Friday, March 19, 2010
My First Blogging Experience
Knowing that this blog was online and was public did not really affect what I would say or discuss in my blog. I felt that the public aspect of it was easy to look past because of the two classes that were both blogging at the same time. It is easy to comment on someone's blog when I know I will probably not see that person or have to discuss the blog with them. Plus, our class discussion did not involve the blog writing as much as just talking about the book as a whole. This made it easy for me not to worry about having to discuss my blog outloud. Plus as I mentioned earlier, the blogs being public and us having the ability to comment on the blogs helped my learning of the book. I hope my comments were meaningful and gave some good insight to others as well, because I know other people's blogs and comments certainly helped me. I think that my strongest post were those that dealt with Food, INC. I was much more interested in that book than I was in the book Lost Mountain. I feel that this reflected in my blogs because I think that not having to read the whole book, and only having a few different blog assignments really helped me focus on just doing that assignment. Whereas, when it was with LM I kind of saw myself getting away from focus because there were more posts and there was more reading to do. I did think that both books were interesting in their own right, but having a movie to go along with FI made it more interesting and easier to blog about for myself. So I definitely think that my worst blog was one of my earlier posts about LM, especially since I was not used to blogging at all and I don't think that I really got used to it until later in the quarter. My best blog in my opinion is the one that we did as groups. I think that being able to collaborate with others on the blog made it very easy to put up a well thought out and all-together blog.
Looking back at the whole blog experience I think that it was a good learning tool and experience for me. I had never done it before so it was something new for me to do in a class. The best thing it did for me was helping understand the readings and books though because I was able to see what other people's thoughts were. It was definitely a good discussion tool without having to bring the whole class together to hear everyone's thoughts, but the blog made it so everyone's thoughts were visible.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Food, INC. Blog 3 Pages 183-218
Salatin is a credible source in my mind for this reading because he is a farmer himself. He provides for more than 1,500 families, ten retail outlets, and thirty restaurants. It's a very well written chapter I believe, and that is expected I think because he also has a degree in English and has had several other articles and six books published. He also gives many different suggestions at what we can do throughout the chapter like buying local products, cooking ourselves, planting a garden, or buying what's in season. The problem is having a garden is just not a possibility at all for me, I know I do not always buy in season (which I can change), and buying non-local products are sometimes just the easier way to go for a college student. I do cook for myself, but things that I'm cooking are not exactly what this book would agree with. I'm not sure how much my eating habits will actually change, if at all, after this book.
Argument Outline and Bibliography
1. Overfishing
- Many different fish are being taken out of our oceans at too high a rate to sustain
- Currently the fishing fleet on our oceans is three times that of which it can actually provide for
- The taking out of fish that are not normally being used for food
- 90 percent of predator fish are gone
- Jellyfish populations are rising
- Bycatching is occuring- Fish that are too small to eat are being caught in the nets used for larger fish and are still taken out of the ocean and used for fertilizer, other pet food, and even to be fed to fish farmed fish
2. Pollution and Poor fishing techniques
- There is an abundance of lost fishing equipment at sea, inlcuding nets that still roam the waters and can still catch fish and kill them once they are trapped
- Ghost Fishing
- Fishing using dynamite
- Fishing using cyanide and deadly chemicals that killing ocean life and coral reefs
- Fish farms that are producing more pollution and waste products than fish
- Pirate fishing unregulated by laws
3. Depletion of fish stocks
- Bluefin tuna is depleting so much that they are worth up to $100,000 a fish
- Cod almost completly gone
- Scientists saying that complete fish stocks in the ocean will be gone by 2048
4. Fish Farming Problems
- Pollution and waste entering the ocean around the fish farm
- Chemicals used on the fish
Bibliography
"Current Problems in the Management of Marine Fisheries." Science. Beddington, J.R., Agnew D.J., Clark C.W. 22 June 2007. Web 22 Feb 2010. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5832/1713
Lynas, Mark. "Sacrificed in the Name of Sushi." Issues 41. Web. 8 Feb 2010.
"Overfishing Basics." Overfishing: A Global Disaster. Web. 31 Jan 2010. http://overfishing.org/pages/why_is_overfishing_a_problem.php
"Overfishing/Greenpeace." Greenpeace. Web. Feb 1 2010. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/overfishing.
"Poorly Managed Fishing." WWF For a Living Planet. Web. Feb 1 2010. http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/problems_fishing/
“The Pros and Cons of Fish Farming.” Advocacy for Animals. 4 Aug 2008. Web. 7 Feb 2010.
“The Pros and Cons of Fish Farming.” USA Today. June 2001. Web. 8 Feb 2010.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Food, Inc. Blog Post 2
Position Statement
Monday, February 15, 2010
Food, Inc. Movie and Book Blog 1
The book supplemented the movie very well. In the chaper about organic foods, more was talked about on how the world is becoming more and more dependent on foods that are enhanced by chemicals. One quote said this well: "All of humanity ate organic food until the early part of the twentieth century, yet we've been on a chemical binge diet for about eighty years." (Page 48). This really makes you think about how much the food we eat has changed because of chemical enhancement. The book also mentions how much Stoneyfield has done to break organic foods onto more of a mainstream scale. Plus, it gives the mission statements of Stoneyfield and what their goals are. Monsanto is discussed further in the book, outside of the corn topic on how they sell their bovine growth hormones to be put in milk cattle.