Gary’s article Cultures of Habitat revealed the facts that the health status among the Native American community is spoiled by the modern society fast-paced lifestyle and the way of eating. The way of Native American dietary intake is mostly depend on the “wild foods” and value family and community. Sadly, a lack of social support and the separation within the indigenous community nowadays contributed to their undesirable health outcomes. This article reminds me the event I had been to at the Native American Museum called The Living Earth Festival and the symposium Creating A Healthy Food Future. The Native American community put a lot of emphasize on the nature and the surroundings who nourish people and provide the food sources to help us thrive. Human beings come from nature and thus our lifestyles should adapt to the pace of the nature without undermining the health of the planet. In other words, living sustainably means we shall live in harmony with the nature through the lens of sharing and giving back. Essentially, what is healthful for the earth and what is healthy for us is the same thing. Native American communities held the belief that foods is people, this means foods share the identities with the people. How you treat foods in terms of growing, processing, and consuming is how you treat your body as well. The respectfulness to the nature shows upon on our environment outcomes. According to Dr Vandana Shiva, humans are part of the nature so protecting nature is not a luxury. Everything is interconnected to one another, and that’s way the native American communities value the “cycle” and thus the concept of circle symbolizes their value through a sense of sharing and in search of communal truth.

Storytelling is another way for human beings to convey the respectfulness to our landscape from generations to generations. A lot of times we feel hungry not only because of our biologically desires but also we are hungry for the relationships. We eat for creating and maintaining relationships. Especially in this fast-paced era, people living their lives with a lot of stress and sometimes tend to turn to comfort foods to ease the feelings and emotions. Reflect on my own experiences, sometimes I use food to eat away the fears and the sense of insecurities. Foods then become my comfort zone. I certainly not only learn to be aware of my own thoughts and feelings but also learn to communicate and face the “insecurities”. It turned out that storytelling helps me to get through my own obstacles.

Knowing the history of the foods is beneficial to our health and environment. We tend to focus on the short term and do not care about the original knowledge that has been cultivate and sustain our lives. Joining the gardening volunteer is a way of knowing the “history” of our foods. Because gardening involves beyond the food works itself but the relationship people build through the feelings they shared with one another. The declining agriculture practices also decreases the physical health and social health of people. Moreover, according to the article “the curative quality of the native foods is a customary component of their diets.” This resonated with me that traditional foods play functional role in public nutrition or culture. Back to home in China, my parents always instilled me the knowledge of using foods as natural medicine to adjust the body function. Whenever I feel kind of sick I usually first cut down the amount of my food intake, and I choose wisely based on my symptoms. For example, if I have a burning throat I would increase my consumptions of fruits and vegetables and be very careful the way I cook and eat them as well. For example, I would like to keep the original flavor of the foods during the cooking process, which means controlling the amount of additional flavorings input. That’s helps me a lot with controlling and reducing  my symptoms and overall health conditions.

WhyHunger’s collection of “Community Voices” is a beautiful representation of a wide range of members working to preserve and promote our country’s foodways. I was particularly drawn to Dena Hoff’s story, a farmer from Glendive, Montana. Dena questioned the changing food system; having grown up eating the food from her grandma’s garden and being taught how to be self-sufficient, she did not take lightly the switch her community was making from growing their food to shopping at the grocery store. Dena teaches others how to grow food on her farm; growing food serves as a platform to learn about food quality, food safety, and what it means to have an economically and environmentally sustainable community. She emphasizes the interconnectedness of the local and the global, and how economic and political forces shape our food system.

What stuck out to me was that Dena’s grandma, like mine, taught her how to can. Given the emphasis on local food system in this course, I think it is appropriate to end the summer with a note on the importance of keeping our own foodways alive lest we fail to recognize the rich history that they have held within all of us. With convenience foods dominating our culture, it can be easy to lose hold of what our parents, grandparents, and generations of family grew up eating.

