Food for Thought: Eagle Rock Class Takes a Look at Our Eating Habits
Today’s post is the third in a series that explores new class offerings for Eagle Rock School’s 82nd trimester, and this time around, we’re sitting in on You Are What You Eat, a class that asks students to research the foods they eat and investigate ways that food influences more than just our physical bodies.
Instructors for this class are Sara Benge, our science instructional specialist, and myself — Mitaali Taskar, a 2020/2021 Public Allies Fellows. If you didn’t get a chance to read Eagle Rock Welcomes 7 Public Allies Fellows to Our Community for 2020/2021, I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in biology, so I naturally have questions, including:
- Why do we need food?
- What foods do we need?
- What food is healthy?
- What does “healthy” mean?
- And, if food is such a necessity, why is there such inequity in the our country’s food system?
The final question posed above is in response to Eagle Rock’s effort to incorporate historically responsive literacy in our greater push towards embodying anti-racist, social justice teachings, while at the same time going virtual in response to COVID-19. As you may be aware, we have restructured some of our 10-week in-person classes into a five-week virtual course, and in this case, we’re discussing food justice and the many related perceptions surrounding health.
That being said, you can’t talk about food justice and health in the United States without first learning the basics of food. So, for the first few weeks of this class, students have been learning about macronutrients and micronutrients, and how these nutrients are presented to us through our culture, our families, and of course, media in the form of advertising.
Students were asked to take, for example, the connection between Continue reading…