Grades

So you may have noticed my last several posts have been about how stressful that last semester was.  Well, it was most surprising to find out that I got a 4.0.  I have only ever gotten a 4.0 1 other time, and I attributed that to the fact that I wasn't taking an honors seminar.  But, this semester I did take an honors seminar and I still pulled it off! (I will post my final paper at the end of this post, which was the final tipping point which means I must have done well!)  But, there were still some other classes that I was unsure about that pulled through for me right at the end (like the one where I didn't really take the final and didn't go to class a whole bunch of times....) and also organic chemistry...which was in fact quite difficult.  Somehow, and most unexpectedly though, they all came out A's.  I'll take it, considering my 2 jobs, 18 credits, and my complete lack of discipline on myself this semester because I made so many new friends that needed to be hung out with ALL THE TIME.  *shrug* There's no explaining it.

Here's my paper.  Feel free to be bored or discontinue reading now, although it is really interesting.  It's about the evolution of food and the way humans eat since pre-agriculture.

Modern humans have been on this earth for an estimated 200,000 years. In the past 12,000 years or so though, the way humans have eaten has changed dramatically.  We have gone from being entirely hunter-gatherers to being agriculturalists to being customers in grocery stores and fast food restaurants, which are part of the uncontrollable food market we have today in this country. Obtaining food used to be the main daily chore of hunter-gatherers, but now Americans spend a mere 10% of their income on food (and 4% on eating out) (Akst).  Food is something that humans always have and always will need, though, and it has evolved over the course of human existence to fit our needs, based on our eating preferences of each particular time period. These changes have had some dramatic implications for the societies that we live in today and the way we ourselves live our lives.

            If we went back in time to over 12,000 years ago, we would see a very different world.  There would be no cities, no buildings, no roads, and many, many fewer people than there are today.  Scientists estimate that there were only between 1 and 10 million people on earth during the pre-agricultural era (Eldredge).  Today there are about 7 billion people on Earth, but this exponential growth did not occur until the agricultural evolution, as previous to this, population growth was very slow (Cohen).

            Societies then were much smaller, and they were mobile (Cohen).They had to keep moving around from place to place to find food to eat.  If one group stayed in one place too long, everything edible within walking distance would soon be gone.  This is the reason they did not put up permanent shelters; they would be leaving again soon.

            It has been estimated that hunter-gatherers spent approximately 6 hours a day hunting and foraging for food (Belovsky, 45).  Jared Diamond points out that the Kalahari Bushmen, who continue to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, only spend between 12 and 19 hours a week obtaining food (Diamond).  Although it is generally regarded that hunter-gatherers lived a “nasty, brutish, and short” life “it turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors” (Diamond).

            In fact, many anthropologists and nutritionists alike are beginning to think that hunter gatherers may have had a healthier life than the agriculturalists that took their place. This is perhaps one reason that the way we ate stayed stagnant for so long: it was keeping us healthy, and we did not need to change it. This was also the main period of time that humans did not have control over their food, so therefore the food did not adapt and change to fit our needs like it has more recently in history.

 Diamond notes this about surviving hunter-gatherer populations: “While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients.” (Diamond B).  We have to assume that this is also the case for earlier hunter-gatherers as well. In his opening lecture at the summer meeting of the Nutrition Society, Boyd Eaton described the estimated hunter-gatherer diet, and it was much different than how we eat today. First of all, our ancestors ate much more meat when it was seasonably available.  They ate approximately 3g/kg of body weight of protein each day (Eaton, 1). Today, we are recommended to eat only .8g/kg of body weight of protein each day (Blake, 242). Meat is very calorically dense compared to vegetables, so it is believed that they would eat it as much as possible.  Bringing down a large animal is much quicker, less labor intensive, and more filling than spending all day foraging for edible plant foods. It is important to note though that the average American today consumes between 11-12% of their total calories from saturated fat, while hunter-gather’s only consumed about 7.5% of their calories from saturated fat (Eaton, 1).  Saturated fat most often comes from animal products, so although we would expect it to be the other way around, this discrepancy can be attributed to a quality issue: “While its composition varies seasonally, the fat of wild animals tends to have more MUFA and PUFA and less saturated fatty acid than is found in supermarket meat” (Eaton, 3). (MUFA: mono-unsaturated fatty-acid PUFA: poly-unsaturated fatty-acid)  In other words, the meat we eat today has a higher saturated fat content as compared to the wild game that was hunted pre-agriculture. This is due to certain agricultural practices that will be discussed in more detail later as we move forward in time to the present.  Hunter gatherers also have substantial cholesterol intake at about 480 mg/day due to the large amount of animal products that were eaten (Eaton, 1).

Almost all the carbohydrates hunter-gatherers ate derived from fruits and vegetables, and since 35% of their calories came from carbohydrates (Eaton, 1) and we know fruits and vegetables are very low in calories, they must have been eating a lot of them to make up this percentage.  Americans today eat a far higher percentage of their calories from carbohydrates, and nearly all of those come from grain products and added sugars, not fruits and vegetables like they used to (Cordain, 342).  While hunter-gatherers may have encountered the occasional honey, there is no other evidence that they ate much grain or other types of sugars at all (Eaton, 1). Furthermore, there was no milk or other dairy products in their diets (after weaning, of course) because milking animals is an agricultural practice that had not yet been developed. Cordain, et al says, “Although dairy products, cereals, refined sugars, refined vegetable oils, and alcohol make up 72.1% of the total daily energy consumed by all people in the United States, these types of foods would have contributed little or none of the energy in the typical preagricultural hominin diet” (Cordain, 342). So it is clear that our diets have changed dramatically since this time.

