Second Reflection on To Live

Here is my response on the second half of the novel To Live, by Yu Hua. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has a little bit of extra time on their hands. It's a fast, engaging, emotionally powerful read.

The second half of this book really blew me away. As I mentioned in my other response, during the first half of the book I had a lot of trouble relating to and caring about Fugui. To me, his character knew that he had done bad things but wasn’t really sorry that he’d done them. He didn’t seem to me to have changed that much. However, over the course of the second half of the book I saw this character immeasurably altered by the horrific events that happened to those he loved. Reading it was heartbreaking, and brought me close to tears several times.
One part of the story that really got to me was when Fugui described what it was like while everyone in the countryside (and village) was starving, and nobody knew if they were going to make it. The people went to their team leader and asked him to go to the county magistrate to get them food, but he came back empty-handed. The team leader then told everyone that the county magistrate wouldn’t let them starve, but nobody was really convinced. “No one completely believed what the leader said, but then again no one dared not to believe. How could we get by if everyone lost hope?” (132) What makes that quote so poignant is that there are many situations even today where it’s still relevant. You know that things are bad, but it’s scarier to admit how bad things actually are than to believe that things will get better. So you just keep hoping. I know I have felt this way before.
Another part of the story that I really liked was one of the sections where the narrator of the story is talking to Fugui, and Fugui overhears a group of women gossiping about someone in the village. He goes over to them and tells them “ ‘There are four rules people should remember… Don’t say the wrong thing, don’t sleep in the wrong bed, don’t enter the wrong house and don’t rub the wrong pocket’ ” (162). I like this quote because it’s good life advice. Of course some of them are easier said than done (who hasn’t said the wrong thing at one point or another?) but in general they seem like good rules to follow. Also, I appreciated that Fugui was telling the women this not because he had never made mistakes, but because he had and learned from them. Getting these glimpses of Fugui as an old man I was able to see how his decisions and hardships had shaped him and brought him to where he was. There seemed to be a certain peacefulness about him by that point.
Overall, one of the things that really struck me about this book was how much the author was able to pack into 235 pages. It’s a very fast read, but there are so many emotions wrapped up in Fugui’s life that it’s almost impossible not to feel older once you’re done with it. Some of my favorite fiction books are ones where you feel like you’re walking alongside the main character, like you’re on their journey with them. This book did that amazingly well. Although I didn’t like Fugui’s character in the beginning, by the end I couldn’t help but be moved by all of the suffering he had gone through. In the end, what this book is really about is living – whether it’s despite everything you go through or because of it is hard to say. None of us know when we’re going to die, we just make do with the time we have.

First Reflection on To Live

The second book we are reading for class is entitled To Live, by Yu Hua. This book tells the story of Fugui, the son of a wealthy landowner in China who, after gambling away his family fortune, is forced to become a peasant farmer. Set during China's Cultural Revolution, Fugui must work himself to the bone in order to support his family, while struggling with land reform brought on by the Communist Party.

Here is my response to the first half of the book:

