What about evolution?

Alright so a bit of research today. If you don't believe in evolution you can just stop reading now, 'cause none of this will make sense to you. With that out of the way here we go! Why is it so hard to refuse food from somebody else in a social setting? This question has been bugging me for quite a bit of time. One reason actually could be evolution I found out. So look at it this way, back in the day, when it was harder to get your hands on food, having food probably meant you were one of the most likely people to survive and therefore be able to look after your partner and kids, and survive long enough to have a lot of kids. So this made having an abundance of food one of the things that evolved into being a desireable trait, both for reproductive purposes and social purposes. And how can we tell who has a lot of food? People who have enough food that they are willing to give food to strangers, and probably whomever they are courting. This makes the act of giving food kind of a big deal socially. It is also very true that turning down food would be an undesireable trait because then you would be left with less. How giving and recieving food shows up in our culture is a bit harder to pin down but these are definitely its roots.

In our culture I feel like we still still have an internal sense of how valuable food was, just because that is how we evolved. This manifests itself in the fact that sharing food has become almost a sacred practice in our society. Foer points this out in his book Eating Animals when he talks about never eating with people you don't like. This idea is fairly obvious in our society, nobody ever just goes to a place and eats with strangers, eating together suggests a certain degree of intamacy. Eating is sometimes also associated with one of the most intimate settings, the home. Nobody would ever invite people who they didn't like over for dinner without some ulterior motive, or because they had to. Sharing food is definitely not something to take lightly.

"Interior crocodile aligator, I drive a cheverlet movie the-a-tor" - Chip Tha Rippa

Branding

Why does everything have to have a "brand"? The quality of the product wouldn't change if you took of the logo so why do we need? In the PBS dcumentary "Merchants of Cool" they discuss this idea at great legnth. Ever heard of the ICP? How about Limp Bizkit? These two rage rock bands went through a lot of branding. The idea behind their brands was to make them seem like they were anti-establishment, stick it to the man and all of that good stuff, even when, in fact, they were making a lot of money because corporations were supporting them. This type of branding goes on all of the time in food industry too, flashy packaging hides dull food, catchy slogans convince shoppers to pay extra money for a grrrrrreat cereal, even if the generic brand is just as good. To be able to brand a product packaging is an important part of the equation. It has to be instantly recognizeable so you can see whenever someone is using it. This was one of the reasons that Sprite was able to associate itself with hip-hop culture. In Merchants of Cool people are seen drinking Sprite at a pretty dang hoppin party, which helps prop up its image as the drink for people who want to be hip hoppin. This tactic was only successful because Sprite was seen with people who to some at least embodied hip hop. For that to work one needs very well thought out easy to recognize packaging. Good packaging in this way more than pays off the extra cost associated with creating a cool sleave for a bottle. It goes further than that stiil. Good packaging also tends to drawn people in who have never heard anything about the product, but that is for another time.

Social Presure

I feel like more and more I am being asked to eat things and it is getting hard. People aren't very simpathetic to my cause. I get offered food a lot more than I used to it seems, although that may just be because I notice it now. I get offered cookies, and sodas, and other foods that people share fairly casually. Just as I was getting a bit exausted from all of these offers though, one of my friends really helped me out and took me to a restaurant. Sometimes people can make this project worthwhile. I feel like the reason the only food being offered to me is packaged is one of the main reasons I only eat packaged foods. Why are they all we have?

Societal pressures explain why food packaging is generally inescapable but it does not really go into why packaging is so prevalent. Why do I have to buy all of my soda bottles with an extra paper sleeve around them? Surely this extra sleeve costs the company money to produce, and it obviously doesn’t add to my soda drinking experience. The only real reason to have excess amounts of packaging like this is to show off the brand. Brand names such as Coca Cola and Pepsi try to make their brands recognized so people are more likely to buy their things. But it is not just that, these flashy, instantly recognizable logos are also there to alert anyone to the fact that somebody around them is consuming this product. Much like in a PBS documentary about how advertisers are a high jacking teen culture and telling us what is cool, called “Merchants of Cool” where they examine how the Sprite brand rose to prominence by being associated with the hip-hop scene, in large part through sponsoring televised hip-hop parties on MTV. This shows why firms need to create recognizable logos that stand out, so that people can be shown what to buy for the examples of others, but this comes at a large cost, one that is felt by everyone that lives on the planet.

Society

People offer to give me food almost everyday. I had never really thought much of it, but now I have to decline almost all of such requests.For some reason declining food someone has offered you on ethical grounds can be a bit awkward. A holy than thou attitude is how I feel I am coming off if I just say I am not eating packaged foods.I almost always feel the need to explain to people that I am just doing a project for one of my classes and that this isn't how I normally eat. The fact that I feel so inclined brings up important questions about myself in the culture we live in. Why do I feel like I shouldn't take a public stand on food? Can it be that people who take stands on foods, vegans and vegetarians come to mind, are seen as trying to push their ideology on people? Or is it just awkward for me to do as an individual? Honestly I do not know for sure which option is more true. I have felt in the past that vegetarians always seem to think they are somehow being more virtuous than everyone, and that annoys me and I am sure other people as well. But why? Aren't people who are willing to put whata they believe in first instead of their taste buds or convenience acting in a more virtuous way than everybody else? Why do they have to feel like they feel like they shouldn't be seen as more caring? People like them should feel free to try to get people to change to better themselves and the planet.