It is also interesting to note that in addition to the quality issue that arises with animal fat content due to agriculture, there is also a quality issue that arises with fruits and vegetables due to agriculture.  There is an approximate 133g of fiber per kg of weight in uncultivated produce, while produce grown on the farm has only 42g/kg. (Eaton, 4). Also, “Wild plant foods known to be consumed by hunter-gatherers generally maintain higher micronutrient concentrations than do their domesticated counterparts, as does the muscle meat of wild animals.” (Cordain, 348)  As farms get older, the nutrients in their soil gets depleted, and fewer nutrients are transferred into the edible part of the plant. Natural ecosystems, however, keep soil fertile so not only do the fruits and vegetables contain more micronutrients, but so do the wild animals that eat them. “Vitamin, mineral, and (probably) phytochemical intake was typically 1.5 to eight time that of today” (Eaton, 1).

Katharine Milton points out, though, people ate a varying diet depending on where they lived, and “we do not know much about the range of foods our paleolithic ancestors ate each day or season in almost any environment, although it seems likely that periods of relative food abundance may have alternated with periods of low food availability in many environments” (Milton). So although it may be hard to say exactly what they ate, we can make educated guesses based on what region they were in and what naturally grows/grew there.  Milton also brought up another way in which the way we eat differs from the way our paleolithic ancestors ate: they experienced feast and famine regularly.  It is easy to image that if you are foraging for all your food, during the summer there is probably a lot to eat, and during the winter there is probably very little to eat, depending on the environment you live in.  So, it is believed that if there was an abundance of food, hunter-gatherer’s would eat as much as possible, because “no food is grown and little is stored, [so] there is little respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods to avoid starving” (Diamond B).  This way, when the time comes that they are unable to find food, they have internal body fat stores to keep them alive until the next abundance. Today, most of us do not have this problem: we have whole grocery stores full of food right at our fingertips.  This is due largely in part to the development of agriculture.
            In his article, Archaeological Evidence for Population Pressure in Pre-Agricultural Societies, Mark Cohen argues that the growing population was the reason humans began utilizing agriculture.  “Changes in food refuse and food related artifacts … suggest changes in exploitative patterns which in turn can reasonably be assumed to result from population pressure (Cohen, 472).  In other words, because human population was already beginning to expand, there was a demand for a new way of eating that would provide more calories and be able to sustain more people.  Thus, agriculture began.

Agriculture was first developed in Southwest Asia (known as the fertile crescent), in 8500 B.C. They began farming wheat, peas and olives, and domesticated sheep and goats (Diamond A, 98-99). Although not stated explicitly, this is possibly because this is where the greatest population pressure existed.  Agriculture developed independently of this in at least 4 other locations around the globe: China, Mesoamerica (Southern Mexico and central America), the Andes in South America, and the Eastern United States (Diamond A, 98), and the practice spread around the world from these origins because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. “Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep.  How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?” (Diamond B).

So although a population pressure may have been the reason agriculture was developed, it also propagated population growth in a huge way. First, more calories means more people. “One acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers” (Diamond A, 88). Domestication of animals was also a very important part of this because it fed people in 4 ways: obviously the meat of the animal and the milk of the animal was direct food, but also animals produced fertilizer for crops, and they pulled plows to increase crop yield (Diamond A, 88).  Aside from producing more food, agriculture allowed people to stay in one place.  This further increased population growth because mothers could have babies more frequently.  When moving around with a band, a mother has to carry her baby until he/she can walk well enough to keep up, so she cannot have another baby until then.  This is usually about four years, and is done by abstinence, infanticide, and abortion (Diamond A, 89). Families who are stationary, however, can have as many children as they can feed, which means every having a baby every 2 years on average (Diamond A, 89).  In this way, agriculture increased human fitness, because more babies were being born to agricultural societies than hunter-gatherer societies.  This in turn increased agriculture’s own fitness, because humans are ultimately in charge of agriculture. Increasing human fitness was the mechanism by which agriculture propagated itself.

While it may seem that this increase in calories and people would mean an increase in health, as mentioned before, that was not necessarily the case. “Hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops.  The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition” (Diamond B).  This is quantifiable by looking at skeletons.  At the end of the ice age, the height of hunter-gatherers was 5’9” for men and 5’5” for women.  By 3000 B.C. (approximately 5,000 years after agriculture was adopted) height crashed to an average of 5’3” for men and 5’0” for women (Diamond B). 

Agriculture also ran dangerous risks.  If one crop failed, farmers ran the risk of starvation. Diamond, talking about present day Kalahari Bushmen, says, “It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat seventy-five or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840’s” (B).   So, even in early agriculture all the way up to the past 100 years or so, we see nutritional problems that arose due to agriculture, which haven’t been completely resolved even today (although much of the height we lost during the early agricultural period has been regained.)

