Why We Actually Need Fast Food

 

If you had to choose between a 4 for $4 at Wendy’s versus a $15+ purchase of groceries to make your own dinner, it’s a good guess you’d rather go the easy way out. For people who can’t afford to buy $300 of food at the store every week, fast food is an easy solution to being able to provide for yourself and/or your family.

With over 322 million people living in the United States, fast food is essential. Easy and cheap, and it’s something. For people who can afford to drop hundreds of dollars at a supermarket for fresh produce, fast food restaurants are sleazy and gross. It’s probably fair that rich people can’t understand that they don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. Wealthier people say “Oh, this is so unhealthy” and that it creates obesity, but a poor person will say, “Thank goodness, something I can afford.”

How are we supposed to feed 300 million people 3 meals a day with fresh fruits and vegetables, proteins and healthy fats? The answer is, we can’t. There are people who can’t even get to that 3-meal-a-day plan. And the meals they can eat? Fast food. It feeds people fast and for cheap.

There’s no conceivable way to get enough land to farm all those vegetables and livestock in a spacious area, unless we want to delete everyone in the South and turn it into strict farmland, which is obviously not going to happen. We have to get used to fast food as a part of culture, because people need it.

Cultural Appropriation and Food

There’s an important distinction between appreciating the food and misnaming a dish that contains a few ingredients that are commonly used in another culture. America is a melting pot of cultures – different languages, styles, art, literature, and food. The different foods should be appreciated and respected – you should want to try them! If done well, “immigrant food can provoke discussions about personal history and shared diasporas” (Ruth Tam, 2015), but there are many examples where this has been done very wrong.

“Asian Cuisine”

We have all been to a restaurant where the menu says that there’s “Orange Chicken,” which is supposed to support cultural diversity, but, often times, there’s not much appreciation for the culture behind the dish. “New” trendy meals, such as bone broth (featured on the Today Show as the 2015 hottest new food trend), make no mention of its history in Chinese culture. As Ruth Tam says in her article “How it feels when white people shame your culture’s food — then make it trendy,” “the same dishes hyped as “authentic” on trendy menus were scorned when cooked in the homes of the immigrants who brought them here.”

The disgust at Southeast Asian foods, particularly smell, has become such a common issue that the ABC sitcom, “Fresh Off the Boat,” had an episode on it, where they made fun of one of the main character’s lunches for smelling and looking differently.

Try New Foods

Go explore and try new foods! There’s nothing wrong with going to an Indian restaurant if you’re not Indian! You don’t have to try everything, but the things you do try, learn about where that food is coming from, its origins, its historical importance.

America is one of the world’s biggest melting pots, so why not go out and learn about the different cultures? As Sarah Jon says in her article, “Why Cultural Appropriation of Food is Bad,”

“Go seek out and experience all the food. When you get the chance, try everything – whether it’s in the various cultural enclaves scattering giant cities like LA or NYC, the local mom and pop shops with the immigrant owners who lovingly dish up their favorite home-country dishes, or the innovative establishments serving the coolest mash-ups of foreign dishes you’ve never heard of.”

Why You Should Watch Miraculous Ladybug

A new show on the rise in Korea, France, Canada, and the U.S. is Miraculous Ladybug. An animated show about a young Chinese-French ninth grade girl, Marinette, ML focuses on not only female-empowerment, but the city of Paris and its culture. It is a show with a target audience of children, but it also has resonated with many teens and even adults, though with a positive effect rather than a negative one.

Marinette is clumsy, sweet, and endearing. She’s a teenage girl with two loving, supportive parents who run a bakery. She wants to go into fashion, and her parents support her every interest. She has many friends in her class, and also a crush on a boy. The show makes her have a typical teenage life that kids can relate to, and separate her from their audience by making her a superheroine.

She doesn’t have super-strength, speed, invisibility, or the ability to fly – Ladybug has luck. She is witty, tough, and smart. Her special item is her “Lucky Charm,” which can become any number of odd objects to help save the day against villains.

Her superhero sidekick is Chat Noir, the epitome of concentrated bad luck. He is flirty, loves to make puns, and has a more-than-obvious crush on Ladybug. They work in sync together, and there is no “damsel in distress” with Ladybug. More often than not, she’s doing the saving!

 

 

The show makes their dynamic all the more interesting by making Chat Noir’s civilian identity none other than Marinette’s crush, Adrien. Part of the reason the show has such a wide audience is because the romance between the two characters is so infuriatingly adorable.

The main pull from young adult audiences is that there is a biracial, female, lead character, who is a also a cool superheroine. How many shows can hit those marks? This is a show many young girls can watch and say, “I can be strong like Ladybug, too!”

The effect of ML on young audiences across the globe is already so amazing. Kids watch the show for the comedy, the action, the heroics, the romance – it has a lot of different themes. The greatest thing I have seen from the show is that there is no “but you’re a girl” trope. Ladybug is seen as formidable and awe-inspiring by Parisians, not for her looks, but for her skill. It’s refreshing to see a show like this, and hopefully more are on their way!

