Local Food Short

Storyboard

Digital Short

I want to tell a story contrasting store bought versus local food.  I want to showcase something that people don’t typically think of when thinking of local.  I believe that people would stereotypically think of vegetables or some type of produce.  I want to tell the story of pre-made cookies and homemade cookies utilizing as many local ingredients as possible. 

-Image of pre-made store bought cookies with their uniform size and shape

-emphasize the point they are all about what is cheapest to produce

-Image of the ingredients list

-emphasize the point that there is no story to these ingredients: idea thought of in a boardroom, recipe formulated in a lab, product made in factory and then transferred to grocery store shelf to sit indefinitely

Compare to-

Cookies made with local ingredients:

-Image of each of the ingredients:

             -milk from hatcher, jd creamery or west wind

            - chocolate from olive and Sinclair

            - eggs from local farmer

            - butter from local dairy

            - flour from Falls Mills

-All of these ingredients tell a story; of the farmer; of the land; of the animals; of the hard work and dedication; of the care given

-Explanation of each farm where ingredients come from

-Money spent on local ingredients stays in the local economy versus it going to a large corporation

-Image of both sets of cookies after cooking: local ones are unique and each has their own characteristics. Pre-made, pre-cut ones are uniform.  They look factory made.

To Do

To do:

·         Interview member of Slow Foods

·         Observations from the Farmer’s Market

·         Interviews from the Farmer’s Market

·         Tour Real Food Farm

·         Collection of texts to use: magazines, books, articles, media

·         Collection of images that are relevant

·         Interview more members of Slow Foods

·         Interview L

·         Interview N

·         Possibly interview local artisans?

Service Learning Reflection #2

The material artifacts that made the largest impact were the lesson plans that NALC provided.  They influenced not only on the way that I “taught” but what the student learned.  They were a list of vocab words and exercises developed to further their understanding of the words and languages.  They often revolved around one common theme.  For example, one lesson plan was based around the theme of messy vs. neat.  The vocab list was composed of various words revolving around this topic and above the list was a picture of two roommates, one who was messy and always late and the other was one who was organized, composed and always ready for the task at hand.  What I found so interesting, particularly the one dealing with the topic of messy vs. neat, is that they are sanitized, stereo-typical models of what one , in America, would describe as a person who is organized compared to a person who is chronically unorganized.  To start with, both the characters in the picture are white males, about college age.  The typical messy man has papers strewn everywhere, is constantly late, does not keep a tidy room, does not have time for breakfast and focuses on leisure activities rather than on homework. His roommate, on the other hand, finishes all his work on time, studies hard rather than participate in leisure activities, wakes up in the morning with enough time to shower and eat breakfast, and keeps a neat room. How much of this lesson plan is influencing the student and helping to form their opinions?  Are they learning from this picture that our country values tidy people and those who are messy and unorganized turn out to be lazy and unproductive?  Even the vocab words make me question the makers of the lesson plans.  The words are archaic versions that are rarely used in common vocabulary.  Would it not be better to teach the words that are useful to acquire; those that would help these students in their everyday speaking and writing?  It reminds me of the type of lesson plans that were in my French books from high school.  They taught us these words that were outdated and rarely used in everyday language.  We practiced the scenes provided with our newly attained vocab words; scenes that we were unlikely to ever participate in.  Again, the question arises, would it not be better suited to teach foreign language learners the practical vocab of the language, maybe even the slang terms used every day?  That is one of the first signs to cue me in that the person is not a native English speaker.  I can tell that they are reciting from memory, one of the words acquired from a vocab list.  The focus needs to be moved from the more academic words to the more useful everyday vocab.

Intro

The back of the van is opened, revealing hundreds of melons.  I wait anxiously as Farmer Dave describes the different varietals available.  “I have Crenshaw melons, Snow Leopard honeydew, and smell this French Chanterais melon.  It smells French doesn’t it, with its light, sweet perfume? Pick out what you would like” Farmer Dave says with a smile.  I try to contain my excitement while picking out which melons to get, rationalizing that I need at least five melons, maybe I possibly need the whole van full?!  This is a memory that fills my mind with the sweet taste and smell of summer.  It is an entirely different experience than strolling through the fluorescent filled produce aisle of the grocery store hoping that maybe this generic cantaloupe will taste less like cardboard than the last.  It does no evoke memories of summer; rather it reminds me of every bland fruit salad I have ever been served, even in the dead of winter.  There is no comparing tasteless grocery store melons to local grown melons fueled by the hot summer sun and picked at the peak of their ripeness.

