Category: Seminar Weekly

Here is the link for my slide show.

Enjoy…again :)))

10 weeks of fun, food, and learning. Thank you all for a excellent quarter, hopefully I will see some of you in the Spring!

 

As a participant in the Student Originated Study: Commodification and its Alternatives, I pursued a project on the commodification of salmon, with an internship component. The total credits attempted are 12 and I will be breaking the credits into thirds, so 4 credits for the class component, 4 credits for the internship, and 4 credits for the project.

The first 4 credits I pursued included participation in a weekly class, weekly readings, tasting labs, and seminar discussion papers. I completed all seminar papers. Some of my favorite papers included week 2: talking about eating and sexuality, week 3: Tompkins discussed 19^th century eating culture and the movement against over indulgence, and week 6: Winona LaDuke’s accounts of working to save salmon and water from pollution. I also prepared a meal for the class on week 4, Sean and I prepared a vegan dish of winter vegetable soup and a wild rice pilaf.

The second 4 credit section is my internship component. I interned with Nisqually River Education Project during their Salmon Toss activity, Water Quality Monitoring, and Student GREEN Congress. As an intern I learned valuable real life experience in a professional setting. I gave presentations to student grades 3^rd-12^th. In these presentations we talked about the importance of salmon in the ecosystem, the salmon, life-cycle, and why toss salmon. On top of presentations, I would also have regular communications with teachers, volunteers, and other Non-profits. Other projects include: logo contest (designing poster and handling entries), writing press releases, data collection for Water Quality, making graphs of data, and making an Action Video for Climate Change activities. Here is an example from the Internship blog post section: “The decaying salmon bodies will support the trees, young salmon, raccoons, the river, the birds, and other wildlife. This is what we teach the children; we teach them to preserve, restore, and respect the mighty Salmon. We are teaching them the price to pay for the ease of commodification, and the price is high” (Fields Week 2).

The last 4 credits, which complete my 12 credits, is the project component. For this I read the book The Tragedy of the Commodity: oceans, fisheries, and aquaculture by Longo, Clausen, and Clark, and explored salmon commodification. In my WordPress I created a web page specifically for this topic. Here are some of example of the writings: “When it comes to reform in fish management, we have to reform the social barriers, and the economic barriers. We need to bring communities back together and untie our hands from the shackles of the state run social systems. The biggest solution (that I see) is stopping worker exploration in the food system (and most industries), give those workers the production management, allow workers to decided how surplus is distributed, and stop using our natural world for the base of all commodities. The political barriers to these changes are possible. The impossibility is the recovery of our earth from the point of no return. No earth=no humanity” (Fields week 9), “ITQ’s further the ecological instability of fish species, by reducing them to a single transaction that can be cashed in at any time. It does not take into consideration that fish populations are better fished at certain periods of the year, or that there need to closed seasons for rest and re-population. ITQ’s also favor some fishers over others and does not create an equitable system” (Fields Week 5), and “Salmon are in a fast decline. The Chinook and Steelhead Salmon of the Nisqually River Stocks are already considered a Threatened Species, with only around 600 Wild Chinook salmon returning every year. My goal with this post and with this project moving forward is looking into the past and present systems of fisheries management. As you can see we have entered the Rabbit Hole, our next step is down” (Fields Week 3). Though these blog post and my interview with a harvest biologist, I learned the truth of how fisheries are managed and what needs to change. The number change is the change to our economic system, moving away from Capitalism and away from exploitation.

Triggering Passages:

“Trade in canned fruit and other products, such as canned salmon, eventually were discontinued in the 1930s after the markets were deemed “too stable” to be profitable” (Newman 125).

“And yet biting is primarily a violence of childhood: it enacts the desire to destroy the other by consuming her, by obliterating the signs of her existence, or, at the very least, by reducing her physical appearance in the world one mouthful at a time” (Tompkins 171).

News Media Context:

“Trump want to cut EPA funding for Puget Sound by 93 percent”

Programs to clean up major water bodies were hard hit: The Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay would also lose more than 90 percent of their EPA funding; cleanup funds for San Francisco Bay and Long Island Sound would be eliminate. www.kuow.org/post/trump-wants-cut-epa-funding-puget-sound-93-percent.

