( we weren't, btw )
Fun fact: Its okay to disagree with stuff you read on the internet. Immediately we started reading it, reservedly and objectively holding our opinions back until we each finished the entire article. We were checking to see if it was an opinion piece, a news article, or an opinion piece that just sounded like a news article.
Right off the bat we noticed quite a few invalid (or at least questionable) arguments laid out in the article. After a brief conversation with Max, sharing our ideas about the article and noting the parts that stood out to us the most, we compiled all of our content, the points from the article, our own reflections, and our counterarguments onto a nice, organized, old-fashioned poster.
Besides winning me some sideways glances around Brightworks, (since I live in the bay area and veganism is becoming increasingly common/popular) this poster was really helpful (at least for me) to organize ideas and present them in a seemly manner. As you can see, the article shared five reasons to not go vegan, each point with its own strengths and weaknesses.
1. Vegans are deficient in many important nutrients.
I'm not going to deny that this makes sense. After all, humans were evolved to be omnivores, so you could conclude that vegans are missing out on at least half the vitamins and nutrients that a meat-and-leaf-eating person would be getting. Arguably, this point highlights that veganism can be just as bad for you as only eating meat. Kris Gunnars, the author of the article, lays down that vegans are missing vitamins and supplements such as B12, amino acids, creatine, carnosine, testosterone, docosahexaenoic acid, saturated fat, and cholesterol. On the other hand, I'm no nutritionist, but would a little deficiency in these substances be all that bad? The real shockers on that list for me were cholesterol and sat fat. You hear so many horror stories about people with high cholesterol and risk of heart disease when you're old and frail that I can't imagine a lack of all these other bits and pieces to be all that vital if I'm being perfectly honest.
2. There are no studies showing that they are better than other diets.
That's also probably true, but again Gunnars' point is iffy at best. To give a very brief summary, he explains the case of the A to Z study, where people eating meat lost more weight that people on a vegan diet, and another study where a low-carb diet did as much for patients as a vegan diet.
He later admits in the article that the vegan diet is more effective than the American Diabetes Association's recommended diet. Hopefully, you can empathize with Max's and my incredulity and frustration when we were only this far in the article.
3. Vegans use lies and fear-mongering to promote their cause.
I can concur that some of veganism's current success is partly fad appeal and trace amounts of peer influences. Still, an unsustainable food source that's slowly but surely destroying our planet is pretty scary on its own. I don't see why vegans would have to do any work to make not being vegan any scarier (climate change denial alert much?). Plus, I feel like the "cause" he talks about is reasonably worthwhile if you break it down. If it's good for the environment, I say it's worth a try.
4. Vegan diets work in the short term for other reasons.
What this means is that vegans just happen to be healthier because they take in less added sugars, refined carbs, vegetable oils, trans fats, etc. Gunnars claims that this is the reason for their health benefits, not the omission of animal products.
I say 'whatever floats your boat'. If cutting out meat from your diet works for you then cool, by all means go for it. Besides, they put so many crazy things in meat these days, it's hard to measure how much of these harmful substances are making their way into your body, veganism is a really good way to just try to live simpler, if not necessarily healthier. It's also like compensating for the millions of Americans that don't get enough (or any) vegetables in their diet. The whole point is more of a sacrifice to the preservation of our planet and a protest against shady business practices than just the benefits to the individual.
5. No health reasons to completely avoid animal foods.
See previous point.
Again, Gunnars makes the infamous argument that humans have been eating meat for thousands of years, and repeatedly denies the existences of scientifically valid health reasons for eliminating animal products from the diet. In fact when you think about it, this feels kind of the same as point two. But it also kind of feels like all the other points.
I give this article two vegan eggplant emojis out of five. Redundant, mediocre, and ranty, but at the same time it was passionate and a good try.
To kick off vegan week, Jack, Josh and I made falafel and guess what it was delicious. But unfortunately, due to some circumstantial health reasons I copped out of vegan week later that night.
Now I have pretty mixed feelings about veganism, but at least I tried.
