Diving In

“The kind of society that would waste this much food is one that doesn't value the earth or the products it produces. It's in our own personal detriment to continue the process.” -Dr. Timothy Jones

Every year in America we throw away 96 billion pounds of food. 

The meal consisted of pasta with cream sauce, spinach, and chicken and a salad made from lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and green onions. We did not pay a dime for it, the taste was fantastic and the produce was fresh and... It all came from the dumpster.

 

I was first introduced to dumpster diving after watching the documentary Dive! and was horrified with how much food we waste in the United States and Europe. I was shocked by how many people would not go hungry if we reduced our food waste.

The Department of Agriculture estimated in 1996 that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people. Today we recover less than 2.5 percent. 

Finish Line and New Beginnings

Two years and a summer is how long it has taken me to finish graduate school.  Stuffing my brain with information on cultural studies theories, theorists, ideas, principles and writing until I could not see the joy in writing any longer.  I stepped away from this blog for a bit because it had seemed so much a part of me and so related to my grad school work I could not see the pleasure in it any longer.  I also needed to try and remove my advisor's voice (no offense Julie!) and begin reclaiming my voice in my writing.  However, on June 16th, I received my Master of Arts in Cultural Studies (MACS) degree and have decided to start writing again and focusing on my passions surrounding food advocacy, food politics and food in general.  Stepping away from so much of the school papers and academic writing style and returning to writing with the goal of starting a conversation, engaging people in discussions surrounding food and food systems.  There is definitely a lot to talk about out there right now!

This being said, I want to share the final pieces of my graduate school work - my final literature review paper (all 30 pages of it in it's original double spaced format; reduced to single spacing!), my presentation from the MACS conference including my slides which accompany the speech and a bit of critique surrounding these pieces.

Our class's MACS conference was a fifteen minute speech per student summarizing two years of work.  The forum was open within certain boundaries and I chose to focus on the topic of hunger in Washington state.

Conference Speech by rtomczek

This Little Piggy... (The Journey - Part 4)

For some reason this nursery rhyme ran through my head the other day and I started really thinking about the words in a critical sense as it relates to my project.

This little piggy went to market,

This little piggy stayed home,

This little piggy had roast beef,

This little piggy had none,

And this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way home.

An innocently read or spoken verse, but when looked at critically describes the unfairness of the food system in our country and around the world.

"This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home". Why did the pig stay home? Was it because he/she could not afford to travel to the market? Was it because there was no market near enough to his/her home to find food at? Was it because there was no money to buy food from the market?