Discussion:

Tompkins passage on acts of violence, in particular, the way violence presents itself in eating culture is incredibly vivid. Especially in the way that biting is a childhood form of violence, we have to be taught and reinforced as children to not bite others; biting also seems to be an act of violence which crosses cultural lines and exhibits itself in almost all children.

The most triggering part of this passage is the end of the sentence when Tompkins says “by reducing her physical appearance in the world one mouthful at a time” (171), what a powerful message about eating culture and how whiteness seeks out otherness. If whiteness cannot kill otherness outright, it will slowly over time, one bite at a time do its best to obliviate it from the world.

The idea of canned salmon being too stable for markets is a concept I find very hard to rectify. I wonder if this is true today, when salmon are struggling to spawn, with little left over to fish, this could create and does create a very violent market. It brings me back to this concept of whiteness seeking to destroy the other and no market is a better example than the salmon market; when the very idea of ‘too stable’ would be laughable to the Native/Non-Native hoping to catch their winter food.

Both of these concepts now exhibit themselves in this proposed budget for the Puget Sound Region, or should I say the non-existent budget. Donald Trump wants the Puget Sound to be forgotten, possibly because the Otherness of the region is not in accord with his white agenda? This was a tough blow for Nisqually River Education Project (my internship) and other agencies working within the Nisqually Watershed. We, as organization, depend on EPA funding to provide some of our funding. Our work deals with environmental conservation, habitat restoration, salmon protections, treaty rights, and so many other issues is at the edge holding on waiting for the push that plummets us to our death or the rope that drags us back to steady ground.

 Works Citied

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print

Ryan, John. “Trump wants to cut EPA funding for Puget Sound by 93 percent”.KUOW. March 3 2017: Page (1). www.kuow.org. Web. March 5 2017.

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print

“Triggering Passages”

“The over-riding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate – that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (Hooks 380).

“With our liberal instinct to avert one’s gaze from the intensely raced and exuberantly racist affect of these images, my guess is that at least some of those cards that our contemporary culture would deem as most offensive have been suppressed or destroyed; thus, we have no way of knowing the scale of the distribution of these images relative to what remains in archives and collections” (Tompkins 150).

News Media Context:

“Polar Bears and Climate Change: The Photographs That Moved Them Most”

Under the Endangered Species Act—which the Republicans in Washington have said they will seek to ‘modernize’—polar bears are listed as a threatened species. http://time.com/4684019/polar-bear-photos/?iid=sr-link1

Discussion:

Native peoples culture is at the constant risk of over commodification by Euro-Americans. Non-Native fisher people continually play this out though their reluctance to acknowledge the right of Native fisher people to exercise their treaty rights. Non-native fishers want to consume the fishing quota of Natives with the idea that all people deserve fair catch of all the fish; this nullifies and consumes the treaties of Native Americans. The first people will loose their entire culture with this consumptive thinking.

It is our greatest defeat, as a civilization, to incorrectly or creatively forgets our history, or the history of our oppressive society. As Tompkins pointed out we only covet historical artifacts, which incorrectly depict life and culture, while leaving out those extremely oppressive and racist artifacts. As liberals we want to help in the freeing of oppressed groups but we don’t want to acknowledge our own continued involvement in those systems.

The same way we conveniently leave out our own history, we also leave the histories of species behind. As a species we have seen the demise of countless species, without ever recording their life cycles. The biggest loss is those species, which are directly linked to the culture of certain people or groups. As we consume those cultures, we also consume those species. Both culture and species are lost to time, to be forgotten forever.

 

Works Citied

Grabriner, Alice. ” Polar Bears and Climate Change: The Photographs That Moved Them Most”. Time. February 27 2017: Page (1). www.time.com. Web. February 27 2017.

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992. Print

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print

“Triggering Passages”

“Alaska alone has some 700 used military defense toxic sites, which tell a story of the Cold War and every war since. The levels of radioactive and persistent organic pollutants remaining in the environment impact people who are dependent upon the land for their subsistence way of life. Then, there are the impacts of economic colonialism and underdevelopment to consider” (LaDuke 147).

“Ranchers have long associated cattle with money. The dairy cows might as well exude the jingle of coins with their milk, while the freeloading beef cattle (or “beeves,” for short) become moneymakers only after slaughter” (Newman 91).