But, even though people’s health may have suffered, their fitness levels soared.  Another reason that agriculture benefitted humans (i.e. another way in which it showed humans that it was worthy of staying around and therefore propagated itself) was the ability of the food to be stored.  This helps to resolve the issue of feast and famine (which humans probably didn’t enjoy too much, and therefore favored a food that would abolish it), because agriculturalists could eat even after the crops stopped producing food. After harvest, surplus of crops could be placed in cellars and kept for a long time. There is even evidence that sophisticated granaries like this existed in the Jordan Valley 11,000 years ago.  They were designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, and located between the now possible residential structures (Kuijt). This could not happen for hunter-gatherer’s, as they were constantly on the move.  Not only did this early food storage idea pave the way for many of the products that we now eat, it also allowed for accumulation of wealth and a monetary system. People could now use grains and spices for bartering, which further spread the idea of agriculture across the globe.

Another reason agriculture was beneficial to humans was that while hunter-gatherers spent all day looking for food, agriculturalists only needed a few people to attend to everyone’s food.  Not only did this solidify agriculture’s place in human’s eating, but it also allowed the development of specialization to create new tools, art, technology, etc.  As this specialization became more prominent, many people’s relationship to food became one of simply eating, not gathering, hunting, or cultivating anymore. As we work our way from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, a period of over 9,000 years, we see a lot of technologies develop, and a significant rise in global population. 

With more and more people going to work in factories and jobs away from the farm, farmers began to become fewer and far between.  Farmers also continued to refine their technology to grow the most food they could they during this time. As Gretel H. Pelto and Pertti J. Pelto said, “Population pressures have triggered the intensification of food production techniques” (513).  So while Cohen believes that a population pressure is the reason agriculture developed in the first place, Pelto and Pelto believe that further refinement of our agricultural production techniques were necessary to continue to sustain such population pressures.

If we look at modern farming practices, we can see some of these techniques that allow us to produce more food for less work.  For example, in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes how corn has been bred to be a more efficient crop. The varieties of corn that we grow today have been selected for to grow close together and produce the most bushels per acre. In the 1920’s, the average was about 20 bushels per acre, but with our new varieties of corn, farmers can grow 180 bushels of corn per acre (36-37).  This demonstrates how farming has evolved since early agriculture, or even relatively recent agriculture.  This was done to fit the needs of humans (the environment that the food is evolving in), because we see a lot of delocalization during this time. This means that “food varieties, production methods, and consumption patterns are disseminated throughout the world in an ever-increasing and intensifying network of socio-economic and political interdependency” (Pelto, 507).  In other words, the consumer of the food is growing ever-distant from the production of the food.

 In order to get food now, humans had to start paying the farmers for it. In the past, small societies would work together to obtain food for everyone (be it hunting and gathering or harvesting crops) and it would be produced very close by.  However, with the rise in population and the relatively few farmers, this was no longer the case. Grocery stores, whose predecessors were trading posts, became more and more common because consumers had to begin paying the people who produced the food they were eating, and the farmers had to have a way of getting it to the consumer. The first self-serve grocery store, The Piggly Wiggly, opened in 1916, and as Pelto and Pelto note, “The growth of commercial food distribution networks has been intricately related to the development of food processing technologies.” (Pelto, 514). So while humans have become more distant from their food, food has also become more processed and storable. This is so that it can be transported and have a longer shelf life at a grocery store, which is a trait in food that humans needed to survive at the time.  They weren’t out gathering or harvesting their own food, so the food that was able to stay fresh long enough to get to them is the food that was favored.  Canning is an early example of food processing with the intention of giving food a longer shelf life.  It was developed in the 1790’s and is a still a process we use today, along with many other food storage techniques.

Much of our ability to produce the shelf-stable food we have today though is our ability to process our crops well. Corn is one of the most processed plants in our country, and plays a pivotal role in our food system.  In this sense, corn has done very well for itself evolutionarily: “The plant—whose prodigious genetic variability allows it to adapt rapidly to new conditions—made itself at home in virtually every microclimate in North America; hot or cold, dry or wet, sandy soil or heavy, short day or long, corn, with the help of its Native American allies, evolved whatever traits it needed to survive and flourish” (Pollan, 25).  The government subsidizes corn, making it a very commonly grown crop and a very cheap crop to purchase, and we have developed techniques to process and break down the kernels and use them in a variety of ways and in a lot of food products (Pollan, 15-56). Pollan describes the breakdown of corn and all of its uses, from the yellow skin to the germ to the endosperm, the most important part:

This oversized packet of starch is corn’s most important contribution to the industrial food chain: an abundance of carbohydrate molecules in long chains that chemists have learned to break down and then rearrange into hundreds of different organic compounds—acids, sugars, starches, and alcohols.  The names of many of these compounds will be familiar to anyone who’s studied the ingredient label on a package of processed food: citric and lactic acid; glucose, fructose, and maltodextrin; ethanol (for alcoholic beverages as well as cars), sorbitol, mannitol, and xanthan gum; modified and unmodified starches; as well as dextrins and cyclodextrins and MSG, to name only a few. (86).

