Educated Eater

Dear UT Community,

During my undergraduate years at UT, I have completely transformed my relationship with food. I have become an Educated Eater, a student who has been exposed to a diverse understanding of food and eating. I was introduced to many new foods, learned about the real cost of food, studied a little bit of nutrition, started cooking, and even took several courses about food. One summer I had the wonderful opportunity to study international nutrition and food culture in Southeast Asia, another time in Brazil where I ate rice and watered down beans with my impoverished host family. All of my studies at UT and abroad have had a food focus.

After three years, I reminisce on the adventure I have had educating myself about food in college and reflecting on my personal journey of deciding what to eat.

I remember having to travel by foot or bus with my empty backpack to purchase just enough food to hold me over for the school week. I remember my first semester eating all alone in the school cafeteria. My parents were no longer around to buy food for me, so I had to learn how to hunt down free food events around campus.

Everything I could fit into my backpack for the week

Now, as I walk around campus, I see so many students trying figure out their own food studies. Some are learning about the economics of food. Why hundreds of students line up on Gregory Plaza receive a free Wendy’s hamburger or download a Google App to get a free meal. Some are receiving a lecture about college culture as they come to class at eight in the morning to find Red Bull energy drinks taped to the bottom of their desks, and random pizza/soda drive-bys as young cheerleaders jump out vans and shove products into your hands. Some students even get an introduction to the politics of food as with the student organization that brought a cupcake truck onto campus to fundraise and now faces a violation of the Institutional Rules (Section 13-205 Solicitation).

College students have to make many new complex decisions about what to eat, but I don’t see many programs teaching them how or why we eat. Longhorns are always talking about food. So why doesn’t UT have a food-focused program that students can use to discuss food and relate it to their studies?  

Student Innovation

As promised in my last post, the time has arrived for the Food Studies Project to fly. Our destination is to lay the foundations of a Food Studies Institute. In order to get started, we took a leap. It was scary, at first, because gravity is always trying to pull us back to the ground. But falling is part of learning how to fly. We, at the Food Studies Project, believe that we can defy gravity with supporting winds, leading us to great heights.

Original Logo for FSP. Created By Asiago

Since launching the Food Studies Project (FSP) in September 2011, our UT Community has really become excited to see where this project will go.  The FSP’s interdisciplinary approach to the study of food has been well received by students both from the sciences and the arts. Most have agreed that the complexity of food in modern day society warrants a multidisciplinary program that balances the interests and concerns about food.

Orientating ours minds to make our program fly requires focus not only on the technical side (administration, venture capital, faculty), but on the beauty of our project as well. A Food Studies program should focus on the behavioral and social sciences that will compliment a variety of academic fields. In other Food Studies programs across the nation, there seems to be a division between a foodie and foodist. I believe that UT should bring a variety of disciplines to the table for students to get a taste of all the aspects and understandings of food. Let’s mix both love for food and the concerns that accompany it into a program that will discuss and create new ideas. Hopefully, with the right balance, we will find our wings.

Food and Mood

Last time we met, I introduced a story I’m going to tell throughout my string of Food Studies blog entries.

The story is now officially beginning and it all started in a bathroom stall at the Miami International Airport this summer. I was in there on the verge of vomiting, not because I ate bad airport food, but because I was hyperventilating and nauseous with extreme anxiety. I was about to take off on my first solo international flight, to a third-world country in which they were still rebuilding after a civil war that ended only in 1992. The realization of “what the heck did I get myself into?” finally hit me.

I managed to collect myself to board the plane. I hate takeoff though, so my anxiety attack crept back upon me as the plane was about to rip from the runway. I was sitting there clenching the armrests—as if somehow gripping them could save my life should the plane spontaneously combust—and I could that see the man next to me had the “oh great I ended up next to the crazy girl” look on his face.

Looking down over El Salvador

“It’s my first time to El Salvador,” I told him in Spanish, as if that would explain everything. “Ah,” he said and then turned away to talk to his chubby son who was playing a GameBoy.

I thought that was the end of our conversation so I then resorted back to my nervousness, but after awhile the man turned to me and said “You need to eat the coconuts there.”