It could also be me. This avenue is a bit less interesting but should be explored. Maybe I just feel awkward expressing such beliefs in front of people, especially since the only reason I am pursuing them is for a class paper. But why do I feel like that? I feel like there are indeed societal pressures that want us not to challenge the status quo. We are not encouraged to act against what has become a norm. Even in college, where we are the most free we will ever be, we are still governed by a fairly limiting set of rules. I guess this is what forms a functioning society, but at the moment it feels like this typw of society has a bit of an anti progressive undertone.

Gum

Today was a pretty good day packaging wise. I woke up and I ate some food in the UC that only comes in boxes, which are recycled and have no plastic wrap. Later in the day though I absent-mindedly started chewing some gum.  I got to thinking about gum. Not only does it come in a ridiculous amount of packaging for how small it is, but it also doesn't meet any of my needs calories wise. That is pretty bad in and of itself, but then as I was spitting it out I realized something else, gum just becomes waste. I was curious so I did a bit of research about gum, and it actually does not biodegrade and is becoming a huge problem world wide. It never goes away, is very difficult to clean up once it sticks to the ground, and it is becoming a health hazard for animals. To me it seems like one of the most wasteful products ever, but I have really never even thought about whether or not I should eat gum because it is such a normal thing to do. I feel like this is everybody's experience with waste, they put it in the garbage can and then it instantly disappears from their lives and it no long affects them in any way. On a practical level this seems true enough, but I feel like we don't quite have unlimmited space to put all of our stuff no matter how optomistic we are. It is also an enviornmental concern that does have an affect on all of us, but like most enviornmental concerns it is hard to get people motivated about unless it affects them in a meaningful way at the moment.

Anyways after the gum incident the next time I ate was at Jack in the Box. Bad decision as the burger came wrapped in paper. Not a huge amount of packaging but enough for me to remember never to eat fastfood. Obviously no drink because that took a lot more packaging. I also left the tray at the front because it had paper on it and I told the cashier he should use it on someone else. He seemed to think that was a bit weird, but he didn't protest. All in all though this was a fairly successful day, where I discovered a bit of waste in the fast food industry and a lot of inherent waste in chewing gum.

This is Hard!

Hey not eating packaged food is almost impossible. I am actually in a situation where it is easier than it will be at anyother point in my life, because I have most of my meals provided by the our school, but it is still so hard. I find myself eating packaged foods like two or three times a day without even giving it any thought. I usually only realize when I am half-way through. Hopefully this will get easier. Also I have decided to also try to produce as little waste as I can not just through food. I think this will really challenge me, and is important. I feel like we make so many things that we know are just going to go into a landfill, and those things will just keep getting made unless people actually stop buying them.

I find myself caring more and more about waste every day. I wonder where everything I throw away or even recycle goes, and who it affects. I know it eventually effects everyone, but who does it hurt the most? Does it kill animals? Is it like Karl Pilkington says? Do turtles choke on my plastic bag thinking it was a jellyfish? How do my decisions affect people in other countries? What about the economy? These questions and many others swirl around my head more and more as I continue on with this experiment. Hopefully I will be able to answer some of the a bit better with time.

Changing the Blog

Well eating locally was a pretty short lived idea. I just couldn't find the money to do it. As a college student I would have to eat all of my food from outside of my meal plan which is just not doable for me right now, so starting tomorrow I will be eating no packaged foods that would go bad or be thrown away if nobody ate them. Working in the UC I happen to know which foods get thrown away everyday when nobody eats them so that part shouldn't be too hard. Eating foods with no packaging though is very important though because where do these packages go? Landfills. That's terrible! Also a lot of money goes into creating this packaging, which also adds to pollution. Excessive packaging is something we could do without.

I will be relating all of this to Low Impact Man, especially drawing parallels between my experiences with his, and some of the roadblock that I am sure I will face as well. I will also use Food Inc especially when talking about the economics of packaging, and how unpackaged goods tend to be more expensive making it harder for poor people to get a hold of. Also I would like to explore the idea of every purchase being a vote much like towards the end of Food Inc. A third text I will probably use is probably going to be Merchants of Cool, and I will talk about how people make their packaging their brands, and how we are basically paying money for the "cool" packaging, even though name brands may not actually be better foods.

This relates well to Planet and Profit. Packaging has obvious impacts on environment not only in the huge amounts of waste it produces, but also in its production. The profit comes into wide adding an extra cost to a product, that in no way enhances the product is justified in a business model. The obvious answer is that it attracts costumers, while impacting the environment does not lead to an immediate loss of profits, but why is this true? hopefully I can explore this through reflection and careful research.


I may run into a few roadblocks. The first being taste. I pretty much only eat packaged goods at the moment because I hadn't really put much thought into it until now, so I ate what tasted good. I have a feeling that I might go a bit crazy with this. Also I don't tend to think before I eat things so I may end up just doing it absent-mindedly. I will be doing this for about three weeks ending on November 21st, and starting November 3rd. I will research every Thursday and Friday. I will reflect every other day. Good Night!

Why Eat Local?

I am Gabe Corwin. I am from a small town in Oregon called Bend. I have always been a picky eater, but in an activist sort of way, more of a spoiled kid way. I have never cared where my food came from in my life. Why would I? Food is food right? After reading things such as Jonathan Saffran Foer's Eating Animals about how animals are treated before they die, and the inefficiencies that exist, because of the amount we transport our meat, and John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, about where all of our stuff comes from. These books made me think about trying to be more aware of where my food comes from. Not only are local foods probably not factory farmed, but we also waste less fuels and less carbon dioxide has to be emitted, it seems more efficient. It makes me wonder why all people don't just eat locally and what roadblocks there are that prevent people from making these choices.