Musings

Dear Portfolio Committee,

I have never thought of myself as a writer. I have never given myself that distinction because the words appear on my page exactly as they rattle around my head on a day to day basis. But I suppose if thinking critically about something is what it means to be a writer then I am always writing, for better or worse. Before entering this class, I had already taken college-level writing classes in high school. I passed the AP exams, but felt the need to reacquaint myself with the writing process and to rediscover myself as a student. I had a lot of fun with it. When I entered this class, my identity as a writer was limited strictly to my experience in classrooms. Although that has not changed, this college writing class has given me the opportunity to play around with my process and hone my skills while improving my weaknesses. The professor always had great insight and pushed me to better my writing with her comments. I really appreciated how nit-picky she could be, as I have come to learn in writing as in many things, it is attention to the smallest of details that add up to a great piece.

The first essay I have chosen to include in my portfolio is the memoir piece. I felt this piece gave me a chance to break away from the rote and informal process of academic argument and rhetorical analysis I had become accustomed to in high school. It was one of the only times in my life I had the freedom to put something of myself in an English paper. What ended up on the page was a funny retrospective about my grandmother, and this surprised me, as I have never really explored this side of myself through my writing. Once the words started coming out and I realized what the tone was I tried to follow the trend my brain had set for me and to keep the tone light hearted and funny. One of the things I made a conscious effort to change in this piece after receiving feedback was to improve the level of detail and frequency of imagery. I am naturally sparing with providing details like this when I tell a story and still recognize a need to improve in this regard. I was pleased with the improvements it had on the final draft of the piece. I have placed this first in the portfolio because I feel it may give the readers a sense of my personality before we dive into the more academic pieces to come, which have less of “me” in them.

The second piece I have included in my portfolio was the text wrestling assignment. While I have never considered myself a writer, I am an avid reader. I enjoyed this assignment as it required getting to know the article I chose inside and out, and extracting the main point while analyzing the author’s rhetorical choices. The piece itself proved to be a challenge for me, as it has been so long that I had to write an analysis. My main challenges here were organization, and responding to the text in a meaningful way, mostly because I agreed with the piece so strongly, that I felt it didn’t need my commentary.

The final piece in my portfolio is an argument piece. I enjoyed writing this piece because I am contrarian by nature, and so it is fun to showcase my unusual perspective on things. My thesis here was on a topic that I am very passionate about, in part because I myself have some chronic health issues related to the topic, but also because I see many people suffering from their diets, even if they themselves are not aware of it. Since I have a strong personal interest in the topic, the research compiled in the piece was done before I even started writing. I can remember times on practice AP exams where I had virtually nothing to say on the subject at hand, and so I felt fortunate that I was able to choose the topic to argue on. The main problem I had with this piece is that I could expand on this topic to write hundreds of pages. I don’t think my professor would have liked that much, nor would I be up to the task of writing it under the time constraint given. I was forced to narrow the topic down and water down much of the information to support my thesis, even though I was not sure if the information would be sufficient for a reader who did not have much prior knowledge of the topic.

I am glad I took the time to take this English class to rehab a skillset that I haven’t had need of for years. The projects allowed me to gain further insight into who I am as a writer, and forced me to dive deeper into topics I am passionate about to improve my ability to share that passion with others. I thank you for taking the time to read my words here.

When I was six years old I was introduced to my Oma who finally made the move from Germany to the States. Until she could find a property of her own that she wished to purchase, she would live with my mother and I in our small weathered house South of Boston. When I met her I knew right away that this old lady, my grandmother on my mother’s side, was a horrible woman. Not only did she smell like a larder, but she never smiled, rarely laughed, and didn’t really hug back, preferring instead to keep her arms hanging by her sides. (Today I know that this is simply part of the German ethos— even still it bothers me.) But beyond all of that, what really inspired my ire was that this relative stranger made it her life’s mission to civilize me.

Before I knew it, the Frau forced me into obligations I never agreed to. She brought other horrible and annoying women into my house— a piano and German language tutor. I hid from them handily. She made me practice my letters and numbers– I elected to practice them incorrectly on purpose. Most of the time I just up and walked away the moment she turned her back on me. “Listen to me! You sit your ass down, NOW.” she would scream in a German accent lacquered with a shrill disdain and firmness that had absolutely no effect on me. As time progressed she grew ever more discontented, and so did I. She and my mother talked about my behavior over home-cooked dinners; how unruly I was, how I refused to keep my hair combed, how I never kept my clothes on. They worried about my future and thusly conspired further against my freedoms. I was distinctly aware of the fact that my mother seemed to delegate all of her authority to this foreign entity. I was betrayed. 