I am glad that the second book we are reading for class, To Live by Yu Hua, is fiction. Not because I dislike non-fiction, but because in my personal reading (which I do all the time, I’m a huge bookworm) I like to switch off between fiction and non-fiction. I think that fiction books can often teach us almost as much about a subject as non-fiction can. Honestly, I had never heard of To Live before this class, but so far I am enjoying it. The book is easy to read, and I can see reading the whole thing in one sitting, if you had the time to do so.
I like the way the book is set up, in terms of narration style, although at halfway through I’m still not sure who the narrator is. It took me a little while to figure out that Fugui, the main character, had named his ox after himself. I feel like there should be some sort of deeper meaning/symbolism to that, but at this point I’m not sure what it is. As far as Fugui’s character goes, I’m having a lot of trouble relating to him. Honestly, a lot of what he says and does thoroughly annoys me. For example, in the beginning of the story Fugui describes his pregnant wife by saying “because she was six months pregnant, Jiazhen was naturally no treat for the eyes. When she walked it looked like she had a pair of steamed buns stuffed down her pants” (12). Then Fugui goes on to describe the prostitute that he is cheating on his wife with by saying “I would often have her carry me piggyback to go shopping – riding on her back was just like riding on the back of a horse” (14).  I know that the author is trying to make Fugui out to be a horrible person here, and he succeeds.
The problem with Yu Hua making Fugui out to be so pompous in the beginning of the book is that when bad things to befall him it’s hard for me to care. I feel worse for his family, especially the women. When he gets conscripted I don’t feel bad for him, in fact I feel like he deserves it. Even after he gets out and goes back to his family I still felt like he was doing/saying things that I disagreed with. Living in poverty, he and his wife decide that only one of their two children can go to school, so they choose their son Youqing. “…[O]nly if we let him go to school would he have a good future… At least one of them should be able to have a better life one day” (88). To be fair, I understand that this is still the norm in many cultures today. I was able to take a step back (so to speak) and realize that as a feminist who has grown up in America, it is extremely frustrating for me to read about situations where women’s futures are sacrificed so that men can have better opportunities. That is exactly what happened here.
One of my favorite parts of the book so far has been from the narrator, when he is describing Fugui: “He was the kind of person who could see his entire past. He could clearly see himself walking as a young man, and he could even see himself growing old” (44). There is something so beautiful about this passage. Maybe it’s because I just had my birthday, and I always get contemplative when I think about another year passing, but being able to look back at your life and really see it is something many of us don’t do. It’s hard to see the bigger picture of your life when you’re just trying to make it through the day, and the fact that Fugui can do that is impressive.  

Being Voracious in Vancouver, Canada

As I mentioned briefly in the previous post, I was lucky enough to be able to spend last weekend in Vancouver with one of my best friends, who I'll call the Brit. My birthday was last Tuesday, so when my friend found a super cheap round-trip flight from London to Vancouver that would place him in Canada the weekend before my birthday I decided that going up there for a few days of food & fun was the perfect present to myself.

Despite the fact that I have lived in Seattle for several years, and that Vancouver is really only a few hours  away by car, I hadn't had the opportunity to go up there until last weekend. According to my mum I have actually been to Vancouver once before, back when I was a wee awkward lass of 12 (or 13) and my family took a road trip up to Victoria. For whatever reason I don't have any memories of being in Vancouver, so as far as I was concerned it was going to be a new experience for me.

Of course, being the foodie that I am I knew that I wanted to do at least one food-related thing while in Vancouver. So I looked up free/touristy things to do, and low and behold came across Granville Island's Public Market. Granville Island, located directly across from downtown Vancouver, is a human-made (I don't like saying man-made because women can make things too) island that was created in 1915 after the Vancouver Harbor Commission decided it would be a good idea to dump a bunch of fill onto a sandbar. Originally it was an industrial area, but today it's a very artsy part of Vancouver. One of the main attractions is the Public Market, which was supposed to be like Pike Place. Since the Brit loves Seattle, and Pike Place Market, when I told him this he agreed to go with me.

We decided to walk from our hotel (in downtown Vancouver) across the Granville Street Bridge, rather than taking a bus or ferry. This ended up being a longer walk than we thought, but the sightseeing along the way made up for it. This little sign outside of a restaurant caught my eye:

Is this really considered a traditional Canadian breakfast? I did see at least one other cafe advertising the same meal, so maybe so, but it just doesn't seem that unique to me. The one Canadian food that I really wanted to have but didn't get a chance to was poutine, partly because the name amuses me and partly because I love french fries. Ah well, there's always next time. Here is a shot of the inside of the market:    