If we look around a grocery store today, we see brightly colored boxes and packages that scream “buy me” on them, and each and every one of them most likely contains a chemical derived from corn.  Humans have options that they have never had before due to processing techniques.  All of these food items most likely have some sort of preservative in them as well.  “From 1949 to 1959, chemists came up with over four hundred  new additives to aid in processing and preserving food” (Levenstein, 109). These include calcium propionate, which extends the shelf life of breads and other baked goods, chemicals that prevent fat from going rancid, chemicals that stop color from fading, smootheners like hydrolyzed starch to give great texture to things like gravies and puddings, and things like monosodium glutamate that simply made things taste better (Levenstein, 109). But, a large part of the food system we are all a part of is food marketing.  The vice president of General Mills explained to Pollan that the reason it would be hard to sell more whole foods (what humans have been eating for thousands of years) is that it would be hard to distinguish one company’s products from another. Instead, we process the whole food and turn it in to something new and desirable that people will want to buy. Making money has become the primary goal of our food system (Pollan, 96). 

Marketing can be looked at as a mechanism that processed food has used to propagate itself through human eating habits. It is unique to processed foods because just as the vice president of General Mills said, you can’t market an apple.  It is what it is.  But, if you take a shelf stable food product and put it in a box on a shelf, you can compete with other boxes on the shelf.  And obviously this mechanism is working, because a large percentage of the food we now eat is in this form.  So, what is it about our lives that make this type of eating ideal?  There are three things: convenience, taste, and price.

Convenience is food trait that has been highly selected for in our busy, everyday lives. “After World War II, technology accelerated the centralized processing of food, which helped pave the way for women to pursue paid work outside the home.” (Akst) They didn’t have to spend all day cooking a meal because of new freezing and packaging techniques that allowed prepared foods to stay better preserved. So because this type of eating has lined up with human ideals about getting out of the house and getting a job, it has thrived in this environment.

Second, these processed foods taste good.  Taste is a sense that is well rooted in human evolution, especially sweetness, which is a taste found in almost all packaged, processed foods.  There are several theories about why humans crave sweetness.  First, there is a lot of glucose in human breast milk—it is very sweet.  Without a preference for sweetness, a hunter-gatherer baby’s fitness would decrease dramatically (Longchamps).  Second, evolutionarily sweetness is a taste we did not get to experience very much—only if we found some honey or during the summer when fruit was in season.  Even when we began growing sugarcane, “it was a rare and costly luxury until cane production was initiated in the New World” (Pelto, 515). However, sweetness related to readily available energy, so it is something that we would have wanted.  “Add fat or sugar to anything and it’s going to taste better on the tongue of an animal that natural selection has wired to seek out energy-dense foods” (Pollan, 107).  So, today when there is definitely no shortage of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, humans are perfectly happy to allow these products to flourish, because it suits our biological predisposition.

The third reason that we now enjoy so many processed foods is that they are cheap.  As mentioned before, Americans spend relatively little of their income on the food they eat.  This is largely in part due to government subsidies. For storable commodities such as corn, the government established a target price based on the cost of production, and whenever the market price dropped below that target, the farmer could either sell his corn to a weak market, not make a lot of money, and weaken the market further, or he could sell his crop to the government at the target price. While this program kept corn prices from collapsing, it also meant that any farmer who produced corn (or other crops with this program in place) did not have to abide by the rules of supply and demand—they could always make money, whether it be from the market or the government. (Pollan, 51-52) 

But, supply and demand are still at play, because due to this surplus of corn that infiltrates almost all of the processed, packaged foods that we eat today, these products are relatively inexpensive when compared to whole, fresh foods.  This means that more people are buying the foods, increasing its success in this environment.  Also, because there is so much of it and it is so cheap, we have now begun using it to feed our livestock. In fact, about 60 percent of America’s commodity corn goes to feeding livestock. (Pollan, 66) “Corn found its way into the diet of animals that never used to eat very much of it (like cattle) or any corn at all, like the farmed salmon now being bred to tolerate grain.” (Pollan, 67) Cows are ruminants, which means that they evolved to eat grass. Fattening up a cow, however, takes much less time and money if it is fed a grain (like corn).  Cheap and quick are both things our current food market demands. This type of feeding explains why wild animals have a lower saturated fat content than do today’s farmed animals; they are eating grass and gaining weight gradually, not eating grains and gaining it so quickly.

So, because convenience, taste, and inexpensive cost are all desirable traits for the food humans want to eat, this is the type of food that has evolved and done well in this current environment. “Over production is a longstanding characteristic of U.S. agriculture.  Technology—and therefore efficiency—has long outpaced population growth, and government programs to cope with the problem have often made it worse.  Yet the size of America’s waistline was relatively stable until around 1980.  In the past 20 years, though, the proportion of Americans who are obese has swelled to 31 percent; another 34% are merely fat.” (Akst)  So even though the food itself is doing well, and technically increasing human’s fitness levels (which is presumably why it was selected for) it is having a lot of unintended consequences on our health, and our societies.  Cordain, et al explains that because humans ate the same way for almost 200,000 years, our genome became accustomed to that pre-agricultural diet.  Then, “when permanent environmental changes occur[ed] in [the] population, individuals bearing the previous average status quo genome experience evolutionary discordance…This evolutionary discordance manifests itself phenotypically as disease, increased morbidity and mortality, and reduced reproductive success (341). They are suggesting that this type of food is actually decreasing our fitness.