News Media Context:

“Groups sue EPA to protect wild salmon from climate change”

U.S. fishing and conservation groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, seeking to protect wild salmon threatened by rising water temperatures attributed in part to climate change in two major rivers of the Pacific Northwest. mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N1G90ID

Discussion

            Winona LaDuke points out a troubling issue among the use of toxic waster and where we decided to store it. The issue of pollutants remaining for decades within ecosystems is an ongoing problem affecting salmon populations, among other species. As I explore my issue of Salmon commodification, there is a real threat of water quality degradation, which will create an inhospitable environment for salmon, thus our ecosystem loosing its key stone species on which it builds its foundation.

Salmon like the cattle are seen as dollar signs to most non-native fishermen. As we see in Wionna’s book salmon can be a great economic resource, but above all the spiritual connection to salmon outweighs economic gains. What if we could come to view all wild and domestic life as more than dollar and cents? I believe that’s when we would no longer need commodity markets for life, because their value would be worth more than a single transaction.

As our climate changes, our rivers grow warm and the cool temperatures salmon need for survival cannot be found. Our earth is warming precisely because of the toxic materials, commodification of animals, and wide use of fossil fuels. All three of these books are connected by the idea that life is not a commodity. The salmon’s habitat is just as precious as the humans; in fact the two are on in the same. If we want to see the salmon, and people save actions like these are methods to create change.

 

Works Citied

LaDuke, Winona. Chronicles: Stories From the Front LinesiIn the Battle for Environmental Justice. Ponsford, Spotted Horse Press. 2016. Print

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print

Zuckerman, Laura. “Groups sue EPA to protect wild salmon from climate change”. Reuters. February 24 2017: Page (1). mobile.reuters.com. Web. February 25 2017.

Triggering Passages:

“As in the passages of Work that open this chapter, bread does not just signify surrender to the patriarchal diktat; it is an portentous product that signifies, as well, an emergent form of independent female subjectivity, although one still caught up in what readers of Alcott’s other books will recognize as her particular nostalgia for the traditional” (Tompkins 133).

News Media Context:

The enduring portrait of Myspace Tom, the Mona Lisa of profile pictures

Picture Myspace founder Tom Anderson in your head. What do you see? A man, 20-something, with short hair, looking over the shoulder of his white T-shirt. And his face, well, his face is slightly pixelated.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/17/14647596/tom-from-myspace-profile-picture-twitter-instagram

 

Discussion:

Once again Tompkins is right on the mark by using the image of bread as a tool for oppression. Women have been confined to the kitchen for centuries, forced to follow the husband’s commands. But the black woman has been chained to the white kitchen, which is a more oppressive form of bread making than the white mother and wife. For me I try and visualize this passage in connection with the use of salmon to enslave the Native Community’s, and force them into assimilation. As the salmon have been overtly exploited almost into extinction, they have been forced to assimilate in to the Patriarchy society of white settlers, a lot like African slaves, and all women.

This article relates directly to Tompkins article, as the image of a white man is still popular and circulated though the Internet. This image reinforces the concept of male dominance in society though deep roots of Patriarchy.

Works Citied 

Plaugic, Lizzie. “The enduring portrait of Myspace Tom, the Mona Lisa of profile pictures”. The Verge. February 17 2017: Page (1). www.theverge.com. Web. February 20 2017.

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print

Triggering Passages:

“Meanwhile , ‘frozen eggs’ took the concept of egg preservation one step further. Frozen eggs started life as storage eggs, which then were sold to ‘egg-breaking’ companies”(Newman 68).

“Sugar and molasses were thus inextricably linked to the slave trade, both in colonial British North America and in the early republic…Sugar, then, seems to have been linked to the slave body securely enough that Hawthorne could casually turn a popular image of blackness in popular culture into a sweet” (Tompkins 97).

News Media Context:

Where the Salmon is From

 The man behind the counter put it on the scale, and I asked him: “Where is this fish from? He looked over, pointed behind him and said, “the aquarium”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/nyregion/metropolitan-diary-where-the-salmon-is-from.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FSalmon&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection&_r=0

Discussion:

The passage speaking to the process of freezing eggs, cracking, and then selling to shops that have use for it triggered me because of its connection to Salmon. In the fisheries industry there is always a long process of keeping the meat fresh for as long as possible: smoking, salting, canning, and freezing. In this way fisher people can receive the best price for their catch as possible a lot like the butter and egg men.

