My twitterive was some of the most personal writing I've ever done, and in all the years since I was diagnosed (started chemo in '05, to give you an idea), I've never actually taken the time to write about my experiences.  My parents always encouraged me to do something with my talents, knowing how much I love to write to the point that they consider me a Writing Arts Major first and an Education Major second, but for some reason, I never got around to actually putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.  It's something I truly regret.

The experience is therapeutic in a way that would have helped me immensely through the ordeal.  And one of the positive side-effects is that such a piece of writing exists, regardless of the media I use to present it, that could possibly help someone else through their own ordeal.  To me, that is one of the most important aspects of the whole project.  

Helping others was sort of my part time job while I was undergoing treatment, as I was generally the oldest patient at any given time.  If I wasn't, I was the oldest patient that didn't mind talking to all the little kids while my parents talked to their parents.  The Lucas family became sort of a cancer therapy in St. Christopher's for a whole year of our lives, and I think being able to do that, to give assistance to others that needed it, helped my mom cope with a lot of what was happening to me.

I don't want to say "from now on" because "from now on" sounds so very final, but starting from this point forward, you, my avid reader, can find some of my blogs on a different website.  No, no, I've yet to abandon this weebly's blog spot, but my group has set up a website for our collaborative research project, Why Buy Local?  You're now provided with a bit of an insight into the eye of madness, as it were, as we will no doubt post about our struggles getting interviews, making time in our day to complete this project amidst a sea of other finals for different classes we're enrolled in, and basically a sea change of ideas.  The group is heading into this with the assumption that our interviews themselves will shape where the piece ultimately goes, so it should make for a pretty interesting ride. 

Bon appétit!

An article more famously known as the Good, Clean, and Fair: The Rhetoric of the Slow Food Movement by Stephen Schneider hit me with a doozy of a quote within the first page.  Schneider described the Slow Food movement as something that aimed to "[retain] a local focus while aspiring to a more global reach" (385), and for my group, that seemed to be right in our wheelhouse.  

Going into the project (which really kicks off with the interview this Thursday!), we had a number of ideas about possible topics we could tackle: healthier eating habits on the go; questioning what types of meat restaurants are actually feeding you when you dine out, partly inspired by Stephanie Bowser and her fish-'n'-veggies lifestyle; the process and logic behind creating/results of eating cloned beef; comparing and contrasting what a ShopRite nutritionist tells consumers as opposed to a Whole Foods salesperson would tell their customer.  If all else failed, we could've fell back and tackled something like Kevin's Law, a subject so deep I'm not sure there's actually a shallow end to wade into.  Instead, the everyone put their heads together and with a stroke of good fortune through Facebook, we decided to interview someone in Medford that Michael Youngkin knows, someone that is setting up a farmers market.  Through the interview, we hope to ascertain as to the reasoning behind her starting the market now, hopefully discovering not only her motivation, but also her future goals.  The project is certainly one that lends itself to further gatherings from local growers.

To me, the quote from Schneider's piece symbolizes what our group thinks should be a more mainstream ideal.  Namely, local doesn't have to be considered small.  If consumers stop buying at supermarkets that ship in their goods from all over the country and the world and start frequenting these upstart farmers markets, something on the local level could actually span the world.  There's something about that idea that amazes me -- local farmers will have that much of an impact.  Sure, Farmer Joe in South Jersey won't be impacting families in Southern California, but he's got his farmer peers out West that will (hopefully) be doing the same thing he is.
"Located in Fiat’s former factory in Turin, the inaugural 1996 Salone marketed small-scale food producers and their products to a total crowd of 32,000" (Petrini, Slow Food Revolution 91).  Wait, what's that?  Small-scale food products marketing their products to a local, albeit incredibly sizable crowd?  That sounds an awful lot like a really big farmers market!  That seems like a really big goal to set, but if eating locally is something that catches on, I can see markets blowing up like that.  More people need to be made away of the problem first, as I still feel that a large portion of the country has its blinders on when it comes to healthy eating habits, but the signs are hard to ignore.  When things like Pink Slime start popping up on the Daily Show, it's a pretty big news story.  Meat containing the pink slime has been banned from Taco Bell and McDonald's, and if those two think it's unsafe only after it comes out to the public what's in their mystery meat, what the does that say about the fast food industry?  What's that say about the food we're stuffing our faces with?

Last but not least, even though these two quotes don't really apply to the research project, I felt they were powerful in their own right: "Put simply, good food is tasty and diverse and is produced in such a way as to maximize its flavor and connections to a geographic and cultural region. Clean food is sustainable, and helps to preserve rather than destroy the environment. Fair food is produced in socially sustainable ways, with an emphasis on social justice and fair wages" (390), and,

"The Noah Principle can be further taken as a strategic move away from protest-oriented action toward more productive efforts at organization and engagement. As Petrini argues, '[o]ur choice is to focus our energies on saving things that are headed for extinction, in- stead of hounding new ones we dislike'" (390). 

The last quote is really telling.  Instead of throwing stones and preparing for the big I-told-you-so once the industrial food market is exposed for the back-lit villains they are, the folks behind the Slow Food movement are doing something about it.  As opposed to predicting the weather, Schneider writes, they're trying to build the boat that could potentially save us all.  If/when it comes out that GMOs can cause blindness and testicular cancer for anyone that eats them, those suggesting to "redefine their gastronomy" can say to everyone that hasn't already gone blind or lost a ball, "Hey, this is healthier and tastes better and it isn't going to cause you to expire at a faster rate than intended.  Hop aboard the Ark, everybody!" 

