HW 11 - Final Food Project 1

Chosen Modality: Experiential                                     

I chose to change a couple of things about how I ate:

1) Where I bought my food, and

2) How it was prepared.

As opposed to getting my food at a supermarket, or buying it somewhere already prepared, I wanted to buy at least some of my food from the farmer's market in my neighborhood, and cook it myself. The reason I wanted to get some food at the farmer's market was to see if it tasted any different than conventionally grown food (the produce at the farmer's market I went to is grown organically, meaning without pesticides, and locally, in upstate New York), and, as we did in HW 3, to see how the experience of buying food at a farmer's market is different than anywhere else.

I also wanted to prepare it myself to see if that changed the experience of eating it - if the food seemed any more or less valuable, if I spent more time eating it, if it tasted better, etc. Some people would probably laugh at this - "Because cooking your own food is so difficult?"- but one should understand that this isn't something I regularly do. While the cooking I ended up doing was something I had done before, it wasn't anything I ever do frequently - the full extent of my cooking day to day probably never goes farther than making toast.

The first meal I made was breakfast. This didn't use ingredients from the farmer's market, because I hadn't gone yet. I made waffles:

This wasn't some great new food experience, since I have made waffles before, but I did notice one thing: I took longer eating them, probably because I took the time to make them - there seems to be a correlation between them amount of effort put into making a food and the amount of time spent eating it. Micheal Pollan mentions this in The Omnivore's Dilemma - he goes to get McDonald's food with his family, and it is handed to them within a few minutes, and is eaten in under ten.

 As for the experience of shopping at the farmer's market, it seemed like everything was more readily accessible, as opposed to being wrapped up in plastic packages. You could literally just reach in and grab a handful of lettuce, which I was repeatedly encouraged to do by the lady selling it. It also seemed like the foods being sold were ones that would actually grow this time of year - for instance, there were tons of apples.


                                                  

All the meat was grass-fed, and like the produce, grown locally. For lunch, I decided to make grilled chicken, and a salad. I wanted to see if the chicken tasted any different, since it was grass-fed. It didn't. However, the vegetables in my salad did. One of my initial reservations about eating organic food was that it just didn't look as nice as the perfect, picturesque vegetables I was used to seeing. But they made up for it in taste, primarily in the way that they had it - unlike the rubbery green things I was forced to eat as a kid, these actually had some discernible flavor.

Dinner was probably the best: I had a salad, as described above, and a turkey burger, which could only be described as really, really good.  Something that remained consistent though out all the organic meals I ate was that they seemed more valuable (probably because they were expensive), and, for the most part, they tasted better. Throughout all the meals I ate, I noticed that I took longer eating them - this may be, as I thought before, that the amount of time taken to prepare a food adds to the enjoyment felt in eating it.