Kiana Cornish
Food convention at John Jay highschool.
When first arriving at the highschool I was mistaken for a volunteer! A woman in charge of a particular section that focused on fast food asked me to help hand out pamphlets to people. Being that I was with my friend that attends John Jay, the woman thought that I was also a helper..I didn’t really care but she kept apologizing as if she had really hurt my feelings..but anyway. So while walking around and saw signs up that said Brooklyn Food conference... being that I live in brooklyn it seemed weird that I have never heard about this event. Walking around I talked with local farmers and they discussed how sometimes its hard for them to make profit because many vegetables and fruits die before they are able to be sold. It seemed as if they were depressed when discussing this instead of being cheerful when speaking to the listeners.
One thing that I noticed was that there were a lot of teenagers around that really seemed to be concerned about the situation in cafeteria food. I didn’t stick around to listen to the discussion focused on school lunch but by the response I saw and the conversations I over heard...people didn’t seem too happy about the lunch served. I heard a young girl state that even though school lunch is bad, kids are forced to eat it because there are no other options. This is something that stood out to me because in our school there are other options such as going out to lunch and bringing a lunch of your own, but even though this is a alternative way to eat...people still settle for the school lunch that is said to be so unhealthy. This shows that maybe it is eaten due to the fact that its very convenient and cheap for students.
I passed by a workshop that was titled “Eating for a healthy pregnancy.” What I noticed was even though it pinpointed healthy eating for pregnant women, it seemed to only be one or two pregnant women that actually stayed to hear different ways to eating healthy. The main trick to having a healthy pregnancy was a lot of water, which a lot of people seemed to already know. It kind of related to the birth unit that we studied in class and it helped me to connect the lives of women that I saw in home birth videos, to the different types of healthy eating during pregnancy. I got kind of bored at this workshop being that it didn’t really apply to me...so I decided to leave.
“Breast feeding: The safest and healthiest way to feed your infant” was a workshop that also connected to the birth unit that we focused on in class. Breast feeding is said to be the safest way to feed your child and the best way to give your new born the nutrients that they need. Some people listening in on this workshop seemed to disagree and stated that regular milk was better because it helped your child become use to the type of milk they would drink in the future..this reasoning seemed kind of dumb and I totally disagreed with it.
The last and most interesting workshop was the one titled “The political economy of food: Why are we all eating Big Macs?” This was a question that we had focused on and class and wrote blogs about, therefor I was interested to see whether or not peoples ideas on this topic was similar to mines or the overall thought of why we eat fast food. The main reason stated for people eating Big Macs was because it taste good, was cheap and very convenient...which was my exact reason for why its eaten. Overall this convention just helped me to get a better understanding of different food and just deepened my thoughts and ideas that I already had.
