Taylor Veasley Food Project

Recipe

Ingredients

2 medium heads of cauliflower

1 tablespoon of sea salt

5 cloves of garlic

2 tablespoons of Olivio ( Olive Oil based butter substitute)

Seasoning Salt 

Pepper

Directions

1. Set a stockpot of water to boil over high heat.

2. Clean and cut cauliflower into small pieces.

3. Cook the cauliflower with the garlic cloves and sea salt in boiling water for about 6 minutes, or until well done.

4. Drain well

5. Put the cauliflower into a large bowl.

6. Add in the Olivio.

7. Mash until it has the consistency of mashed potatoes.

8. Season to taste

Analysis

This dish is very healthy. I love it because I love starches, especially potatoes. This gives me an alternative to mashed potatoes, they taste the same but they have much less carbohydrates and is a lighter side. Sometimes when you have mashed potatoes accompanying other foods they can be heavy and overpowering, the mashed cauliflower is nothing like that at all. The Cauliflower I bought was from Produce Junction and I believe that it came from a local farm. I do not know the exact name of the farm but, I know it is from a farm near Philadelphia. The garlic cloves were bought from Produce Junction also but it was not clear where they were from. The workers did not know when I asked so I could not really get a conclusive answer about the origins of the garlic. The Olivio has two ingredients in it that are actually processed, most of its components are natural. The rest of the ingredients were seasonings. This recipe is easy to make and has only a few ingredients within it. The bet part about it though is that you can season it however you like. You can season them just like you season potatoes and they taste just like them. You can even not add anything, if you are trying to watch your salt intake, and just rely on the garlic and sea salt that it was boiled with. There have multiple times when I have eaten it like that and it is actually quite good and not at all bland. The fat content of my meal would be quite low. Overall it is a great recipe and it is good for you.

Politically the food I prepared was wonderful. It was not expensive at all to make and it took no time to put together. The heads of cauliflower cost about $2 each and the whole garlic cloves cost about $2.60 each. In total I only spent about $7.20. This cost so little to make and feeds so many people that I feel like I am saving so much money. The people that made money off of my meal are Produce Junction and the farm that my food comes from. All of the other ingredients I have or are seasoning so the nutritional fact is clear. 

Socially, a lot of things I feel as though my dish is also lovely. This dishes' only social ramification would be the travel. How the ingredients got from one destination to another. That could be a problem depending on how far the vegetables traveled. In my case they did not travel from too far away from Philadelphia. 

I have learned a lot in this unit. The most important thing I have learned though, is that I need to begin to pay attention to the kinds of foods that enter my body. Whenever I go grocery shopping I notice all of those "heart healthy" and "organic" etc. labels and I think nothing of them. I never read the ingredients to see how beneficial the food could be be for me. I never even stop to think about it, in a way I am being ignorant. I realized during this unit that my ignorance needs to stop and I need to start treating my body better by eating better. 

When we did the focus on diseases and disorders that were repercussions from being obese I was appalled. A lot of things were brought into perspective and I realized that obesity was serious. The biggest problem I see within our food system is how much of the bad things that we eat. I think as Americans we eat a lot, but we don't eat a lot of salads or vegetables we eat a lot of fatty meats and sugars. This is a problem. We are now the number one on the list of most  obese countries. If we did not eat so much of everything then I believe that we would definitely be healthier. I believe the reason that we do eat so much is because we develop an emotional relationship with food. We no longer eat to live, we live to eat. We associate food with emotions and feelings and we trust in this food. This kind of emotional connection with something that can hurt us should not exist. This section of the unit really taught me a lot and made me realize what my problem is with food and being healthy and America's problem as well. 

As for myself and what choices I will make from here on out to ensure my healthiness is I will just be more cautious about what I put into my body. I will begin to look at ingredients and how food was made and if it is processed. Becoming a healthy person begins with intake, if I am eating crap then I will look like crap because I am what I eat. 

I think the other impactful section of this unit was on friday when we looked at the one section of a documentary. The section was about chickens, cows, and corn. It had a lot of information in the beginning about chicken farmers and how they are forced to do things that are not good for the chickens because they are so in debt. We also learned about how cows are fed corn when their bodies have evolved to process grass not corn. We learned about how cows are contracting different deadly viruses and then are wading in each other's feces and are spreading these viruses. The the feces is not completely sprayed off the cattle so when they are slaughtered some of the feces gets onto the meat along with the viruses causing the consumers to possibly contract a deadly virus. We then learned about how corn is in just about everything that we eat and use on a daily basis, even gasoline ! A lot of the things that happen within our society are harmful to either our wallets, our bodies, or both. I learned in this unit that if everyone decided to make a difference in what they put into their bodies it could have a large impact on the entire country. Individuals can make a difference and this unit helped me to see this.