This brings me to my own family foodways. In a class last semester I was tasked with giving a presentation on a family recipe. As a product of modern day America, a melting pot of ethnicities, cultures, and stories, there was not a wide, straight path to follow to find a family recipe that has been passed down through generations. I became frustrated by all the dead ends I was hitting. I was annoyed with my parents for not keeping their food traditions alive; I was bored after various relatives took this opportunity to give me a detailed version of our family history.

The fact of the matter is that, much like most of ours, my culture and the food pathways that come with it are not as transparent as I would have hoped. Despite the inconsistency and frustration of what seemed should be a simple task, I learned more about my family than I had envisioned. This opportunity not only forced me to be patient when conversation diverged, but it also forced my family to answer longstanding questions about my cultural, racial, and ethnic history.

I learned that oftentimes, our foodways are so embedded into us—our lifestyle, upbringing and routinized patterns; we do not see them as anything significant, especially since these traditions often came into this world before we did. Thus, foodways, to me, offer a structure to learn about history, share memories, and pass on traditions that can remind us of the ones we love and the ones we’ve lost.

Canning is the ability to hold on to, not just the seasons, but also a tradition and a memory of the things we love and do not want to lose, in a sealed jar. The preservation of the strawberry jam recipe represents the untouched, incorruptibility of the sweet, tangy memories I have making this jam with Mama, my grandmother and my namesake, Gene-Ann. The slowness—and especially the inability to cut corners or rush time—is significant to canning. This environment allowed us time to laugh, share, and use the kitchen as a space of leisure and the creation of memories. I felt honored to become part of a story—as this gift of knowledge that Mama’s mother passed on to her is now being shared with me—I long for and anticipate the day that I can share the seasons with my sister and my kids.

Lately though, I’ve been thinking about my grandfather, Poppi, mostly because I worry about him not having Mama by his side, especially as his health begins to deteriorate. I’ve been asking him to teach me for months now, how to make his famous rolls and seafood soup, but understandably, mourning the loss of his wife and taking care of his health have made writing down and teaching me these recipes far from a priority. I stress to Poppi how important this is to me because only after Mama passed away, did I realize how lucky I was to celebrate the traditions that she was known and loved for. In preparation for the day when this is no longer possible, a simple recipe can hold onto more than just a culinary tradition. It encapsulates the time shared writing the recipe down, going through the specific and precise motions of preparing the recipe, and the cultural traditions and history from which the recipe derives.

While I know it is difficult for Poppi to see how biscuits and soup are platforms to hold onto our family history, I hope he reads this post, and recognizes it as one last plea to help preserve and share with me this family tradition that he has so lovingly prepared all of these years.

And lastly, I hope this serves as a plea to everyone; I encourage you to make an urgent effort to preserve recipes. Like seeds, like stories, like any monumental moment in history, recipes, and the legacy that precedes them, are celebrated and passed on when people make the concerted, loving effort to share them.

“We’re here to help the kids be healthy. Simple as that.” Camille, FoodCorps leader at Boulder Elementary School says.

That were the exact words that I heard at work last week as my supervisor was looking into running a catering business. With the School Breakfast Program, National School Lunch Program and now the DC Summer Meals Program, it is great that DC works hard to combat the problem of child hunger. Last week, we visited US Congressman Jim McGovern who is an activist with the “End Hunger Now” campaign. However, combatting hunger and nutrition can have a big gap. Ending hunger is one thing, but actually having access to nutritious food is another. As a result, there is a gap where organizations such as FoodCorps can step in. CentroNía, like Boulder Elementary school, has more than half of the students on free or reduced lunch benefits and almost 90% on the school meal plan. As children have 2 out of 3 meals at school, efforts should be concentrated at creating a wellness environment at school.