Oh, and since I don't want the other member of my group to feel left out, I'm gonna name drop him here and link you to Darren Gaunt's article on the reading.  It has a pretty boss picture of a bowl of soup that talks about the same topic.  Bam! #intertextuality #audienceawareness #iknowhashtagsdon'tworkhere

Seven pages in to my second article, I began to come to the conclusion that collaboration and composition as reflexive inquiry are related more than I previously assumed.  Although Donna Qualley's article talks about how reflexive inquiry is a self-initiated process, it becomes clear that a lot of the self-initiating is inspired by outside sources, because of something overheard in conversation, read in a textbook, etc.  In order to seek better and clearer ways of reaching an understanding, one must always be able to reflect upon "one's [previous] claims and assumptions in response to an encounter with" something new.  Qualley makes reference to a quote by Robert Atwan that says ideas and methods have a consequence, and show "a mind at work" as opposed to the copy/paste "prefabricated assertions".  In simple terms, you've gotta take the time out of your busy day to stop, examine something closely and determine how you feel about what is being said, and then choose to accommodate the conclusion you reach into your way of thinking.  At least, that's what I got out of it.  

Qualley talks about the five paragraph essay and how students begin to view composition as a formulaic design, but in reality, good writing is something that can't  necessarily be taught.  It takes time and effort on behalf of the writer to cultivate that skill.  If said writer does not want "engage" in self-critical examination of their own work, their own epistemologies -- if they never wish to supplement their perspectives with the perspectives of others -- will "good" writing will ever occur?   

No matter how much a professor attempts to teach their students the need to continually reflect on their work, not everyone is going to buy it.  Compounding matters are the ways writing and thinking are taught at the high school level.  The five paragraph essay, no matter how many words you've memorized out of the dictionary, is only effective when you're willing to admit to shortcomings and when you always strive to embrace complications.  

Oh, collaboration, you fickle minx.  I haven't quite forgiven you for that fiasco in Comm. Theory a few semesters back, but I'm willing to overlook that mess on account of being really tired and needing to get this blog post done.  What can I say?  I'm a swell guy.

I want to say 95% of the groups I've ever been assigned to have functioned in what Lunsford and Ede call a "hierarchical" fashion, where roles are given to each member based on what said member is capable of doing.  The stoner in your group that you wish you could trade for the foreign exchange student is not going to be designated the leader, but because everyone has to pull their own weight, maybe you let your plant-smoking companion design the power point.  Hey, he was the one that said he was heavy into graphic design.  More power to him.  In hierarchical collaborations, group work is divided up and done solo, with occasional group meetings here or there to make sure everyone is on task and up to date.  

Maybe that's why that Comm. Theory presentation sucked so hard: I trusted the rest of my group to handle their pieces of the writing.  One student had to handle section A, I was handling section B, and then the third and final member would take the relevant info as outlined by the rest of us and put it together in some kind of on-screen display we could use as reference during the lecture.  When Section A failed to materialize until the day before the project, and Section-PowerPoint failed to materialize at all, I realized the hard way that collaboration and cooperation aren't necessarily the same thing.

The group and I obviously didn't see eye-to-eye on what we were doing.  Because they didn't value their solo work, they couldn't value the work of the group: as such, we got a B (bolstered mightily, I might add, by the fact that my third of the project was the most kick ass project on Speech Codes delivered in 2010).  In terms of the individual grades, because my part of the assignment wasn't lackluster, I got an A.  The others didn't fair so well when my professor saw blackboard conversations between the three of us that were extremely one-sided.  I was the only one posting things when they were due, and I got very little in the way of response from either of my group members.  Looking back, I'm pretty sure that foreign exchange student and I would've totally aced the presentation and set the grading curve.

There was no collaborative voice for my group, no way to offer one another assistance, at least not without me doing all the work.  Aside from the word "Nacirema," the others knew next to nothing about speech codes.  I ended up speaking for roughly 20 out of the 25 minutes our group dripped mediocrity and self-loathing all over the stage.  Because we weren't able to back each other up, one person had to bear the weight of the entire project . . . and it sucked.  

It sucked hard.

I expected to come into the readings of Berry and Pollen knowing very little, and to leave knowing a few steps I could take to show me how to eat healthier, but I'm afraid that's not the case at all.  In "The Pleasures of Eating," Wendell Berry poses a question at the outset of his article: What can city people do to eat healthier?  It sounds like a simple question, no doubt, but I expected the writing to feature an in-depth look at what people can do to form healthier eating habits.  I didn't expect was some cut-and-paste "do this, then that, and you'll find that this . . .", because very few things in life are that simple.  With something as complex and convoluted as the food industry, simple answers are next to impossible.  I didn't expect Berry's writing, however.  For the most part, the article reads as a critique of the food industry, with very little in the way of answering the questions he presents in the very first lines.

Instead, the reader is given quotes like, "The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp" (Berry).  While all that is true, and no doubt disturbing to anyone that sees it, it doesn't exactly tell me what I need to do to go about healthier eating habits.  

Under the cut.

Lindsay

Kelly

Pauline

Ashley

Stephanie - dance //

Darren - kid //

Katie - alcoholic //

Sam - family room //

Alexa - home //

Other Sam - roots //

Michael - disconnect //