My grandmother was brought up in a family of butchers. Her father and mother owned a shop in the city of Bremen in Northern Germany. She grew up after the war learning the trade, from the proper slaughter of animals to the elegant butchery of the carcass and casing of the meat. Even in war torn Germany, where the blackened cobblestone streets were marred by the aftershock of bombs, they never lacked for food and it followed that in a household where the best ingredients were nearly always available, my Oma became a wonderful cook.

In time as young as I was, I hedged enough stubborn victories to reach an understanding with my Oma. The tutors stopped coming and the old nag stopped trying. I spent my days stripped bare in the garden, exploring the woods behind our house thinking I had won the war. But the devious and cunning enemy had experience on her side. I still depended on her for the essentials. I still had to eat.

After a day’s play in the woods it was inevitable that I would need to brave my Grandmother’s lair, the kitchen, to find something to eat. And to her credit, she never begrudged me sustenance. She offered up a smorgasbord of the foods of her native country. She cooked sauerkraut with smoked pork shoulder. Bratwurst with potato salad. Pork and veal knuckle with sweet red cabbage. Every piece of bread was copiously buttered, and every savory meal was accompanied with a glass of cold milk, and followed up with some freshly baked cake, be it apple or plum. Her heavy set frame towered over me at my trough, intermittently slapping mashed potatoes or whipped cream on my plate with a big wooden spoon, an extension of her contemptuous arm.

Like a pavlovian dog, I came to the kitchen when she called. And it was food that formed the backbone of our détente. It wasn’t long before I spent most of my time hovering around my grandmother. And it wasn’t long after that, the tutors returned, at lunch time. Today my grandmother tells this story to anyone who will listen. She seems to be proud of what she sees as a cunning and manipulative way of bringing me into the fold. For me the details are a little foggy, I just liked to eat. 

My grandmother still never really hugs or kisses. She never compliments or showers me with affection the way I have seen other grandmas do their progeny. But when we find ourselves at odds, her food cajoles us both back to mutual understanding, and respect. For me through her act of giving and sustaining and labor over a stove, and for her through my capitulation— sitting down at her table. “Thank you Oma, I enjoyed the meal.” To her ear: “I’m sorry Oma, you were right.”

German cuisine is not very complicated. Potatoes, pork, veal, dumpling, and pickled and fermented vegetables make up the bulk of the majority of traditional German meals.The relationships surrounding our food are much more complex. What primal strings did my Grandmother pull to affect my opinion and behavior; how did I come through food, to love and trust a woman I found myself at odds with from the moment I met her? Perhaps despite her cold disposition food is a way of showing love, and at our core, we all understand that.

In many aspects of modern life it is not difficult to see how far removed we have become from our cave dwelling ancestors. In most respects this is an obvious metric of technological progress. However a careful look at what has happened to the human diet between then and now will reveal one thing: we as a species are degenerating. A diet once flush with animal based nutrition has become supplanted by cheap, chemically fertilized and mass produced grains and sugars, overly processed and stripped of essential nutrition. This departure from the traditional human diet for favor of one dominant in soft processed foods and grains has been a disaster for human health.

Twelve thousand years ago in Southwest Asia and the fertile crescent, humans stopped foraging wild roots and vegetables and hunting for wild meat as they and their forebears had for hundreds of thousands of years. Instead they started to grow their food, constituting the birth of the first domestic gardens and farming cultures. It was in these microcosms that humans suffered from the first widespread instances of crooked teeth, deformed mouths, and recessed jaws. (Price) 

As time went on, improved technology facilitated further industrialization of the agricultural process. As in the earliest farming communities, increased industrialization didn’t just allow us to be more productive. It further damaged our species to such an extent that the physiological differences between the physical development of our earlier counterparts and our current iteration are stark. Curious by this phenomenon, a dentist by the name of Weston A Price journeyed to places with peoples who in their entire history had not made any significant changes to their diet and thus ate in a manner consistent with the primal. The same tale played out everywhere he went: “Societies that replaced their traditional diet with modern, processed foods suffered up to ten times more cavities, severely crooked teeth, obstructed airways, and overall poorer health.” (Nestor 114) The culprit? Their diets were all the same “white flour, white rice, jams, sweetened juices, canned vegetables and processed meats” (Nestor 114)

