Do you ever think about the food you are about to eat before you shove it in your mouth? I didn’t use to, but try and read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and try and tell me you are perfectly fine eating McDonald's. During this project, we dove into food ethics and learned about CORN and the role it plays in today’s society. We started out by reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma which created a huge impact on what I talked about with my family and friends, usually interrupting them with a comment like, “that’s basically 100% corn”. I have always been careful about what I eat because growing up my mom would only buy healthy food and, no, I could never get the fruit snacks I was always craving. But, maybe that was for the best… This was a joint project with Chemistry and that portion helped us identify foods and then conduct an experiment with them. The final product for humanities was an essay about our developing food ethic and what it means to us.
Honestly, I do not think that studying food in Chemistry and Humanities helped me with this project. We didn’t overlap any of the material so it made it confusing on why we were doing so. In Humanities we learned about the ethic side of food and Chemistry we conducted experiments about food and then went into detail about what changed with the variable, I didn’t see a connection with the two classes. It was nice to be able to focus on one subject and have a sense of unity within the grade but otherwise, I don’t see the need for it.
My main takeaways from studying food are that everything is not what you seem. The food industry is very sneaky when writing ingredient lists and telling people what is in their food. You have to be very careful when purchasing and eating food and so it is always good when you know exactly where your food came from. Before this project, I didn’t even realize that I had a food ethic but through analyzing my life and food patterns that I follow I started to recognize my habits. This is something I want to improve on, I value fitness and health and food is a huge part of those two factors in my life. Creating an ethic that has a lot of thought put into it would be really beneficial for me in order to keep a healthy lifestyle and help to remind me of this project and what I learned.