As we saw previously with the rise agriculture, it seems that humans tend to select foods based on the foods’ ability to increase humans’ fitness levels, so a new way of eating has recently sprung up.  Because it is now possibly the case that healthier, lower calorie foods will increase our fitness, locally grown and organic foods, particularly produce, are beginning to thrive (Hurst). This is known as the Green Revolution, and is perhaps in an effort to mimic humans’ previous eating patterns.  Much of America is still in the packaged, processed stage of this food story, but all around us we are beginning to see a shift towards “all natural” and “fresh” foods. As this is still a relatively new type of eating, it is hard to say whether this type of food will become more successful still, or slowly die out in competition with the packaged food, which is still propagating itself very successfully.  Perhaps they will co-evolve, and become dependent on each other, or perhaps a new way of eating will come in to fill a niche, and take over altogether.

Whatever it is that is going on in our world, though, there will always be a food there to fill the requirements of how we want to eat, whether it be quickly or healthily or by spending all day gathering. It has been shown that food is very adaptive to its environment (which is human eating patterns), and as long as humans have control over the food we produce, it will continue to adapt to our needs accordingly.

References

Akst, Daniel. "Cheap Eats." Wilson Quarterly. (2003): n. page. Printed web page.

Belovsky, Gary. "Hunter-Gatherer Foraging: A Linear Programming Approach." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 6. (1987): 29-76. Web. 17 Apr. 2012.

Blake, J. S., K. D. Munoz, and S. Volpe. Nutrition;from science to you. Second Custom Edition for Ithaca College. San Fransisco: Pearson, 2010. Print.

Cohen, Mark N.  “Archaeological Evidence for Population Pressure in Pre-Agricultural Societies American Antiquity.”  (Oct., 1975), pp. 471-475

Cordain, Loren, et al. "Origins and evolution of the Western diet; health implications for the 21st century." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 81. (2005): 341-354.

Diamond, Jared. (A) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The fate of Human Societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999. Print.

Diamond, Jared. (B) "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race." Discover. May (1987): 64-66.

Eaton, Boyd. "The ancestral human diet: what was it and should it be a paradigm for contemporary nutrition?." Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. 06/28-07/01/2005. East Anglia, Norwich: 2006. 65, 1-6.

Eldredge, N.. "The Sixth Extinction." actionbioscience.org. American Institute of Biological Sciences, 2005. Web. 17 Apr 2012. .

Hurst, Blake. "Up on the Farm." Wilson Quarterly. (2003): n. page. Printed web page.

Kuijt, Ian , and Bill Finlayson. "Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley."  (2009): n. page.

Levenstein, Harvey A. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, Part 12. University of California Press, 2003. Print.

Longchamps, Alisha. "Taste." Article Directory. 2012. Web. 9 May 2012. .

Milton, Katharine. "Back to Basics: Why Foods of Wild Primates Have Relevance for Mondern Human Health." (2000): n. page.

Pelto, Gretel H., and Pertti J Pelto. "Diet and Delocalization: Dietary Changes since 1750." Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 14.2 (1983): 507-528. Print.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 1. Print.

SUMMER

So it's summer.  I have a little over 2 weeks until Groundswell starts (which is the sustainable farming class I'm taking), and in that time I am working A LOT at the Y.  90 hours this pay period.  I really don't mind working that much.  It's a fun job most of the time, and I'm always doing so many different things.  Lifeguarding is definitely the least fun, but even that is sometimes not that bad because it's so much more laid back than the pool at home.  Lots of times it just ends up being the 2 guards just chit chatting the whole shift while we watch the pool.  Plus there is no cleaning involved.  All I have to do is watch the pool for several hours and I'm done. But even that is better than home because there are rules about parents  having to be present and these people are paying to be there so its a whole different atmosphere....basically parents don't just send their demon children there all day every summer for us to deal with, which is nice.

I'm also teaching lessons. This session is almost over, but I've only had 2 classes because I was in school for most of it.  Next week, though,  I start teaching 5 days a week which means I will have something like 8 classes.  Hopefully I can remember all of their names.  I like lessons better here too because in all but the very first class, the kids can't touch the bottom.  They are forced to swim.  There is none if this stopping and standing up business that used to irritate me so much.  I am teaching the equivalent of a level 3 group now (for all of you who understand what that means) and most of them can swim a 25 of front crawl and back crawl.  Yeah, it may not be pretty, but stopping really isn't an option so they just keep going. Also, being afraid of the deep end really isn't an option either.  It makes my life so much easier, because I can just work on swimming with them, not yelling at them or coaching them to get over their fears.

Last night was my first night coaching the swim team.  This is by far the best.  I worked all day yesterday and came home with a smile on my face because I got to coach right at the end and it was SO FUN.  Coaching is always something I've been interested in, and since there were only 3 of us there last night, I got total control of the 2 youngest lanes.  They were cute and fun and willing to swim and I got to make up the sets and  the drills with no one watching over my shoulder.  So fun.

So the Y is about the best job I could have asked for.  I wish the pay was a little better, and I wish more people worked there so I didn't feel so obligated to fill all the holes in the schedule and cover people's classes when they were gone, but I would rather being doing something fun for a lot of hours than making more money somewhere else doing something not fun.