For those cultures who maintained their traditional diets, consisting of cheese, meat, blood, animal organs, and fermented vegetables, the outcomes were equally consistent but far superior. According to Price “Their teeth were almost always perfect, their mouths were exceptionally wide, nasal apertures broad. They suffered few, if any, cavities and little dental disease. Respiratory disease such as asthma or even tuberculosis were practically nonexistent.” (Price 32) Price even painstakingly analyzed the skulls of 1276 Peruvian natives. Not a single skull had the dental deformities that are quite common today. 

So today we have crooked teeth, smaller faces, and narrower palates; what is the big deal? As a trade off we as a species are much more comfortable. We no longer have to hunt and outsmart big game with primitive tools. Unfortunately with regards to dentition such bony development is inseparably related to nasal breathing ability, as the palate and mouth form the floor of the human nasal cavity. “Within just a few generations of eating [processed foods], modern humans became the worst breathers in Homo history, the worst breathers in the animal kingdom.” (Nestor 107)  And when nasal breathing is impeded, so too is sleep and exercise, both foundationary fundamentals of human health. According to one study of many with similar outcomes, “Among patients with symptoms of nasal obstruction, compared to patients with normal nasal breathing, those with impaired nasal breathing had significantly lower quality of life in the physical and mental domains.” (Galazka)

What is it about the transition from an old, and from a modern perspective, frankly unappealing way of eating to our current food culture that has damaged our development so profoundly? Today, in burgeoning first world economies, little thought is given to what fills grocery store carts on hurried journeys through super market aisles. For the average consumer there is the perception that there are food options in abundance. Although this is not exactly the case. “45,000-odd items in American supermarkets, more than one quarter contain corn.” (Flannery) Corn which in most industrialized nations is sprayed with atrazine and glyphosate and is genetically modified and genetically engineered to be as sweet, large, and productive as possible. Apart from the harmful chemicals making their way into our breakfast cereals, this corn is so different from what natives once planted, it scarcely resembles it at all. This unnaturally fructose laden, polluted frankenfood touches every facet of our domestic food production. It is in livestock feed, its sugars are in our baked goods and soft drinks, and most of us have not too distant ancestors that never ate corn in their lives and who enjoyed a life free of many of the chronic metabolic diseases that we see skyrocketing today. What is lacking apart from a connection to our roots, and a knowledge of what we are eating (mostly corn), is nutrition in the form of essential fat soluble vitamins (not found in grains, but sorely needed by the body), minerals, and enzymes. We need all of these in the presence of one another to “develop strong bones throughout the body, especially in the mouth and face.” (Nestor 115)

Modern industrialized agriculture is particularly ill suited to the task of providing this nutrition whether we are talking about corn, soy or wheat. The widespread adoption and use of chemical fertilizers to fuel huge mono crops of staple grains has reduced a vast and incomprehensible web of nutrition, soil health and diversity, all occurring naturally in the food sourced from nature, to just three elements: nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. “NPK fertilizers compromise trees’ root systems, block the uptake of micronutrients, encourage attack from harmful pests, and cause a host of other issues for plants. They also pollute waterways.” (Camu) When soil is fertilized with NPK, something essential to food, and to health is lost, and it is barely quantifiable. The food is still attractive, and abundant. It tastes reasonably good. It can be digested and burned for body heat, and caloric energy, but it has lost its soul. The plethora of vitamins and minerals and bacteria required for proper human development do not even begin to be replicated or replaced by NPK fertilizers. The vegetables of today, and the livestock that feeds on them are nutritionally bereft, therefore so too are we who depend on them for sustenance. By contrast, nature has a way of putting all of these things back into the soil for the sustenance of future generations. Early farmers understood this, but modern agriculture makes no such promises.

