Fall Term Reflection

I chose to center my first year at PSU around sustainability because I was involved in sustainability work and education in high school, and since living in Portland with so many different kinds of people I really wanted to explore what sustainability calling might be. I was blessed to be able to purchase my first home in April 2016, and thrilled we were able to get a very small 90-year-old cottage in SE Portland with a big yard for vegetables and chickens. As I’ve painted and fixed things and planted trees and learned how to pull dandelions and built my own compost bin and gaped my water bill, saving money, energy, and time, as well as being responsible for an entire household of consumption, has really brought issues of sustainability to the surface for me.

This semester our class read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which taught me a lot about America’s ethically and environmentally broken food system. I had some previous awareness of the appalling slaughter conditions for industrial meat, but I didn’t realize all the corporation-controlled government actions that have been taken over the years to protect cheap, low-nutrition industrial food. As I focused my annotated bibliography assignment towards the end of the term on childhood obesity, I had a solid base for understanding why bad foods are everywhere and why they are cheaper for low-income families to obtain. I had been under the impression that poor school lunch guidelines were partly to blame for the obesity epidemic, but my research suggested that our working-class American populations really just have too much work and stress and so little time and money on their plates to educate themselves or their kids about nutrition, or to teach themselves to cook and buy healthy meals. While Michael Pollan was able to reveal so much about the corrupt meat and corn industries, when he cooked his entire hunted-and-gathered meal at the end of the book, it took him almost an entire week of preparation to bring it together. Most working-class Americans’ lives aren’t compatible with a no-waste find-it-yourself food lifestyle.

The most widespread solution my classmates proposed to actually changing the behaviors of Americans struggling to eat well, reduce their environmental impact, and cut costs, was to decrease meat consumption or to go vegan. Aside from the “is killing an animal the same as killing a human” debate, changing our food behaviors this “radically” says something about how reliant America has become on meat, and how heavily it has been subsidized and encouraged by government health experts for purchase. I loved hearing this solution from my classmates because cutting out meat is a pretty fool-proof way of reducing one’s environmental impact. Pollan argued that for every pound of meat we took out of our diets, we were wasting hundreds of gallons less of water that went into producing the meat. One of the class research project groups discussed the widely-argued issue of protein in a vegan diet, and proposed many cost-effective plant protein ingredients to substitute for meat. I have been teaching myself more vegan recipes for years to cut down my meat consumption and save money, and I can attest to the fact that with some creative thinking it’s not hard to do. As a working American who rarely sees my husband when we’re both in school, I am thankful I have the opportunity now to learn about our food system and how to adjust my diet to have less environmental impact. It will make be a better parent for healthy kids.

I want to give a shout-out to my classmates Brett Friederick, Dara Mar, and Kai Melton-Kitagawa for their support and friendship this semester. Brett, Kai, Dara, and I researched buying and cooking meals off-campus vs. eating in the dining hall, and we tossed ideas around for a couple of weeks before agreeing on that subject. When we finally decided on our research topic and split up into different responsibilities, our communication and creative thinking really came together. Working on that project was a pleasure to do with them. I appreciate the fact that our mentor groups stay the same all year long, but when we’re all new to PSU, it really helps to have classmates to text about questions and to joke around with when the semester gets stressful. I’m thankful I have connections to all three of them before winter and spring.

Finally, I want to encourage all of my classmates to keep an open mind and allow themselves to grow into who they’re meant to be as environmentally responsible adults. This first semester, beyond the readings and into documentaries like Food Chains and food-system reports form The New York Times, we learned a lot in a very short time about how corrupt America’s food system is. That’s had a huge moral impact on me, but is something I’ve been working on for a few years. As someone with a restricted diet due to my IBS, I’m further challenged to create a responsible diet that doesn’t make me sick. Each of us in this class right now has the privilege of learning the facts before we act. We all have needs we need to balance and social-justice focuses in many subjects. I look forward to learning more, sharing with each other, and seeing the many different ways my classmates choose to adjust their habits for the good of the world.