Working at CentroNía, I am now even convinced that food education should start as early as possible. Research has found that most food preferences and tastes are developed before the age of 5, so exposing children to new foods and textures are strategically important because “It is much easier to start a habit than to change it.”  This was what my supervisor said when we visited a center that we did food consultation on. The results at Bambini Play & Learn Center after a week of adopting our food menu was encouraging. No more peanut butter jelly sandwiches or frozen pizzas, the children ate all of the chili con carne, spinach salad and pineapple. One child kept on saying “Más! Más! More! More!” even when his plate wasn’t finished. I think that it is never too late to make change and so what Camille is doing with 2^nd graders is very meaningful and would be something I might look out for in the future when I graduate. I especially liked her rules of the two-bite club, to have two bites of something before deciding if one likes it or not and banning “ewww, gross” from the children. Not only does it train children to be more open-minded, it also creates a more positive atmosphere because children are easily influenced. I have been teaching cooking classes to PreK children and will definitely try to adopt her methods.

I have just read an article from The Washington Post quoting that federal data shows a 43% drop in obesity rates among children 2 to 5. I believe that this is the results of many organizations that recognize the importance of providing healthy school foods and shaping children’s palettes since young. As a result, I do see a bright future for our next generation.

 

The DC FoodWorks group spent this Monday learning about sustainable seafood. We met with two large research organizations: Oceana and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. We talked about the various strategies environmental groups are taking to clean up the world’s waters, from oceans to the Chesapeake Bay, and we discussed various sustainable fishing regulations that these organizations are promoting. Regulations include bans on certain types of gear or restrictions on how much fish can be caught from a certain fishery.

Our meetings today were extremely interesting and the people we talked to were so smart and thoughtful. We didn’t, however, meet with any fishermen. Ben Platt, whose story is featured on the Why Hunger website, speaks about the importance of fishermen’s opinions in creating fishery policies not just the opinions of big organizations. Catch quotas are being imposed in Ben’s fishery and Ben says that this will actually have a negative impact on both the environment and the fishermen with small operations. Ben says that larger boats will begin going after species, such as crab, that they do not typically go for but that are important to Ben’s fishing operation. These larger boats will put Ben out of business and could wipe out the crab population. This story reminded me of the importance of working alongside people in a community when implementing regulations or policies in that community. There is never one solution that will fit all cases.

Another thing that Ben’s story reminded me of was the importance of small businesses. Ben talks about supporting small fishing operations—if there are more, smaller boats on the water, more crew members will be hired, and more on-shore supporting jobs will be created. This made me think of my job at Union Kitchen. Union Kitchen supports the growth of small food businesses, from start-up catering companies to ice cream makers. One of the facts that Union Kitchen is most proud of is that is has created over 400 jobs through its own operation as well as its member businesses. A business may start with only one person and an idea, but at Union Kitchen that business will hopefully grow until the owner can hire a few employees, and then eventually open a storefront and hire even more employees. When businesses “graduate” from Union Kitchen, they make way for other aspiring business owners.

We are creatures of habit, and those habits develop at a young age. We all know someone who’s a picky eater. Their diets consist of bland carbohydrates, salty and sweet foods, and white bread with the crusts cut off. They eschew vegetables, healthy proteins, and well-rounded dishes. With the cheap and easy availability of these picky-eater unhealthy foods, it’s increasingly easy for kids to become picky eaters and to only eat these low-nutritionally dense foods. I wrote in one of my past posts that what food you like is really dependent on what you’re fed by your parents and their taste in food. It also has to do with what you’re exposed to in school and what your friends are eating.

This is what I liked so much about the Two-Bite Club at Boulder Elementary School. Not only do they introduce the healthier foods in school, but they also make trying new foods and healthier eating “cool.” For kids that’s really important. I also really like that they have the two bite requirement and no negativity rules. Encouraging kids to be open minded about food is important for a diverse diet. If good eating habits start at a young age, it will be increasingly easier for to pursue healthy diets throughout their life, no matter where they end up.

What I most like about this initiative is its creativity. This is what we need. We need passionate individuals who can implement creative solutions. You can’t mandate behavior, you have to influence it. To make the great changes we’d like to make in the American diet or our food systems, we have to come up with creative ways to influence people.