Unfortunately lack of nutrient density is only half of the woeful diet equation that has set humanity on its decline. Another crucial part of human development is the application of requisite mechanical forces. For development of the upper and lower jaw, the gateway of the airway, the greatest relevant mechanical force is that induced by chewing. “Our hunter-gathering ancestors and cousins spent hours every day chewing, chewing and chewing. All this motion of the jaw leads to broader mouths as the muscles and bones are in a constant workout every day.” (Cussen) Compare that to today in the USA for example where the USDA’s recommendation is a caloric intake comprising of 50% whole grains; a recommendation which is often and easily exceeded. The resultant malformation of the jaw, the seat of the teeth leads to lack of space for the tongue forcing it to the back of the throat creating apnea. Tangentially, the epidemic of these problems visible today has lead to a reconsideration of orthodontics, and a shift towards orthotropics: less focus on pulling teeth from a crowded mouth and bracing them into a proper bite, and more on using the body’s natural mechanical propensity (chewing and proper oral posture) for growth to create the necessary space in the mouth to ensure proper airway development.

It is clear then, that the quality and type of food consumed directly impacts health and development. It can also affect our psychological health in a negative fashion. People often say that the beauty of a face is subjective. But there are some qualities of a beautiful face that are timeless and ineffable. We see a sharp jawline and prominent cheekbones and gush. But our lizard hindbrains are telling us that this person likely has patent airways, was able to procure adequate nutrition in his formative years, and has a high likelihood of surviving with less health problems and a higher quality of life. It’s no wonder that the inverse, a sunken long face with retruded jaws and small airways, indicative of poor airway development and all of the health problems entailed are not valued as much as are the optimally developed. In the nature vs. nurture debate of what decides human potential and outcomes, food is a large part of what dictates epigenetic change. And so unfortunately the food of modernity matriculates too in a way, into poorer social relations, feelings of loneliness, and isolation— malformed unhealthy people who are castigated as ugly, and probably less able to assimilate than they otherwise would have been if they developed properly.

The dawn of the industrialized age catalyzed profound change for human civilization. Among these changes was the way industrialized nations sourced and processed their food resulting in a profound shift in the diet of the human populace, particularly in urban areas. This shift marked the beginning of widespread physiological decline in the health outcomes of the human species, with poorer breathing, less robust bony development, crowded teeth and dental problems, and uglier faces. And it all started in mankind’s earliest gardens.

Works Cited

Camu, Basil. “Using Fertilizer? Think Twice Before You Do.” Leaf & Limb, Leaf & Limb, 22 May 2019, www.leaflimb.com/Traditional-Fertilizers-Cause-More-Harm-Than-Good/. 

Cussen, James. “Is Mouth Breathing Ruining Your Life?” Medium, Medium, 4 Sept. 2020, medium.com/@jamesgcussen/is-mouth-breathing-ruining-your-life-2b52fe6a7986. 

Flannery, Tim. “We’re Living on Corn!” Michael Pollan : Michael Pollan Writes about the Places Where Nature and Culture Intersect: on Our Plates, in Our Farms and Gardens, and in the Built Environment., New York Review of Books, 23 June 2011, michaelpollan.com/reviews/were-living-on-corn/. 

Galazka, Adam et al. “Association of breathing patterns and quality of life in patients with nasal obstruction.” Otolaryngologia polska = The Polish otolaryngology vol. 72,1 (2018): 11-15. doi:10.5604/01.3001.0011.5927

Nestor, James. Breath. Penguin Life, 2020.

Price, Weston A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. La Mesa, CA: Price-Pottenger      Nutrition Foundation, 2003. Print.

In the 1970s the Nixon administration rolled back the Agricultural Adjustment Act which ensured that farmers were given a living wage for their goods while preventing overproduction and environmental harm. The repercussions of these rollbacks dramatically transformed the landscape of the American food supply chain, both literally and figuratively. “President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, led the charge for completely dismantling the parity agriculture system in favor of one that prioritized profit over everything else.” (Perkins) telling farmers to “‘get big or get out’ thus creating the concept of Big Ag.” (Perkins) Since then we have seen corporations and supermarkets, operated by huge conglomerates, take majority market share from what was once a vast network of small local farmers, grocers and butchers.

It begs the question: What have we given up for increased efficiency and decreased spoilage in our modern food supply? There may be negative consequences in the decision to place the security of our individual food needs into the hands of others. Large farms and distribution centers have largely displaced the small local farmer and the backyard garden. This has decreased the burden of acquiring food for the average consumer, but has created many degrees of separation from big agricultural globo-corp farm to table. Perhaps the abandonment of the long traditional and sacred consideration of food as medicine, and transitively its careful production and sourcing has been a critical oversight on behalf of lawmakers and the American people. After all if the food we consume is the foundation of our health, then it is also the backbone of our nation’s resiliency. 

