TOW #24 - (IRB Post) The Omnivore's Dilemma

I'll start off my very last TOW of the year with a question I was asked through my last IRB book: "What should I eat for dinner?" Maybe it would be better phrased, "What am I eating for dinner?" Every day, as omnivores, we have the dilemma of choosing what lands on our plates, but many times we don't consider what really lands on our plates - what it's made of, who made it, how it was made, and how it got there. To truly decide what's the right food and to make a choice that would fulfill our dilemma as omnivores, Michael Pollman says that we must understand the details of what our food is made of, and to this day, we are not really fulfilling this goal, as most people hurry to get to where our food is without properly thinking of where they come from.

Because people in this generation tend to rush, many people don't devote enough time to understand what's inside of their food and the history behind it because many times, they don't think it's very necessary. Pollman cites that 19% of American meals are eaten in cars because a car is made convenient to eat inside, and the food that we consume are comfortably tailored to be able to be eaten with one hand. The chicken nugget squished a dinner with forks and knives into a simple commodity that can be eaten with one hand. When people hurry, they choose to eat food like Wawa that can be quickly bought and eaten, but this speedy aspect of food cancels out many other factors that should be considered in resolving the omnivore's dilemma. Another factor that makes many feel it is unnecessary to know where their food comes from is from the fact that many food processing steps are convoluted.

Before reaching dinner plates, many different food has to go through processing that's often complicated and has too many steps, so many find it unnecessary to be aware of fine details. Corn, which is one of the most consumed foods in America, must go through processes such as grain mills and kernel separators that affect the quality and taste of corn but not everyone knows about in detail or specifically to the corn they buy. Meat also must go through various steps in feeding the animals and being processed in factories that people don't realize and should know about more than merely being "grass-fed". Because not everyone is informed of those aspects, not everyone feels the need to be aware of them, but as Pollman prepares an entire pork himself for a special dinner at the end of the book, he argues that people should be informed of these processes.

In this generation, there are myriads of places our food can come from, and because most people aren't directly involved in the hunting, gathering, farming, or sometimes preparing of foods, we don't know the processes that go through our food, especially in an age where we rush to get places. However, since the beginning of the human race to now, we have always asked ourselves the question: "What am I eating for dinner?" To solve this dilemma most effectively, we must know the many layers of food that reach our plates.

TOW #23 - Visual Text: Angry Birds Trailer

Over spring break, I went to the movies with my friend to watch Zootopia, which turned out to pretty good. An interesting thing about animated movies is that while the movies themselves often have pretty good qualities, a trailer or an animated short before the movies sometimes leave an impression on me that other trailers don't. For example, "Lava" caught my attention even before I watched the movie I intended to see, which was Inside Out, a movie that took me on an emotional roller coaster. When I went to watch Zootopia, I was left interested by the Angry Birds Movie trailer more than Zootopia, which was good in itself as well. Angry Birds is a movie that most people will be looking forward to watching or criticizing, because it's obviously an animation based off of a popular video game unlike other animations, which are originals or are based on traditional stories or comic books. While there usually aren't a lot of good information to base movies off of when it comes to video games, companies can make a good profit off of advertising with a video game as popular as Angry Birds is. The catch that prevents a lot of companies from doing this, however, is that people would probably have high expectations from it and expect the excitement they feel from the video game to be transferred directly into the movie, which is hard, even if the movie itself is good. Angry Birds trailer managed to catch that by having a prequel plot setting for the movie while being able to link key characters from the game into the story. Hopefully, the movie will be as good as the trailer.

TOW #22 - College Admissions Shocker!

This time of the year, as a junior in high school, I constantly hear about college news from seniors, whether they got accepted, rejected, or waitlisted. Although I'm not directly experiencing it yet, I can somehow feel some secondhand stress from those dying to hear back or dying because of the sad news that someone got rejected from their dream school. Because college admittance seems to get rougher every year, Frank Bruni, writer of the New York Times, wrote a satire against this phenomena that criticized top-tier colleges, especially Stanford University, for having almost impossible standards for accepting students. Because of the current college application system and the high expectations for admission, Bruni's argument that college admissions are ridiculous can be viewed true.
Top-tier colleges like Stanford have extremely low admission rates because of the high achievements that many students seem to make. Bruni jokes, "The thousands of rejected applicants included hundreds of children of alumni who’d donated lavishly over the years, their expectations obvious in the fact that they affixed their $50,000 checks to photographs of Emma playing an obscure woodwind in an Umbrian chamber orchestra or Scott donning the traditional dress of an indigenous people for whom he tailored a special social-media network while on spring break." From the perspective of someone who has played an obscure woodwind instrument before and is currently playing one of the most played instruments, the violin, I can say that people have pointed out the academic advantage of one instrument over the other more often than they have pointed out the music or intellectual advantage. Also, there are many articles that attest that the secret to being accepted to Stanford is to have a basically nationally recognized accomplishment that no one has achieved before, like a new scientific method. Even though a student could be academically and intellectually gifted, these high standards prevent such students from being admitted. The acceptance rate has gone even farther down to 4.7% as of 2016.
While Bruni's mode of writing was obvious satire, the many rejection letters to academically and intellectually talented students are real. Although Stanford has the right to keep their own standards of what kind of students and how many students they can and want to accept, this can often be frustrating to capable students who have potential and could have a perfect life without Stanford.