Social Media and Being Transgender

In my high school, people stuck to the cis-heteronormative. You never heard if anyone came out. My town was a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” kind of place. You wouldn’t be exiled for not adhering to the unfortunate “status quo,” but you would quickly become somewhat of an outsider in the limelight. There was no education in the curriculum, so this was totally foreign territory. The word “gay” was used as a slur, since we didn’t know what it meant in fifth grade. The slur used towards people who identify as transgender (I will not type it) was used sparingly, but it was still used. I had no idea what being transgender meant until my junior year. I had no idea what the queer community was, or how much they faced on the daily. I found out through social media. Social media is a large reason why I figured myself out. The main site that I used throughout high school was my key to unlocking who I am, and, oddly enough, it was Tumblr.

Despite being a social media website that is poorly maintained, it’s still a great platform. All posts are seen publicly, and can be commented on and expanded. It’s a social-private mix, with people posting very personal experiences or feelings or posting witty one-liners. Following a lot of people, I see all sorts of posts, ranging from long historical analyses to memes. Originally, it was an artist that got me exploring my own gender. Their art is one of my favorite styles, and it took me a while to understand what their gender meant to them. Their blog, and eventually other blogs with genderqueer people, became my go-to places. I wanted to understand how they figured it out. How could these remarkable people find the right pronouns, the right names, the right gender that fit them? Outside of that small world, I was in a second skin. I started to become uncomfortable with the phrases “young woman” and “pretty girl.” I didn’t feel attached to those terms, and the more I thought that way, the more it felt like needles in my chest.

I can now proudly say that I am bigender. I identify as female and nonbinary. I don’t always feel one or the other – sometimes I feel both (those are the most confusing times), and sometimes I can go weeks feeling one or the other. There are a lot of days that I accidentally misgender myself. Being misgendered really sucks, but I have a good circle of friends who get it, and support me. But despite being bigender, I am cis-passing. It can be a bit of a struggle, but it’s safer. It’s easier with relatives and strangers to not be shunned on sight, and I ache for those of you who can’t feel that privilege.

My story aside, social media (especially Tumblr), has become a safe haven for those who aren’t ready to come out to their family/friends, or who need a support group. There are specific blogs that answer questions or redirect to valid resources for trans kids. There is a mindset in large circles on social media that are accepting of all gender identities and sexualities. On Tumblr, it’s normal, even popular, to be trans. Stepping outside of that world is jarring, because there aren’t as many people who believe that gender is a social construct.

Older generations aren’t as tech savvy, so they are not prominent on sites as quickly evolving as Tumblr. It makes Tumblr our space to talk and learn about these (unfortunately) sensitive topics, and gain support from others. This community is uplifting and like a family in some ways. It gives me hope that younger generations will recognize that being trans isn’t abnormal, but normal, because of how normal it is online. That we are just as much a person as the next. This might all be because of the growth of confidence through social media, and I know that with more and more people understanding and accepting the queer community, we will be seen as normal in the future.

The Sentinelese Are Modern Civilization Too

The Last “Uncivilized” Place on Earth

Shown above is an aerial view of an island in the Bay of Bengal, the North Sentinel Island. The island is covered with trees and other vegetation, surrounded by coral reefs, and therefore lacks natural harbors. It looks uninhabited from the sky, yet there is a civilization that has had very limited contact with the outside world for over 60,000 years.

The Sentinelese people are anywhere from 50-400 individuals, with what is believed to be their own language. Anthropologists know little about them, mainly due to India’s three-mile exclusion zone. The Indian government implemented this safe zone not only for the safety of the Sentinelese, but for everyone else. In the few photographs that have been taken of the Sentinelese people, there is clear hostility towards outsiders. In the picture below, the Sentinelese stand at the shore, spears and bows in hand. They have thrown spears and shot arrows at helicopters and any ships that have come too close. There is a shipwreck off of one of the coasts, where it is believed that two fishermen were fishing inside the exclusion zone and were killed by the Sentinelese for trespassing.

The little contact with these people includes the kidnapping of six people in 1879. Four children and an elderly couple were taken from the island to Port Blair, where the colonial officer who kidnapped them stated that the elders sickened and died. They sent the weakened children back to the island with supplies, where an epidemic most likely started.

The other major reason that there is a three-mile exclusion zone is because these people do not have the immunities to diseases that most of the modern world now possesses. As far as experts know, they have no vaccines or immunities, so sending people ashore would ensure the death of every Sentinelese person on the island. The Sentinelese live without electricity, automatic weaponry, and all the technology that the majority of the Western World could not live easily without.

Despite the differences in their culture versus Western World culture, the Sentinelese are a modern civilization, because they are a surviving culture today. The ignorance of some people in Europe and America towards these non-Western World people has caused a stirring on social media sites. There are people saying to “send the military in” and “wipe them out,” while others agree with their no-contact policy. Due to the ease of travel and the expectation that travel makes a person more learned, there are also people who want to explore the island and exploit what the Sentinelese people have to offer. There is a common stereotype that cultures without modern technology are savage and wild. The idea that Western colonization is necessary for a civilization to be seen as “advanced” in the modern world shows how the Western World can be close-minded and ignorant of the importance of all cultures.

What is known about the Sentinelese people is that they are strong, healthy, and unwilling to come in contact with outsiders. The no-contact policy is the safest course of action, and most respectful, since that is the policy the Sentinelese seem to uphold.

 

For more pictures:

View post on imgur.com

 

References:

http://www.survivalinternational.org/campaigns/mostisolated