The cat's silhouette moves across my bookshelf.
The mission of a shadow.
Stealth betrayed by stiff paper.
Green eyes stare.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Food in Grand Rapids
Culture is such a defining feature in the lives of everyone regardless of whether we know or care. With shifting cultures of new generations, people seem to be yet again redefining where they stand in relation to their food. I have taken a strange path over the past few years going from eating triple cheese burgers and large pizzas as my diet to now being vegan and searching out every edible locally sourced food procurable.
What is our story? How did we get so detached from our food? Why do we need a local food movement? Why are local residents fighting for their rights to own chickens? Most importantly though is what are we eating?
What is our story? A short answer is that most of us are products of our culture and our apathetic nature as animals, only ever wanting to take the easiest path. A longer answer though is a look into the American spirit. The saying 'you are what you eat' could not be more fitting. The local food movements are getting away from the mechanization of our diets and factory system of devalued people and product, and is stretching it self to the other end of the scale to the hard meaningful labor we all know to be who we are and what we stand for. We are not just a price tag or a source of income for some multinational corporation. We live locally, we eat at local restaurants, we even have the majority of our friends locally. The mass production of food, paid for by subsidies, distributed, devalued and dangerously easy to ignore are the subconscious projections of our own inability to tell people what we really want vs. what we need. There is a separation of our inherent morals and our manufactured desires created by ad agencies.
How did we get so detached from our food? Realistically, no one wants to be told what to do. This was set forth by the founding fathers of the United States. It doesn't matter your political persuasion, everyone likes the option of choice over the lack thereof. Why is it so often that we let fast-food joints tell us what we want to eat? And why would we not question what it is that we truly need vs want? It was only a generation ago, my fathers generation that had pigs behind their barn and house as well as chickens, rows of fruits and vegetables, and more often than not a plethora of canned foods to last multiple families through the winters. Today, I often peer into the refrigerators of the world and see only the disposable temporary unrealistic notions of what food is thought to be. Steak does not look like a cow. Green peas do not grow in a can. Corn syrup is man made. We became detached from our food by just a few lies and it happens to be unrealistic that we subject ourselves to it all. It is easier to be ignorant than it is to engage ourselves.
Local food means local, not a factory farm. We are talking about raising chickens for eggs and ultimately maybe some soup and dinner at the end of a very fruitful life, right? Why is it that city councils can tell you that you have to be unconnected from your food? This is the first time in all history that we are not allowed to know where our food comes from. So if we are not allowed to know where our food comes from, how can we expect to know what our food truly is? Does anyone truly know what they eat anymore? I am positive that the average consumer could not imagine what is put into their food and by default into their bodies.
What is our story? How did we get so detached from our food? Why do we need a local food movement? Why are local residents fighting for their rights to own chickens? Most importantly though is what are we eating?
What is our story? A short answer is that most of us are products of our culture and our apathetic nature as animals, only ever wanting to take the easiest path. A longer answer though is a look into the American spirit. The saying 'you are what you eat' could not be more fitting. The local food movements are getting away from the mechanization of our diets and factory system of devalued people and product, and is stretching it self to the other end of the scale to the hard meaningful labor we all know to be who we are and what we stand for. We are not just a price tag or a source of income for some multinational corporation. We live locally, we eat at local restaurants, we even have the majority of our friends locally. The mass production of food, paid for by subsidies, distributed, devalued and dangerously easy to ignore are the subconscious projections of our own inability to tell people what we really want vs. what we need. There is a separation of our inherent morals and our manufactured desires created by ad agencies.
How did we get so detached from our food? Realistically, no one wants to be told what to do. This was set forth by the founding fathers of the United States. It doesn't matter your political persuasion, everyone likes the option of choice over the lack thereof. Why is it so often that we let fast-food joints tell us what we want to eat? And why would we not question what it is that we truly need vs want? It was only a generation ago, my fathers generation that had pigs behind their barn and house as well as chickens, rows of fruits and vegetables, and more often than not a plethora of canned foods to last multiple families through the winters. Today, I often peer into the refrigerators of the world and see only the disposable temporary unrealistic notions of what food is thought to be. Steak does not look like a cow. Green peas do not grow in a can. Corn syrup is man made. We became detached from our food by just a few lies and it happens to be unrealistic that we subject ourselves to it all. It is easier to be ignorant than it is to engage ourselves.