My favorite part of the summer though is just being able to come home from whatever I've been doing all day and just sit.  I don't feel guilty about watching TV or hanging with friends because I don't have anything else I should be doing. No papers looming over my head or readings for tomorrow's class or any of that.  Just pure relaxation.  I've never been so grateful for that. Even if I'm busy all day and I come home at 10 o'clock, I can just relax.  I LOVE IT.

I have 2 goals for this summer:  First, to lose the last 10 pounds that I've been working on since London.  Now I know you're all rollling your eyes right now.  But really I just gained some weight in London and I haven't quite lost it all yet, so this summer is my chance.  It's not that I think I'm fat, just that I don't think the way I look now is how I should look and how I want to look. I lost 10 and 15 pounds the last 2 summers respectively, so it shouldn't be a problem (Did I mention how much I love having time to work out again?).  It will be so nice to fit into all my favorite clothes again (which is the main reason I'm working on this...If it weren't for tight clothes I really wouldn't look that much different), which have been hiding in the back of the closet for quite some time.  The homeade oreos I made yesterday aren't really helping....But I also made a delicious salad which I am going to devour once I finish this post, go for a run, and shower.

My other goal is to buy a MacBook air.  While this computer is still functioning, it does some weird things sometimes, and will need to be replaced soon anyways. I would rather do it while it still works than to have it crash in the middle of the semester where I'm scrambling to buy a new one.  Plus, I'll only be an undergrad for 1 more year, and apple offers discounts to students.  I need to jump on that.  My next paycheck from the Y will be about half of what I need,  but I'm also taking donations. Cash or check, please. ;)

My classes got a little rough at the end.  I got that senioritis thing (even though I was only a junior) and just kind of stopped caring.  I put a lot of work into Organic chemistry and my final honors paper (which I'm contemplating posting on here), but other than that I was just kind of like "Meh".  I almost didn't even take my Friday final. I was so wound up packing that I started 20 minutes late (for a 45 minute online final) and I didn't know any of the answers and frankly I just didn't care because it was my least favorite class and my last final of the year.  I kind of half answered 3 of the 4 questions and turned it in.  I'm almost positive that class will be my lowest grade...It was just SUCH a hard class to go do every Monday Wednesday Friday.  BLECH.

All in all though, I think my grades were fine.  The fact that I had 2 jobs, a swim club commitment, orchestra, a new boyfriend, and was taking 18 (19 with orchestra) credits has led me to be okay with the work I did, which for the most part was pretty good.  Like I said, I let that one class slip, but the other 5 classes were up to my usual standards, I think.  Grades come out Thursday, so we will see.

PS I want to give a big shout out to Ryan, without whom moving on Friday would have been so much more miserable.  He carried so many heavy boxes out to my car for me, plus he's storing a bunch of stuff of mine and Casey's at his house for the summer.  He was the most helpful, and how did I repay him? By slamming my hatchback door right on his head during the moving process.  Sorry again, bro!

Wow I just typed so much.  I LOVE FREE TIME WEEEEEEEEEE

Alllll of the things!

It's been awhile.  In the last 3 weeks or so since I've written, basically all I've done is finish my junior year.  Which was no small accomplishment, trust me.  I don't think I've ever been so excited for summer to be here, and I don't think I've ever enjoyed the down time (of the last 3 days) of summer more.  That semester was a killer.  But I'm done now.

I spent all day Friday moving all my stuff out of my on campus apartment into my off campus apartment.  Turns out I have a lot of stuff.  I took me 2 full car loads, and then another almost full load which included my bike.  And I have a big car.  Most of that stuff is still piled in the living room.  The room I am subletting for the summer will be vacated in 2 days...Jess is going to Rochester for her cadaver lab for the summer.  Right now, I am in Fiona's room.  She went home to Maine for a little while.  It's a little weird not having a place to call my own yet, but more than anything I'm glad to be done moving.   I hate moving.  I literally cannot wait until the point in my life where I'm not a young adult bouncing from place to place, but more of a regular adult with a more permanent situation so I can get all my stuff (believe it or not, in addition to my 3 carloads here in Ithaca, my room at home is still full) into a house and set up shop for real. A lot of you may be asking yourself, "Why does she need so much stuff?" and that's a good question, but I think there are 4 answers to that.

First,  if I need something, I buy it.  I think I get that from my dad.  I have the mentality that even if I only need it for this one little thing, I may be able to use it again someday so I'm just going to get it and then I will have it.  Also, I'm not big on borrowing things from people.  I don't like to mooch and use everyone else's stuff all the time.  Usually, I am the one people borrow things from, and that's okay because at least some of this stuff that I buy is getting used.  I dunno.  I'm weird.

Secondly, I buy things in bulk.  I get that from my mom.  If I see Suave shampoo and conditioner on sale, I buy like 8 bottles because I know I will use it EVENTUALLY, because I use it after I swim, and it's cheap now.  Then, when my other bottles run out, I won't have to go to the store and buy new ones, they will be right here.  Basically anything that won't go bad that I know I'll use EVENTUALLY and is cheaper to buy in bulk, I will buy in bulk (Hello, giant box of bandaids...)