The Brit and I spent quite a while just wandering among all the stalls. All of the food looked and smelled so amazing! The problem was that a lot of it seemed to be geared towards tourists, and was therefore somewhat expensive. For example, one of the first stalls I saw walking in was selling herbs and spices. There were all these really delicious spice mixes, and I thought about buying some before realizing that it would be way cheaper for me to just make my own mixes since I already have most of the individual spices. Speaking of spicy things, here's a wall of hot sauce (at a different store):

Anyway, overall the Brit and I had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed checking out all of the different stalls. However, we both agreed that Pike Place Market is better. While this market had more food, Pike is more affordable. I don't think the farmers market was going on the day we were there, which is too bad, because I would have loved to see it. So my opinion is this - it's definitely worth visiting, but beware of spending tons of money. Just enjoy the sights and smells :)

 

Reflection Part Three on The Omnivore's Dilemma

I've been a little behind in getting posts up of my reading responses due to the fact that one of my best friends has been visiting me from England (yes, his accent really is amazing), but I'm hoping to use this weekend to catch up. In the meantime, here is my final reflection for The Omnivore's Dilemma:

The last section of the book, in which Pollan prepares a meal entirely from ingredients that he has hunted, gathered, and/or grown himself, was both the most and least interesting portion of the book for me. As I stated before, this is my second time reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I remember from last time that the end of the book was a little over-the-top for me. Don’t get me wrong – I love local food, and think cooking your own meal is superior to fast food. That being said, there was something about the way he waxed poetically over every part of the meal that rubbed me (an admitted cynic) the wrong way. To be fair, this is the part of the book where Pollan really gets to indulge in his feelings, and I shouldn’t begrudge him that.

The chapter that I found most interesting was the one entitled “The Ethics of Eating Animals” since this is something that I, as a mostly-vegetarian, struggle with. Pollan sums up the state of meat eating in America well when he says, “there’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side” (306). I know people who lavishly indulge their pets, yet think nothing of buying Foster Farms chicken nuggets (which definitely come from factory farmed birds). It seems that as a society we have decided that select members of select species (there are far more adoptable animals than people willing to adopt them) get to be loved, while the rest are left to a cruel fate. This happens because we don’t actually have to look at the animals we’re killing. When you go to the store the meat that you buy doesn’t look anything like the animal it came from. You don’t have to look at the factory farms and slaughterhouses where that meat was raised and killed. If you did, you might make a different decision. As Pollan says, “nowadays it seems we either look away or become vegetarians” (307).

So here’s the question – can you look and still eat meat? Can you understand what you’re doing, take responsibility for it, but do it anyway? The conclusion Pollan comes to is yes. I want to agree with him, but I think it is incredibly hard to only eat ethically raised/sourced meat, dairy, and eggs in America, which is what you have to do if you don’t want to look away or become vegetarian. I’m not saying that if you’re default is to eat meat ethically, but you slip up and have a burger at a friend’s barbeque you’re automatically a horrible person, but it seems to me that scenario (sliding from eating ethical to non-ethical meat) is more likely to happen if you’re not a vegetarian. I am not trying to preach vegetarianism here, because admittedly I do eat (ethically raised) meat from time to time. However, I did find it frustrating that Pollan was unwilling to condemn slaughtering animals on an industrial scale. He says, “so is it possible to slaughter animals on an industrial scale without causing them to suffer? ...For my part, I can’t be sure, because I haven’t been able to see for myself” (330). I understand that he hasn’t actually been inside a slaughterhouse, but there is enough literature out there to make it very clear that killing 400 animals an hour means some of the animals will suffer.

I would say that I agree with Pollan’s statement “what’s wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle” (328). Veganism isn’t a viable option for many people. I would like to see Americans eat less meat that’s better quality.

Reflection Part Two on The Omnivore's Dilemma

Good morning! Here is my reflection on the second section that I read of The Omnivore's Dilemma. In this part of the book Pollan goes to visit and work on Polyface Farms, an alternative farm located in Virginia. Here is a picture of Joel Salatin, the man who runs it.