Local food means local, not a factory farm. We are talking about raising chickens for eggs and ultimately maybe some soup and dinner at the end of a very fruitful life, right? Why is it that city councils can tell you that you have to be unconnected from your food? This is the first time in all history that we are not allowed to know where our food comes from. So if we are not allowed to know where our food comes from, how can we expect to know what our food truly is? Does anyone truly know what they eat anymore? I am positive that the average consumer could not imagine what is put into their food and by default into their bodies.
topic of life
It was suggested that I write more... I think I write enough, I just don't share or show it to too many people. I think my thoughts pour out as a matter of importance. I only want to think about what is important, and therefor I only ever want to write about what I feel is important. It is not that I feel the need to clarify my intent to write, but to present more of the problem of why I have a problem writing. For instance, when I was going to college, I feel like I could have written forever about just about anything. It could have been because I already had to write papers all the time on just about every subject that I could imagine, that it made it easier to draw on subject matter to write about. Not to say that I don't have any interesting subject matter in my life to draw on. I have a whole blog about coffee. But merely that without a subject of interest like a particular book or topic I seem to be like a drone of a human being endlessly wandering in my own mind looking for a new form of entertainment or new person to laugh with. Again, don't get me wrong. One of the best things about my life right now is that just about every night I end up spending it with a group of people laughing, telling jokes, looking at life, deconstructing, and amusing ourselves with the small nothings that we are involved in. I think that maybe it is not my business to mention people by name often, in any form of writing, and that it might lead me to not want to write about the specifics of my interactions with people but only vaguely. I love my friends, and I love everything they do with a full accepting nature that I have come to embrace. They are the most fantastic human beings I think I have ever met.
It is weird to think that I spent so much time out of state. It also seems that being so far away from this place, Michigan, Home, was and is so foreign. My past three years almost non-existent. I have grown so much in that time that my head feels like it is going to explode with what I care for so much. I have coffee labs every Wednesday, and employee labs every Sunday. I teach people what I have learned. I get people invested in what I love. I bring them closer to myself. It is eerie that I feel closer to so many people here than I have ever felt anywhere else I have ever been. Ypsilanti has been the best most fulfilling experience to date in my short twenty-five years on this planet.
2010 is almost up, a new year is pounding at our door. Everyday I read all the science headlines, and they seem to make more sense to me than the regular political news. People make less and less sense to me culturally where as science and logic only get reinforced in my mind. The more I learn about the universe and M-theory, the more I feel myself as actually being apart of something greater. I do not mean like the human race great... but I mean like in a sense that the particles that make up my existence have essentially been recycled from the earliest moments of the universe and their current state is in the construction of thoughts, and the constitution of physical actions that represent my being.
Although not a necessity, I would like to know more about the universe before I die. The answer to the question that everyone asks but no one knows...
It is weird to think that I spent so much time out of state. It also seems that being so far away from this place, Michigan, Home, was and is so foreign. My past three years almost non-existent. I have grown so much in that time that my head feels like it is going to explode with what I care for so much. I have coffee labs every Wednesday, and employee labs every Sunday. I teach people what I have learned. I get people invested in what I love. I bring them closer to myself. It is eerie that I feel closer to so many people here than I have ever felt anywhere else I have ever been. Ypsilanti has been the best most fulfilling experience to date in my short twenty-five years on this planet.
2010 is almost up, a new year is pounding at our door. Everyday I read all the science headlines, and they seem to make more sense to me than the regular political news. People make less and less sense to me culturally where as science and logic only get reinforced in my mind. The more I learn about the universe and M-theory, the more I feel myself as actually being apart of something greater. I do not mean like the human race great... but I mean like in a sense that the particles that make up my existence have essentially been recycled from the earliest moments of the universe and their current state is in the construction of thoughts, and the constitution of physical actions that represent my being.
Although not a necessity, I would like to know more about the universe before I die. The answer to the question that everyone asks but no one knows...
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