Regardless of what some expert has to say, vegan week was, if not fun and enlightening, then at least interesting
everything is interesting.
🍆🍆
The article in question: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/why-vegan-diets-suck
Thursday, November 19, 2015
We Need to Talk About Bananas
Ack I have not been updating this shame on me
(I have become full-fledged Violet band member! Yay! Okay moving on)
What on earth have I been doing? For one thing, delving into the unexpectedly complex world of bananas.
About a week ago, November 10th to be exact, Grace and I dissected both an organic and inorganic banana to see if we could tell the difference.
The first thing we noted was the color. The organic bananas all had a curiously green tint to them while the inorganic bananas seemed a perfect canary yellow, exactly what you would expect of the product of countless herbicide and pesticide influences. The inorganic banana, at least at first glance, was so much more dependably uniform and cookie-cutter resemblant of your ideal banana, that when compared to the organic banana, you could almost pretend it was fake.
Cutting open a cross section of each, the organic banana had a distinctly "nicer" taste to it. It was as if the inorganic bananas had been stripped of their personality.
Of course, personality and individuality are not always what one is looking for when they open a Chiquita.
For inorganic bananas, the peels were thinner, the bananas were both thicker and longer, there were less traces of seeds (although there was hardly any to speak of in the organic banana either). It became clear to us that the inorganic bananas had been manufactured to consumer ease, catering to their needs of a predictable, staple fruit. It's no wonder the banana is so perfect, we need it to be.
As a supplement, Amanda passed on some background articles about the origins and history of bananas. One article briefly described a legend where Eve of the Garden of Eden had been tempted by, not an apple, but a banana. We have come to hold the banana in a staggeringly high regard. Just imagine what the world would be without bananas. And yet they are in abundance; they are accessible and cheap. But what is the price of popularity for bananas?
Doing my own research, I happened upon a documentary called Big Boys Gone Bananas, (look it up, it's on Netflix) which is a documentary based on another documentary by the same filmmaker, Fredrik Gertten, called Bananas!*. The original documentary, Bananas!*, is a story of the lives of six workers of Dole Food Company (probably the second biggest banana distributor), suing Dole for negligence after a pesticide Dole used on the bananas made the workers sterile.
As it turns out, this kind of malicious and sketchy business practice, especially in Central and Latin America, was and is not all that uncommon. Way before Chiquita joined forces with Fyffes to become the world's largest banana producing conglomerate, it started as a somewhat smaller company called United Foods. Despite starting out meaning well in 1944, in the 60's there were many allegations of worker abuse, exploitation of child labor, and the like.
If you google "banana controversy", the source of the debate is not always obvious. Why this "controversy" around a huge corporation using shady farming methods? Of course it's wrong, shouldn't someone be protesting this? That's where it gets sticky. You can't just boycott bananas, unfortunately. According to www.chiquitabananas.com, the average American eats 27 pounds of bananas a year. There are whole countries whose economies depend on the crop.
The term "banana republic" meaning "(noun, derogatory) a small nation, especially in Central America, dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital" according to google, gets its name from the situation in Central American countries in the first decades of the 1900's. When banana companies realized they could make a lot of money on exports, they bought huge plots of land from the dictatorial government and evaded taxes. The exports mostly benefited government officials, while these large corporations exploited both the land and the labor of natives. All the while the countries' economies became more and more dependent on banana exports.
Half of me wants nothing to do with bananas anymore, or at least never to eat a banana again without careful research about its background and origin, organic or inorganic. And regrettably, the other half wants to turn the other cheek for the sake of convenience, telling myself that one person consciously consuming cannot possibly make a difference. But then I realize that that's not the point. It's about being a better person. It's about choosing how things affect me in this world. Do I want to put bananas tainted by conspiracy and iffy ethical jargon into my body? It's all part of a much larger debate, and perhaps now more than ever, you are what you eat.