My aim is to explore Local Food culture and find out why people are choosing to source their food locally and what it entails.  In the past couple of years what started as a grassroots movement has gained an ample following.  Growing concerns with where our food is coming from, our health as a nation, and the treatment of the animals we eat have been some of the issues that have garnered attention.  As a result people have been going “back to the land”.  Those interested in local food are supporting local farmer’s markets, subscribing to CSA’s and in some cases are growing their own food.  I want to get a better understanding of why people are making this move and shunning cheap, readily available food in favor of local products, which are generally more expensive and only available during their specific growing season.

            I would consider myself somewhat of an insider of local food culture.  For many years now I have held a fascination with European culture and their tendency to eat food sourced from their regions.  The combination of this fascination, a joy of cooking and a medical condition made me take a hard look at the food I was eating.  This was about six years ago, a time when local food had not made it to the forefront via avenues such as Omnivore’s Dilemma or Food Inc.  Local food was not something that was readily available, especially in Nashville.  It is something that has gradually bloomed and now has a rather large following.  I try to shop at stores that provide local and regional produce when I cannot make it to the farmer’s market and try to buy products from local vendors.  Last summer I participated in a program called a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with Real Food Farm.  Each week throughout the summer I received a new box of freshly picked produce.  This semester I have become part of a group called Slow Food on Belmont’s campus.  I highly advocate Local Food and want to get as many people as possible involved in the culture.

            So what is my point of choosing this topic for my project?  I want to examine the many motives that have caused people to eat locally.  I want to explore why something so natural as eating food from local farms has become the “in vogue” thing to do and why the elite are readily jumping on this food movement while the lower classes are stuck eating cheap, highly-processed foods.  Eating food from a local or regional source is a practice that goes back through human existence and would be the logical and natural way for us to eat.  All of this changed through industrialization and the globalization of food commerce.  Food was no longer being purchased in the region, because we had access to food all over the world.  Then the real downfall of local food happened when major corporations started taking over the food industry.  It became about what is the cheapest to produce and for the consumer to buy, regardless of the consequences.  So why are people now taking a stand against these major corporations and standing up for the local farmers, that just a few years ago, were being run out of business?  What has shifted in our world and specifically in our country that has caused people to take a hard look at what they are eating and making them forgo the cheapest product in favor of the local product?   That is what I will examine.

Service Learning Reflection #4

While reading “Inventing the University,” the idea of privileged language and the discourse of academic writing seemed particularly relevant to experiences at NALC. I have always been somewhat uncomfortable writing in an academic setting.  I feel that there are so many technical details required and a certain way of writing to make one sound knowledgeable and authoritative of their work.  I feel I often do not possess these certain skills or rather, am not fully capable of accessing this particular language.  While thinking about my particular education in reading and writing it struck me that the people I have been tutoring have similar struggles.  Though they are not necessarily performing in an academic forum, I am the teacher and their audience.  My knowledge of the English language places me at a level where I am familiar with certain terms and discourse.  This is what the students of NALC are trying to learn.  They are trying to become a part of this world of privileged language.  It therefore becomes a comparable situation.  I am writing for an audience of which I am not familiar with their particular discourse and the NALC students, the non- native speakers, are trying to learn the ends and outs of the specific language.  Though we may both possess a basis of the language, we may not be particularly knowledgeable of the ‘insider’ vocabulary and terminology used.  This can prevent both of us from exploring these languages.  The fear of using the wrong term in front of our audience can hold us back from learning as much as possible.  Every time I sit down to compose a paper anxiety consumes me.  I am afraid that my point does not come across in their language and I will be deemed a bad writer or uninformed on the subject.  This is mimicked through the students of a foreign language.  Often times the students become very self-conscious about speaking at NALC because they are afraid they will use the wrong term or what they say will not make any sense.  In these situations we tend to filter ourselves.  Confidence level is diminished when I, as the writer, and the foreign speaker are aware that we are unfamiliar with the particular discourse.  We end up choosing our words carefully.  In order to overcome this barrier we have been told to practice what we learn.  We have to learn to integrate what we have learned into our basis of knowledge.  Though we may never be entirely comfortable with this “privileged language” whether it be academic writing or foreign speaking, we can get a basic understanding and knowledge that will help us in the future.