Living Lessons
Eat Like an Abuela: Traditional Northern Mexican Diet View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amanda Palacios
The goal of my research thesis is to investigate and document traditional Northern Mexican diet through food-centered life histories with the purpose of promoting traditional Northern Mexican diet and food practices encouraging people to embrace and reconnect with their cultural heritage. The objective of my research is to make claims and provide evidence as to why Mexicans and Mexican Americans should push back against acculturation and make efforts to reconnect with their culture through the closest link we have to our ancestors, namely through our abuelas, who hold the greatest knowledge to our traditional practices and diet, as the elders of our community. Hispanic/Latinos experience health disparities of chronic diet-related diseases at disproportionate rates in the US. There is a need to address and recognize the root of these health issues and ways to approach them. One of those ways is by reconnecting with the traditional diet of this region that healthy, sustainable, culturally appropriate, and place-based.
Edible Learning: School Food Service Programming and Experiential Education that Promote Better Nutritional Health View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kristina Grasty
The typical American diet, which involves the consumption of processed foods high in saturated fats, sodium, and refined sugar, is known to be unhealthy. Millions of students in the U.S. suffer from symptoms of malnutrition, making them susceptible to compromising health conditions such as type 2 diabetes that may persist into adulthood. Well-designed school nutrition programs and action learning that promotes sustainable agriculture have the potential to enhance students’ nutritional well-being as well as their understanding of the ecological systems needed to support good nutrition. My doctoral dissertation uses documentary film as an exploratory, qualitative research method to investigate approaches used in school nutrition programs and nutrition-related education that can have a positive impact on students’ lives. The result is a documentary film called Edible Learning: Promoting Better Nutrition in Schools. Several themes emerged from this study suggesting that experiential lessons to educate students about sustainable food systems should permeate throughout a school–in the cafeteria, in garden learning environments, and through school-community partnerships. Supportive, non-exploitative partnerships can be leveraged to overcome institutional challenges faced in promoting greater nutritional health. Recommendations are given for optimal practices in school food service programs and curricula, including courses of study such as agroecology, in order to positively impact students’ health and their understanding of the importance of optimal nutrition and the ecology of food systems.
Cooking with Purpose: Using Online Education to Empower Appalachian State Students and Community with the Knowledge, Skills, and Confidence to Prepare Healthy, Sustainable, and Affordable Meals View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carla Ramsdell, Sherry Nikbakht
A team of faculty, staff, and students at Appalachian State University is designing online nutrition education and cooking classes for food insecure students. This “Cooking with Purpose” program is coordinated by the Office of Sustainability in collaboration with faculty across the campus at the Nexus of sustainability, budget, nutrition, waste, and community. CwP selects a 20-student cohort each semester, and we prioritize students who use our campus food pantries. We hold five meetings per semester. To establish personal relationships and a community, the first meeting/cooking demonstration is in-person. The next three cooking classes are held via Zoom, with ingredient and equipment lists distributed a week in advance. Students have the option to shop at the campus food pantry if they are unable to procure the equipment or ingredients. The recipes are chosen to integrate inexpensive, sustainable ingredients with unique flavors and methods that are cooked in ways to minimize time and energy consumption. Building on the established community from the first gathering, students and facilitators cook, each in their own kitchens, and share their results via Zoom. The final meeting is again in-person and serves as a celebration for the completion of the program. We have experimented with various incentives for students to remain engaged. We are excited to expand this program beyond students to include alumni and community members, requesting a donation to help ensure the financial sustainability of the program. IRB-approved survey data shows that Cooking with Purpose has already had a positive impact on Appalachian students.
Food and Health, Weight, and Body Image in Spanish Social Conversations: Informing the Process of Policy Decisions View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chris Miles
This sociolinguistic research takes an ethnomethodological approach to account for the talk of food and food references that display organically in Spanish social conversations. The investigation describes the results of how food emerges in Spanish conversation organizationally, functionally, and thematically through a discourse analysis of two Spanish language linguistic corpus data bases and transcribed, segments of natural, scripted (native Spanish speaker to native Spanish speaker) conversational interactions between actors from two seasons of a popular Spanish television series. The corpus linguistic data bases analyzed were: 1) the Corpus Oral de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea (CORLEC), a general corpus containing transcripts of ethnographically recorded conversations in a number of social settings in Spain, and 2) the CallFriend Spanish Corpus, a general corpus that contains 60 unscripted, person to person telephone conversations of up to 30 minutes per conversation between 120 participant native speakers of different varieties of Latin American Spanish. The data analysis reveals a myriad of ways in which the topic of food emerges thematically within the structure of the Spanish conversational turn-taking system in social encounters and demonstrate significant talk oriented toward food related to health, medicine, weight, and body image. The results of this study suggest that understanding what people are saying about food while engaged in casual conversation may be a powerful source of knowledge that serves to inform public policy decisions regarding the connection between food and health.