Thirdly, I have several hobbies that involve owning a lot of things.  Scrapbooking and sewing, namely.  Arts and crafts are something I've had a special place in my heart for since I was a very small child, and I still love it.  I have boxes and boxes in my close at home full of beads and stickers and yarn and thread for friendship bracelets and colored paper and fabric that I found on sale and I know I will use EVENTUALLY and all sorts of other knicknacks like that.  It makes me so sad that I have to leave it all at home because I just don't have room for it at school but I LOVE doing it.  I also had to leave my sewing machine and my Cricut machine at home, even though I am kind of in dire need of a sewing machine here....so many things to fix!  There is no doubt that when I have a house of my own, one room will be an arts and crafts room.

And lastly, I'm very sentimental.  That's how I got into scrapbooking (along with my love of crafts).  Quite a few of the boxes in my closet at home are things from my childhood that I just couldn't bare to part with, such as my favorite dolls and stuffed animals, and little knicknacks from places I've been or stuff that people have given me.  It makes me so happy to pull it out and look at it all and remember the good times, but it does take up a lot of space.  Sigh.  Hopefully I don't become a hoarder.

So anyways, I was just gonna update you on my life but this is already pretty long so I will move to a new post now.  But hopefully you now understand why I have so much stuff.  Although I've kind of vowed never to buy anything again at this point.

Snow day--except not really.

All the elementary through high school in Ithaca got snow day's today! GEEZ.

Just yesterday, Casey asked me if I ever got to wear the snow boots I bought Freshman year this year.  The answer was no.  We essentially skipped winter this year.  On January 31, people were out side in shorts tanning.  Over spring break and the week after, I wore shorts every day.  This last Friday (3 days ago), it was over 80 degrees!

Last night at 1 am when I may or may not have gone outside for unspecified reasons, it was snowing.  Alot.  I was out there for about three minutes, and my head was completely piled with snow...like I was wearing a hat!   It did that all night.

My favorite tree right outside our door was broken in 2 spots. The snow was so wet and heavy.  It would be the BEST snowman making snow....(more pictures to come?)

My car was completely covered

 All the poor blooming plants have no chance.  These are some bushes outside my apartment.

 These poor little trees were just mindin' their own business when BOOM.  (Sorry about the bad quality....The sky was doing this weird wet thing that was quite unpleasant and getting it all over my camera lens.

 This was on my walk to class today.

 Poor trees look like they want to fall over.

So I guess Ithaca has decided to switch winter and summer.  This is LITERALLY the most snow we've gotten all year.  On April 23rd.  At least I got to wear my boots today.

Update:

Rob and I DID make a snowman.  And I was right, it was excellent snowman making snow.

Notice the flowers for arms and the blooming tree in the background.

It was supposed to be a girl snowman but I think Rob's roommate has since made some anatomical changes.

How I got locked IN my room

It was Friday afternoon.   I was done with classes for the week, which is the best feeling ever. Casey had left a little while ago with Ryan, and then was headed home for Easter weekend. (Yes this post is a little delayed.)  I was about to meet Rob outside and head over to Brett's for dinner.  When he texted me to say he was outside, I went to open the door, and it was locked. The little button was not pushed though.

Now, I did not panic because this is actually the second time this has happened.  The first time was last semester, and Christina was on her way over.  She texted us to tell us she was outside our building, and when we went to go get her, we realized we couldn't get out.  But, it was a simple fix.  We dropped her our keys from the balcony, she came in and unlocked the door from the outside. No big deal.

So, Rob came in with someone else who opened the door, I slipped my key under the door, and it didn't work.  I was stuck.  He fiddled with it for awhile, and then Brett came over and fiddled with it for awhile, but it was no use.  So I called public safety.  Know who they sent?  A plumber. After about 30 minutes of him fiddling with it, he called for backup and went to pick up his more experienced electrician friend.  Rob and Brett had been pretty valiant waiting outside for me this whole time, but by this point they were ready to leave.  So, they headed down the stairs, but they noticed that fire escape door was open.  So they went out on to the fire escape and I opened my bathroom window and I had a brief glimpse of civilazation that would have to last me about another hour.

Notice that I am inside the screen, and Rob is outside...

This new guy knew what he was doing a little more, and after about 15 minutes they got it open.  He explained that sometimes when the door gets slammed too hard the little lockey thing gets jammed in the big hole with the door closely thing.  (I'm really good at door vocabulary.)   I thought back to the last person to close our door: RYAN.

See, usually when Ryan comes in our door, he doesn't really close it, and like 3 hours later we realize our door's been open the whole time and we yell at him.  So, on his way out, he didn't really close it, but then he came back up the stairs, SLAMMED it to make a statement, and then they left.  And I hadn't tried to get out since then.

BUT ANYWAYS.  They got it fixed and reassembled (eventually) and then the next Tuesday an actual door guy came and actually fixed it. (For the second time.)

Biochemistry

I'm sure this topic has been mentioned on this blog before, but right now I'm going to give you the whole story because I'm irritated.

Biochemistry is kind of an essential class for nutrition students.  Therefore, it is a required class for our major.  Also, any grad school program you look at requires it.  Now, we don't take the same biochem the biochem majors take, because there are a lot of prereqs leading up to that and its a two semester class and we don't have time.  We just take a 1 semester course that teaches us about metabolism and junk.