The same way black bodies have been sweetened by the comparison to sugar; Native American bodies have been tied directly to the salmon, either by their culture itself or by the exploration of salmon and native culture in conjecture. The market of salmon, and health of stocks are directly linked to the health of Native Nations.

For me this article ties both of these concepts together though the idea of where does our food come from? Selling, tracking, and commodifying food is a long process that starts at the source. If the source is being exploited than the all parts of the market it is connected to is most likely being exploited.

 

 

Glickmen, Suzanne. “Where the Salmon is From”. The New York Times. December 1 2016: Page (1). www.nytimes.com. Web. February 20 2017.

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print

Triggering Passages:

“…mother’s departure from the bland diet that republican reformers took such pride in to the conspicuous consumption of excitants and rich and savory food…making clear the relationship between female domestic pride and skill, the eroticized diet, the young woman’s licentiousness, and the decadence of an era that has overturned the primitive and healthy diet for the modern saturnalia of foods” (Tompkins 2012, 80).

“raw sugar prices surged to a record 60 cents a pound, a nearly fivefold increase in a span of less than ten months. Consumers started to resist, cutting back on purchases of sugar and sugar-laden products. And then something called high-fructose corn syrup entered the fray” (Newman 2013, 39).

News Media Context:

Humans Almost Drove These 6 Animals to Extinction. But We Saved Them Instead.

In recent years, humans have managed to pull a weird parrot, a tiny fox, a rare tiger, an ancient tortoise, a threatened gorilla and a rather handsome mountain goat, among other creatures, from the jaws of extinction.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/animals-saved-from-extinction_us_58807961e4b02c1837e9cf7f

 

Discussion:

In this passage, and the story of the young lady who cannot seem to quit touching herself, Graham correlates the extravagant undisciplined lifestyle of the family to the incessant need to masturbate by the young woman. The male figure is seemingly left out of this unfortunate telling, and in fact of all the blame is shouldered by the mother and female child. Tompkins mentioned that this is directly linked to the shifting responsibilities of the household to the woman, as the woman is given more duties such as buying the food, she is expected to be frivolous in her spending. In this manner the husband must step in and teach or control spending, thereby controlling the families habits as well.

We can see in the absence of one commodity, there will always be one that is cheaper and more easily made. This substitute product is usually highly manipulated and usually less healthy than its counterpart. High fructose corn syrup could be considered the evil twin of natural sugar, but it can be easily controlled in commodity markets therefore is much more viable substitute than the more volatile market of sugar production.

In my individual project, of looking into the commodification of salmon, I have found that the anthropogenic forces on the earth are devastating the other species we co-habitat with. It is exciting to see that humans can reverse our own wrong doing, but we are only protecting those animals and those species that have zero utility to human economic livelihoods.

Works Citied

Mosbergen, Dominique. “Humans Almost Drove These 6 Animal to Extinction. But We Saved Them Instead”. Huffingtonpost. January 26 2017: Page (1). www.huffingtonpost.com. Web. January 29 2017.

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print

Triggering Passages:

“The fine line between genders and species as it appears here presages the later depictions of encounters between classes of people as they will continue to take place in the spaces devoted to eating…can be seen as more than simply a desire to cling to the past; it is also a desire to cling to an embodied, orally authentic present” (Tompkins 2012 29, 35).

“And most important for Americans, this spice lust led to the discovery of the New World… Although European explorers, particularly the Dutch and Portuguese, would continue to search for new spice islands and spice routes to control the lucrative flow of the spice trade, by the nineteenth century, spices were no longer viewed as exotic” (Newman 2013 20, 21).

News Media Context:

 Trump’s TPP withdrawal: 5 things to know

 “Until Trump negotiates his own bargains, he’s betting he can reverse the decades-long trend of globalization.” http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/23/politics/trump-tpp-things-to-know/index.html

Discussions:

The public arena of eating has always been a place of discrimination and rejections. Tompkins points this out exceptionally well by addressing how the development of common areas devoted to socialization around food can force the mingling of classes. From Jim Crowe laws, to the recent Religious freedom acts, the performance of eating with and around varying class levels can be held as a deplorable act by those who hold the highest of class standings. This idea is continually embodied in present and past eating culture, the class which is seen as undeserving of shared space may change, or only added onto a long list of other classes already unwelcome.