In The sickness in Our Food Supply by Michael Pollan, Pollan argues that the ongoing pandemic has exposed certain weaknesses in our modern food supply chain. According to Pollan, the American food chain as it exists today injures the human population physiologically in the context of a pandemic. He also suggests that the efficacy of the food chain itself, because it is more heavily consolidated (in the hands of a few corporations) than it has ever been before, has been adversely affected by the Covid crisis.

Pollan explains that these issues have come to the surface because of the way the food economy is structured for “brutal efficiency” rather than for nutrition, quality, or logistical resilience. He bemoans the fact that this structure and its resulting deficits have not only promulgated an unhealthy diet, “the western diet”, and an upsurge in inflammatory and chronic metabolic diseases, but have in doing so also made the populous more vulnerable to the pandemic, not only economically, but physiologically.

On top of this, Pollan points out the irony in the fact that some of our most vital workers in the supply chain are at great risk in a pandemic. Those laborers who are responsible for American meat arriving to grocery stores properly butchered and sealed, are members of a demographic least protected from illness, and often without health insurance. He writes that farmworkers often “live and work in close proximity, many of them undocumented immigrants crammed into temporary quarters on farms. Lacking benefits like sick pay, not to mention health insurance, they often have no choice but to work even when infected. “ He suggests that we need to take better care of the workers involved in the supply chain to mitigate problems in emergencies like a viral outbreak.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom. Pollan points out several possible solutions to mitigate these problems; solutions which, personally I have long desired to see implemented. Chief among Pollan’s suggestions are to strengthen the local food supply. He writes that “The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy.” Not only this, but local food is usually healthier too as our current “industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food.” And so local food not only improves the diets and health of its consumers, but also diversifies the sources of quality nutrition, thus making it less likely that an outbreak at one source will have a great effect on the supply chain.

Having worked in an industry that puts me into close proximity with the chronically ill, I have long questioned the ill-effects of an ultra-processed modern diet consisting primarily of GMO corn and Soy. An industry that is primarily profit driven, and which is not connected to the land and community in the way a local farm can be has little incentive to provide foods which nourish rather than simply feed. Not only are these foods fundamentally disruptive to the human physiology in the quantities we consume them, but they are also laden with agrochemicals like atrazine and glyphosate (Roundup). Both of these are permitted into our food system by the EPA and FDA despite being known health hazards. In fact “the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, announced that glyphosate could “probably” cause cancer.” (Cohen)

Furthermore the distance these foods must travel to reach our plates is an environmental hazard in itself. The environmental impact of the transportation of these mass produced, overly processed foods to centralized distribution centers is far greater than that incurred by the local farm, and the local market. It is no wonder then that one chink in the chain caused by Covid, or whatever other ugly disaster which might rear its head, can devastate the US food economy. When we start to pull on strings in the complex web of sustainable agriculture, cutting corners by replacing traditional and time-tested practices with chemical shortcuts, and adopting far and wide distribution from distant centralized sources rather than sourcing from nearby and varied sources, we are begging nature to drive us to correction. Pollan illustrates how Covid has been a prime example of such correction, and perhaps there is more to come if the American people do not wisen up to the importance of food quality and security.

Pollan’s rhetoric is convincing and impassioned. His reputation as a local food advocate aside, his appeals to logos to criticize the existing system are biting. Opening the piece with a metaphor which compares the American consumer and those responsible for his food as “caught swimming naked when the tide goes out”, is perfectly apt, and humorous. His barraging of the reader with facts and evidence by listing them rapid fire, serves to form a forceful and formidable tone which contributes to a powerful argument. And in his concluding paragraph, his characterization of the food system as a political choice, opens the readers mind to the possibility of reform. Ultimately the argument that our food system is weak and Covid has brought this to light, is effectively made. I agree with everything Pollan wrote in the piece, and am not surprised to learn that an industry that cares nothing for the health of its customers does not care for that of its employees’. His solutions, while idealistic, are logical too; we need greater reform; “For even when our food system is functioning ‘normally,’” Says Pollan, “reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these.”

Sources

Perkins, Keisha. “Get Big or Get out Archives.” Iowa CCI, 2016, iowacci.org/tag/get-big-or-get-out/.

Cohen, Patricia. “Roundup Maker to Pay $10 Billion to Settle Cancer Suits.” The New York     Times, The New York Times, 24 June 2020,www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/business/roundup- settlement-lawsuits.html.