But guess what?  Ithaca only offers this class every other year in the fall.  They offered it Fall 09 (my first semester of college) and Fall 2011 (the semester after I got back from London).  Neither of these times did I meet the prereqs for the class,  so neither of these times did I take it.

But now, it's not supposed to be offered again until Fall 2013, the semester after I graduate.  So this problem has been on my radar since Freshman year.  I knew it was going to be a problem, and every semester I ask my adviser and I ask the head of our department what they are doing about it.  Well, now that everyone else who is in the same boat as me (which is about 10 of us) is also realizing its a problem, our nutrition adviser took it upon herself to set up a meeting with the head of the biochem department and demand that they offer this course more often and demand that they do something for us upcoming seniors.  So, about 5 days ago, we got an email saying that a new biochem course will be offered in the fall for premed and nutrition students. (It's not the same one, mind you, but it will work.)  Halle-freakin-lujah.

Today is registration.  I was able to register at 10:50, right at the end of my evolution class.  So near the end of class, I pulled out my iPad and typed in all my  course numbers.  All of them went through.  Except bichem.

It said I did not meet the prereqs for the class.  (Side note: Everyone else in our grade who was able to take chemistry, Orgo 1 and Orgo 2 a year earlier took Orgo 2 and the other biochem at the same time in the fall of 2011, because both classes are only offered in the fall.)  So, I looked up the prereqs.  Orgo 2 is a prereq, but I CAN'T TAKE IT TILL THE FALL BECAUSE I'M ONLY IN ORGO 1 NOW.

Luckily, the teacher of this new biochem class (who is also my Orgo 2 teacher next semester...at least I got that class...) has class in the same room that I was sitting in during all of this.  So when he walked in I said, "Can I get a prereq override?  I need to take these concurrently to graduate."  Guess what he said?

No. I wouldn't be able to do it without an Orgo 2 background first.  I angrily calmly explained to him that I need this class to graduate.  (Is he even aware that the reason his department is making him offer this class all of the sudden is for people JUST LIKE ME?)  I then explained to him that there are approximately 10 other students in my shoes who are going to need to take it at the same time as Orgo 2.  He was astounded, because he said the class is going to fill up fast and there won't be that many spots for us unworthy nutrition students. (It's not like our adviser was the one who set this whole ball rolling or anything.)  After a little more freaking out discussion, he said I should come talk to him tomorrow.  (You know, after every senior has already registered for classes and filled that class up...I get to register today because I'm in the honors program.)

Well I'm going to talk to him tomorrow. Caleb is coming with me.  He might think it will be too hard for me to do it at the same time as Orgo 2, but the alternative is taking it at Cornell at the same time as Orgo 2.  I don't particularly want to do that.

ALSO, I walked in to my class right after that, and 4 other students were already talking about this exact problem. Just in this one class.  This is not even all of them.   I told each one of them to write him an email (as proof of what I told him earlier because he didn't seem to believe that there were that many of us), and that I was going to have a chat with him tomorrow.

BLAH ITHACA WHY CAN'T YOU JUST OFFER AND LET ME TAKE THE CLASSES YOU REQUIRE ME TO TAKE SOMETIME BEFORE I GRADUATE? EH? EH?

Update:

Later that same day, I went  and talked to the associate professor and chair of our department (for some reason our department has two of these and I talked to both of them), my advisor, and my internship advisor who can't really do anything but I was frustrated and needed to vent.  This was the first they were hearing about this, and some emails were sent to the biochem department.

I checked, and at the end of senior registration Tuesday, only 5 people were signed up in the class.  I gloated a little, because what that means is that without overriding the whole lot of us into the class, the class would  not be offered.  5 is not enough of a demand.  I think the professor who was teaching it thought that it was going to fill without us (because OUR adviser expressed such a need for the class) so he thought that letting a few measly nutrition students in who weren't done with biochem would just slow the rest of the class down.

WELL NEWSFLASH: the reason you're offering this course is for US, bro.  Notice how no one signed up?  That's because we were all blocked out of it because of your Orgo 2 prereq.  I got an email yesterday (Tuesday) from my adviser (she felt compelled to email to let me know what was going on due to the minor freak out I had in her office Monday afternoon) saying that he was going to let us in.

So, today people have been handing in override forms like crazy.  When I turned mine in to the chem department today, there was a whole stack of green papers just like it on the poor ladies desk. I when I signed up for the class online  after my form went through, and I checked how many people were in it so far: 17. That's 12 more since yesterday.  And I'm sure there are more coming.

Maybe someday these grown adults will learn how to communicate and solve problems.  Until then I'm here to do it for them.

Bye Life

2 presentations, 1 10-page paper, 1 3-page essay, 1 organic chemistry quiz (I studied for 3 hours for last week's quiz), 1 research proposal, 1 research critique, 1 interview with a faculty member for a later project, lots of reading (including 2/3 of a book), 20 hours at the Y, and tutoring.  In one week.

Also laundry.  Always laundry. I will give 1 million dollars to the person who comes up with a way to do laundry in less than 2 hours.

consider yourselves updated.