Sources: http://www.jimmccluskey.com/history-of-the-banana/
http://blog.mapsofworld.com/2011/08/26/where-do-bananas-come-from/
http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is-killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/
http://www.bananasthemovie.com/pesticide-lawsuits-%E2%80%93-a-dbcp-overview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas!*
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=banana+republic+define
(I have become full-fledged Violet band member! Yay! Okay moving on)
What on earth have I been doing? For one thing, delving into the unexpectedly complex world of bananas.
About a week ago, November 10th to be exact, Grace and I dissected both an organic and inorganic banana to see if we could tell the difference.
The first thing we noted was the color. The organic bananas all had a curiously green tint to them while the inorganic bananas seemed a perfect canary yellow, exactly what you would expect of the product of countless herbicide and pesticide influences. The inorganic banana, at least at first glance, was so much more dependably uniform and cookie-cutter resemblant of your ideal banana, that when compared to the organic banana, you could almost pretend it was fake.
Cutting open a cross section of each, the organic banana had a distinctly "nicer" taste to it. It was as if the inorganic bananas had been stripped of their personality.
Of course, personality and individuality are not always what one is looking for when they open a Chiquita.
For inorganic bananas, the peels were thinner, the bananas were both thicker and longer, there were less traces of seeds (although there was hardly any to speak of in the organic banana either). It became clear to us that the inorganic bananas had been manufactured to consumer ease, catering to their needs of a predictable, staple fruit. It's no wonder the banana is so perfect, we need it to be.
As a supplement, Amanda passed on some background articles about the origins and history of bananas. One article briefly described a legend where Eve of the Garden of Eden had been tempted by, not an apple, but a banana. We have come to hold the banana in a staggeringly high regard. Just imagine what the world would be without bananas. And yet they are in abundance; they are accessible and cheap. But what is the price of popularity for bananas?
Doing my own research, I happened upon a documentary called Big Boys Gone Bananas, (look it up, it's on Netflix) which is a documentary based on another documentary by the same filmmaker, Fredrik Gertten, called Bananas!*. The original documentary, Bananas!*, is a story of the lives of six workers of Dole Food Company (probably the second biggest banana distributor), suing Dole for negligence after a pesticide Dole used on the bananas made the workers sterile.
As it turns out, this kind of malicious and sketchy business practice, especially in Central and Latin America, was and is not all that uncommon. Way before Chiquita joined forces with Fyffes to become the world's largest banana producing conglomerate, it started as a somewhat smaller company called United Foods. Despite starting out meaning well in 1944, in the 60's there were many allegations of worker abuse, exploitation of child labor, and the like.
If you google "banana controversy", the source of the debate is not always obvious. Why this "controversy" around a huge corporation using shady farming methods? Of course it's wrong, shouldn't someone be protesting this? That's where it gets sticky. You can't just boycott bananas, unfortunately. According to www.chiquitabananas.com, the average American eats 27 pounds of bananas a year. There are whole countries whose economies depend on the crop.
The term "banana republic" meaning "(noun, derogatory) a small nation, especially in Central America, dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital" according to google, gets its name from the situation in Central American countries in the first decades of the 1900's. When banana companies realized they could make a lot of money on exports, they bought huge plots of land from the dictatorial government and evaded taxes. The exports mostly benefited government officials, while these large corporations exploited both the land and the labor of natives. All the while the countries' economies became more and more dependent on banana exports.
Half of me wants nothing to do with bananas anymore, or at least never to eat a banana again without careful research about its background and origin, organic or inorganic. And regrettably, the other half wants to turn the other cheek for the sake of convenience, telling myself that one person consciously consuming cannot possibly make a difference. But then I realize that that's not the point. It's about being a better person. It's about choosing how things affect me in this world. Do I want to put bananas tainted by conspiracy and iffy ethical jargon into my body? It's all part of a much larger debate, and perhaps now more than ever, you are what you eat.
Sources: http://www.jimmccluskey.com/history-of-the-banana/
http://blog.mapsofworld.com/2011/08/26/where-do-bananas-come-from/
http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is-killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/
http://www.bananasthemovie.com/pesticide-lawsuits-%E2%80%93-a-dbcp-overview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas!*
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=banana+republic+define
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