Comida con Causa, Spanish for "Food with a cause." In this Humanities and Spanish class project we learned all about food justice and how our country's food system works. But more importantly, how it doesn't work. Poverty, Hunger, Food deserts we learned it all, but this was a very important project to me because since we were young most of us were told about all the hungry kids out there but, now that I'm older this problem has become much more "real" to me. The main thing that stood out to me when researching my way through this part of the project was Food Deserts.
Researching and finding sources never really was my strong suite. But I'm proud to say that after this project I feel much more confident in my abilities to use and find reliable sources. At first when we were writing our research paper on our chosen topic (mine was Food Deserts and Obesity), every student was assigned to find at least five reliable sources and it was suggested we had notes from that source. When I heard this, I was upset because it sounded so boring but eventually I got around to doing it. I found websites and articles about food deserts and I was so shocked when reading one article from Spoon University when they stated that In food deserts the death rate from type 2 diabetes is two and a half times higher than normal because of their exposure to fast food which is twice as high and the lack of fresh affordable food. (I've included the link in the article below)
Brundage-Moore, Asha. "Food Deserts, Hunger and Obesity." Stanford Daily. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2017. <http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/05/03/food-deserts-hunger-and-obesity/>
Brundage-Moore, Asha. "Food Deserts, Hunger and Obesity." Stanford Daily. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2017. <http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/05/03/food-deserts-hunger-and-obesity/>
Towards the end of this project we made infographics. We basically got all the condensed info from our papers that we wrote and put it into an easy, fun, little poster that could be read in a short amount of time. When I had finished mine I thought I was just going to turn it in and be done because in my eyes it was perfect. But, one of my friends insisted to critique it so I let them. I later found out many mistakes I could fix and improvements I could make. I went through two other rounds of critique before I got my finished product. The feedback was from grammar to formatting to layout, but in the end my final draft was great. Through this I learned that a second pair of eyes, never hurts.
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The thing I take most pride in for this entire project Is towards the beginning when we were still forming our own views on the whole food industry thing and GMO's idea and we had a socratic seminar every week. I would annotate around seven pages of information then on Friday during the seminar I would have so much to say that I sometimes would talk too much but later on I would share the air to let others speak as I got better seminar after seminar. And towards our last few I would facilitate the seminars, ask driving questions and refer to the text. I loved this part of the project and it was definitely a good way for me to form my own opinion.
If my teachers were to do this project again I would strongly recommend some hands on stuff. Like since we were sitting in class all day learning about hunger and just thinking of ways to help, we should actually go out ourselves and help out. I really feel like it would make the project more "real" or ''personal" in a way since your the one actually doing the work.
A moment I had that I believe needed to happen and was very important was around three quarters of the way through the semester when I noticed my humanities grade wasn't looking as nice as I would have liked it to be. I was In the great room "working" with my friends when I noticed the grade and it hit me. What I do now could effect me for the rest of my life. My grade now could determine what college I go to, my college defines my future career which is basically going to be my lifestyle when Im older. So, from that point on I was just getting work done. extra credit whenever there was any and I was looking good from that one Tuesday morning.