Welcome to the Food Studies Project

Hello, I’m Asiago, lead organizer for The Food Studies Project. My last name is “Heron” named in honor of the Great Blue Heron. I am told by people during my time at UT Austin that I have an inspiring personal story to tell. I would like to share an abridged version of my story, give thanks for the education I have received, and invite you all to come fly with me this winter. I have always had an interest in food, probably because I was pulled out of elementary school when I was seven years old, and spent most of life at home eating and watching the Food Network. Sadly though, I did not learn much about food or cooking sitting in front of the television. I just ended up eating more. It got to the point that I had to eat something every time I sat down to watch TV. By the time I was 13, I was already an obese teen who spent his days playing games, only pausing to go steal cigarettes and food, which I called “Game Fuel”, at my neighborhood market. My life was wasting away because I never left the nest, never built the courage to take that first leap. I started learning how to fly when I decided to go back to school at the age of 20. I started a new life thanks to junior college. At the time, I could not imagine that taking a Spanish class would not only guide me to UT Austin but also teach me how to fly around the world.

source: wikipedia.org

Education helped me think differently about food, and it naturally changed my unhealthy ways. Studying foreign cultures and languages brought me awareness about the importance and meaning of food. Meanwhile, my concern grew for the future of food throughout the world. My first couple of years at UT, I did not know I had this food focus in my studies. It wasn’t until I came upon Dr. Rebecca Torres’ course “Farming, Food, and Global Hunger” that I realized I had always had great interests and concerns with food in all of my classes.

Food Sovereignty in Bolivia

Two weeks before the Fall 2011 semester started, I had the honor of being part of a Food First delegation in Bolivia with the amazing new project Food Sovereignty Tours.

It is hard to summarize all the new information that was presented to me by Bolivian locals and from the wonderful professionals–now friends–that I met on the trip. Being the youngster on the trip, I did not feel ready to engage in the subject of Food Sovereignty and Climate Change. Even though I did not have much of a background in many of the discussion topics, it did not take an expert to see the shocking reality of the world food system in Bolivia. How the Global North uses beautiful counties like Bolivia in the Global South to aid their own food security. How food is no longer a human right but a commodity used to control populations and benefit certain wealthy nations. As an undergraduate in college, we read a lot about the injustices and unfair issues throughout the world, but lack the reality of experiencing it. I wish my school would had some sort of Study Abroad Program like this. Wake up tours. I wasn’t able to get a scholarship or university credit for the tour (I funded it with the rest of my emergency savings and donations from a few professors who believe in my future) yet it was worth it because I went in with just an interest in food security and left a food activist.

FEB Food Studies Links

Food Studies to me is understanding the world via food. Students can study food in any academic field because almost everything that we do as humans is related to obtaining food to eat. One reason why I wanted to create this blog was to show the great interest, by undergraduate college students like myself, to study food. But, not nessarly to study the food itself but our interacttions with it. For example, here is a recent study about race and food production: The Color of Food

I wanted to share a few links that came to me recently that might be useful in your search to study food.

No Wendy’s Challenge Spring 2011

Fall 2010, I challenged myself to go the entire semester without consuming a single thing from Wendy’s. Why Wendy’s? Well, they seem to have a geographical monopoly on my campus, with three locations all within a short walking distance. The amazing part is that all the stores have great customer traffic, but they serve different clientele.

Triad of Wendy’s at the University of Texas at Austin

After completing the No Wendy’s Challenge last semester, I thought I would go out to eat to celebrate. So… I went to Wendy’s! I wanted understand why the fast food experience can be dangerous from a non-nutritional/environmental stand point. I want to bring your focus to the misleading language used to promote gluttonous consumption (of not just food), and how the convenience leads us to eat mindlessly.

Eating Mindfully with Susan Albers

As part of my new year’s resolution of reading a book a week in 2011, I read a little book recently called, “Eating Mindfully” by Susan Albers. I enjoy the idea of eating food consciously without focusing on nutrition. If you think about it, the field of study is called “nutritional sciences” for a reason, it is meant for scientists to comprehend. Susan breaks down eating food into 4 categories: Mind, Body, Thoughts, and Feelings. Categories which she says were pulled from Buddhist teachings. I tried to think how these four elements apply to my relationship with food nowadays in my senior year of college.

 

MIND

Whole Foods – I want foods closer to their natural state in the environment. This isn’t an ad for raw cuisine, but more of a push to understand where food comes from. For example, I drink whole milk, because in my mind whole milk is closer to raw milk than say fat-free. Another example would be  my preference for foods that have not been “fortified” (adding vitamins, minerals, etc that were not in the original food). Not a big fan of supplements either…

Highlights and Lowlights of my Mindful Eating Week

For one week, I ate mindfully, keeping notes of the economics, time, and psychology of my weekday meals. As a result, I raised my awareness about the relationship I have with food. Located some potential dangers such as overeating before bed, a habit turned to routine, which I believe I do to help me relax and get tired to hit the sack. I learned that over eating does not only make you feel grossly heavy but it is a major time killer, and time is one of the most important things that students deal with in college.

Weekday Mindful Eater in College: Psychology of my meals

The last thing that I recorded in my weekday mindful eating project was the psychology behind my meals. In particular, I focused on the number of meals I ate alone and the satisfaction rate of those meals. As I mention in my previous two posts both on economics and time, the idea for this project came from Warren Balasco’s book “Food: The Key Concepts“, a great book for students interested in Food Studies to start thinking differently about food.