Here is what I wrote up for class:

After spending almost 200 pages reading about the horrors of the industrial food system and the better-but-still-not-great industrial organic food system, it was a relief to start reading about Polyface Farms. I remember how moved I was by Joel Salatin’s farm the first time I read the book, and how cool I thought it would be to intern there. I never ended up doing it, for multiple reasons, but mostly because as much as I love food I am not cut out to be a farmer. At any rate, Pollan’s description of Salatin makes him out to be quite a character. I had completely forgotten about his use of the word holon, but I love it. In the book it’s described as “an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part” (215). It’s such a perfect word to describe the different parts of a farm.
Although I believe that what Polyface Farms is doing is on the whole a good thing, I have also come to believe that Joel Salatin may not be the alternative farming prophet that Pollan makes him out to be. What changed my mind? Reading Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book contains an essay entitled “I Am the Last Poultry Farmer” by Frank Reese, a heritage turkey farmer. Reese says that he is the only poultry farmer left in America who is raising birds that haven’t been bred to live in factory farms. He says of Polyface Farms, “Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds… So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference… Salatin’s organic free-range chicken is killed in forty-two days… It can’t be allowed to live any longer because its genetics are so screwed up” (Foer, 113). Reese definitely sounds frustrated in his essay, and it seems to me it has to do with the fact that Joel Salatin has gotten so much recognition after being featured so prominently in Pollan’s book.
I was curious to see what Pollan had to say specifically about Salatin’s chickens. He doesn’t say anything about them being industrial birds, however when he is describing how often the portable chicken pens that Salatin developed are moved he says they “had been calibrated to cover every square foot of this meadow in the course of the fifty-six days it takes a broiler to reach slaughter weight” (209). So the number of days is different between the two books, but even so, this means that Salatin’s chickens are living less than two months. Something seems off about that to me, although to be fair I don’t know how to raise chickens.
Regardless of what type of chickens Salatin is raising, I appreciate that he is able to slaughter them on site. I know that Temple Grandin has done a lot of work around improving the conditions of slaughterhouses for both the animals being killed and the humans doing the killing, but many of them are still run under very deplorable conditions. In describing what it was like to help slaughter the chickens Pollan says, “In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling” (233).  This sentiment can be applied to meat-eating in general in America. While I don’t believe eating meat is morally wrong, I do think we would be better off if everyone ate meat consciously and appreciated that a living creature gave its life, as opposed to just eating a burger without thinking about where it came from.

Reflection Part One on The Omnivore's Dilemma

The first book we are reading in my Food Politics class is The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

I have been meaning to get a copy of this book for years, so having it be required reading was the perfect reason to finally break down and buy it. I love owning books like this, because it means I can underline to my heart's content, without worrying about having to resell it. Anyway, our assignment for class is to write a reflection on each part of the book as we read it. Here is my first one:

I am going to start off by saying that I love this book. This is my second time reading it, the first time being about four and a half years ago, at the end of 2007. I know it sounds cliché, but this book really did change my life. It opened my eyes to the American food system and made me realize that I needed to change the way I was eating. This was significant for me, because up to that point I thought that I was doing fairly well in terms of eating healthily and being respectful to nature. I wasn’t. True, I didn’t eat fast food, and hardly ate any meat, but I wasn’t eating consciously. I didn’t have a connection to my food, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the labels. This book changed all that. I moved up to Seattle not long after I finished it, and I can honestly say that because of it I joined a co-op and started shopping at my local farmers market. I became aware of my food in ways that I hadn’t been before. This book was also a jumping off point for me in terms of reading other books on food – Food Rules by Marion Nestle, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Slow Food Nation by Carlo Petrini are all books I recommend.
So here I am, almost five years later, re-reading this book as a completely changed eater. It’s been a good experience so far. One of the things that has struck me is that no matter how many times I read certain facts they still amaze me. For example, I have now read many books/articles dealing with factory farms. I know how awful they are, on multiple levels. Still, when I read that “[m]ost of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed” (p.78) I was struck dumb. I had completely forgotten this fact, and it took me a few minutes to fully process it. Honestly, I feel like just this one little fact has huge implications for Americans. And this book is chock full of facts like that. If someone like me, a fairly conscientious eater, doesn’t know how huge of a problem antibiotics in CAFOs are, what does that tell you about the average American who is just going to the store and buying packages of hamburgers?
It’s also been interesting to read this book through the lens of someone who is working on hunger issues. I am working part-time at a food bank, and one of the things I’ve realized is that the fact that hunger exists in the world today has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of food in the world. Early on in the book, when Pollan goes to see where corn is grown he meets a farmer named Billy, who has fallen under the spell of Big Agriculture. He is trying to produce more and more corn every year. Pollan states “Two hundred and twenty bushels of corn is an astounding accomplishment, yet it didn’t do Billy nearly as much good as it did those companies” (p.56). Reading this it struck me just how screwed up our food system is. Here is a man who is producing massive amounts of food, but he’s going broke doing it.  In addition, there are still tons of hungry people in America (not to mention the rest of the world). So obviously it’s not that there isn’t enough food being grown/produced in the world, it’s what is being done with it that’s the problem. We, as Americans, need a different way of thinking about food, and this book does just that. I’m excited to keep reading.

Happy Earth Day!

Hello there. I'm Ursula, and this is my brand-new little blog that could. The title comes from the fact that while I love food (especially fresh, local, sustainably grown, ethically raised food) I am doing the proverbial "broke college student" thing at the moment, and therefore don't have a lot of money to spend on said food. However, I am determined to make it work! I figure Earth Day is an appropriate day (well, night at this point) to post my first blog, since I am mainly going to be focusing on food, and obviously all of our food (in one way or another) comes from Mother Nature.

I set this blog up per an assignment in a class I am taking this quarter entitled Food Politics. I am hoping that I will keep blogging after the quarter is over, but we'll see what happens. (The road to hell is paved with good intentions, best laid plans, etc.) At any rate, most of what I will be posting for the next month and a half will be homework assignments, but I'll try and make them interesting.

Anyway, since today was Earth Day, and also a beautiful sunny Sunday, I thought I would share some pictures I took at the Broadway Farmers Market. (Before you say anything - yes, I took these with Instagram. I am one of the millions of Android users who rushed to download the app as soon as I found out it was available. Move over iPhone users, we're here to stay.) Today was the opening day of the market, and it really could not have been more perfect.

 

I have lived on Capitol Hill for several years now, and I make an effort to go to the market every week. It doesn't always happen, but obviously I go often enough that today some of the vendors recognized me and welcomed me back to another season. Awwww. Seriously though, I feel so lucky that I can live in a very urban environment, and yet still know who's growing my veggies and making my cheese. That is the beauty of farmers markets.

Well, that and these gorgeous flowers. I didn't end up buying any, but just seeing them makes me smile.

The pic below is what I ended up bring home from the market. Not a lot, but it's all really good quality. In case you're wondering what I bought (I don't think you are, but I'll tell you anyway) this is it:
-Eggs from Millingwood Organics.
-Camp Fire Smoked Washington Jack cheese from Mt. Townsend Creamery (I almost always buy cheese from them because it's just so freaking good. Seriously. All of it.)
-Sunny Citrus yoghurt cheese from Willapa Hills Cheese. I've never bought their stuff before today, but it was on sale, and oh my god is it delicious. Creamy, with just a little tartness to it. I may be addicted.
-Salad greens from Willie Greens Organic Farms.
-Smoked salmon from Loki Fish. Incidentally, this company is run by the professor who is teaching Food Politics. (Hi Pete!) I love being able to buy delicious wild fish from your professor :)

Alright, I think that about does it for now. Here's to happy eating.