Commodities, as pointed out in Newman’s second chapter, can directly be tied to the earliest forms of human exploration. In fact in many ways the search for commodities drives human exploration. But that search and exploration comes at huge cost, a cost, which is mostly billed to the country or peoples that the commodity is extracted from. That cost is a loss of monetary value, nutrient loss, and the export of identities (or cultural).

This action, an action against de-globalization is actually a good one. As a proponent against the TPP, I am mildly happy that Trump has ended our involvement. But this needs to be followed by policies that promote localization of products especially food. I will not act unconcerned for the countries that have built their economies on global trade, so although I feel compelled to give Trump a pat on the back, I will refrain until the extent of this action can be analyzed.

Works Citied

Bradner, Eric. “Trump’s TPP withdrawl: 5 things to know”. CNN. January 23 2017: Page (1). www.cnn.com. Web. January 23 2017.

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print

“All commodities are assigned a grade, so a standard is imposed on what is bought and sold. But that grade is often below what most consumers would choose to purchase. Corn is probably the most striking example-grain market specialist Chad Hart of Iowa State University refers to “food grade” versus “feed grade.”1 The former is sold as canned corn or ground into corn flakes; the latter is used to feed livestock and is distilled into ethanol.” (Newman 11)

In the society we live in it’s easy to forget that at all times, in every way, we are being graded. This passage “triggered” me because it relates to my experience at Evergreen. Being a individual at an alternative school and participating in an alternative learning process, makes it easier for me to see how grading food (like people) is HARMFUL. All food should be of the same quality, the same standard which is: healthy. Healthy soil, healthy nutrients, and healthy land. Just like our education system, our food system should be structured in a way that doesn’t depend on grades.

 

“ The insight that the act of eating dissolves the boundary between self and other, between subject and object is not mine alone, nor is the idea that eating is also a social practice that confirms and delineates difference, demarcating social barriers and affirming group formations” (Tompkins 4)

In my 8 credit program: Community Resilience Women Making Change. Our first week focused on the idea of cultures and how we are socialized into them. This passage connected me with the metaphor of the iceberg; in which like the iceberg the bulk of mass is underneath the water line. We are taught our individual culture’s customs mostly though non-verbal cues. And one of the non-verbal cues is the way we eat, how we eat together, individually, what we eat, what we use to eat with, and how we view eating. The social aspect of eating is one of the greatest socialization’s we learn, from early childhood on, and those eating activities are unique to each culture or family.

 

“As environmental sociologist, the analysis we offer in this book is in fundamental accord with Suzuki’s declaration. We are embedded in physical, ecological systems, but we have been changing them through our social, human-made systems, which have been organized to pursue specific interest. Social systems are sociohistorical products. Thus, they can be changed” (Longo, Clausen, Clark xii).

This is a passage from the Preface of the book I will be reading in regards to my personal project. As someone who reviews the idea of managing fishing as a social system and social problem, I am excited at what this book will offer in terms of solution and insights. Far too many times we forget that our Oceans are not just for physical scientist but also for social scientist to study as well. This is especially true when we are talking about fisheries management as it is a purely social construction.

 

“Last year, under then-Gov. Mike Pence (R), Indiana state police raided a voter registration center working to sign up black citizens. Pence, who also opposed a state law banning LGBTQ workplace discrimination, tweeted about MLK Day too” (Satlin).

This article had me at the title: Politicians Honor MLK Day While Working against the Rights He Fought For. One shining moment of the internet is the freeing up of information, including the idea that the internet forgets nothing! No longer can politicians say one thing, while behind closed doors doing the opposite. We must not forget this as we transition into the new era.

 

Works Citied

Clark, Brett; Clausen, Rebecca; and Longo, Stefano B. The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Print

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print

Satlin, Alana H. “Politicians Honor MLK Day While Working Against The Rights He Fought For.” The Huffington Post January, 16 2017: Page (1). www.huffpost.com. Web. January, 16 2017.

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print