Pizza Meals

This is my Last Action Project for my last term, Food For Thought. In this course we are studying about how to review foods. For this Action Project we had to choose a food to get at a restaurant and a home meal. We had to research a lot about our food. We had to find the food, review it and say what we smelled, tasted and felt about the food.  We also had to take a picture of our foods. The thing that I am most proud of is making the whole project. Something that was hard for me was reviewing it.  Please learn more about the project down below.

AA, Food Meals,(2016)

People either hate or enjoy pizza. Since I love pizza it will be my homemade meal. I will prepare a medium sized pizza. In these couple of paragraphs I will share my notes. The pizza looks like a square of meat with bread around it. It looks green and big. When you look at the pizza you can see steam coming from it. The pizza also looks outstanding. The pizza smells like green peppers and onions. When I took the pizza out of the oven it smelled earthy which reminds me of the outdoors. As for the feeling of the pizza it is hard and harsh.  When you feel it, it also feels warm and humid like a warm fire. The pizza bubbles so it sounds like birds pecking in the summertime and maybe like the breeze in the morning. When I eat the pizza is crunch and chewy at the same time.  It also tastes lemony. The dish I made appears fresh and organic to me. I know this because when it came out of the oven I had that feeling of perfection that I had just made a wonderful pizza. Six adjectives I would describe this meal are good, juicy, great, homemade, hot, tasty, Italian. The ingredients are: Mild Italian sausage, pizza sauce, mushrooms, onions, green peppers, green olives, black olives, Romano cheese, Mozzarella cheese, and hot roll mix. You can get all of these ingredients at Mariano’s. Overall this meal was very delicious and when I finished it I were full.

To compare my homemade dish with that of a professional, I wandered out to the Chicago Domino's pizza restaurant. The pizza looks like meat with sauce on it. It also looks like an angel coming down from heaven. It smells like the beach in the summer. It smells like flowers on a summer's day. The pizza feels like a smooth ground. It feels like a hot pot. It sounds like a stove pan sizzling. It sounds like the trees in the summer. When I eat the pizza it sounds like a wood being thrown in a fire. The pizza taste sweet, like very sweet. It also taste lemony sometimes. Six words to describe this meal are creamy, crispy, wholesome, lumpy, fine and saucy.

The dish that I preferred was the homemade meal. It had a more unique taste because I added more ingredients to it. Although the restaurant meal was delightful, it was much too crunchy. I thought that the homemade meal had a more preferable smell to it like real organic onions, pepper and sausage. The texture for the homemade meal was more tangible. When you touch it you can feel the warmth of it like a warm fire burning and the dough was crisp outside and soft inside. Over all the homemade meal looked more perfect. In the end, the homemade meal also sounded better. When you bit down on it you could just hear it sizzle. I would recommend the homemade meal, because overall it tasted, sounded, felt and looked superior. I would also recommend it because you could taste every ingredient in it. It tasted crunchy and smooth at the same time. The homemade meal was also quite a bit heavier, so after 10 or 15 bites I was full. Overall the homemade meal can have more foods within it so that means it might taste more perfect than each ingredient was originally. It can also be stored more easily than the restaurant meal.

One of Pollan’s five food transformations is called ‘from quality to quantity.’ This relates to my homemade meal for three reasons. The 1st is the quality of the meat is important. The 2nd, the quantity is huge-there are two pounds of hot Italian sausage in the meal. Lastly, pizza is a big meal because a whole group of people can eat it and enjoy sharing this together. Pollan’s 5 food transformations ‘quality to quantity’ is related to the restaurant meal for three reasons. The 1st one is that it does have a little quality from how it is packaged and sent to the person who ordered it. The 2nd one is the quantity of it is big. For the 3rd and final one this meal is big enough to feed ten people at a party since there are two boxes. Overall, both of the meals can be understood through Pollan’s 5 food transformations because they both can speak to quality to quantity.

In conclusion both of these meals are good in quantity but overall the homemade meal is the greater one out of both of the two meals because it was far superior in quality.

GMOs Are They Bad Or Good

In the STEAM course "Food" we are learning about GMOs and if they are bad or good. We also learned about the mathematics of GMOs data. We also had to examine different sides of the GMO debate. For the project we had to research our position and write a convincing argument. I like how the end results of my data turned out. I also like the graph that we had to do. What I am proud of is my whole video in all. The one thing that I could have done better was talk much lower in the video. I also thought that I could have practiced a little more before I made my video. For the graph my two dates were 1998 and 1999 there was a 8.6% change going up between the two dates. You can learn more about my video and graph below by watching it and looking at the graph.

GMO Debate: AA Argues Against GMOs from GCE Lab School on Vimeo.

1998-1999 blue
43-38=5 43/5
8.6% change going up.
What this means is the 8.6% change in diabetes.

This graph represents that the soy and corn crops are going higher but diabetes is going up higher with GMOs in foods. These both have to do with each other because the GMO’s can lead to diabetes. The red is how high it is going for the rate of food with GMO’s in them from farms. Imagine that a little kid had allergies and ate GMO’s and died. This could happen because GMO’s can make new allergies and maybe kids who already have allergies can maybe get another as opposed to someone who doesn't consume GMOs.

Works Cited

"Monsanto Utilizing Ivy League Influence to Push out Even More Genetically Modified ‘solutions’ to Problems Caused by GMOs in the First Place." GMO News – GMO News and Information. Web. 24 May 2016.




"Real Costs of GM Crops Concealed." Friends of the Earth Europe. Web. 24 May 2016.




Sonima.com. "Understanding the Controversy and Science of GMOs." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com. Web. 24 May 2016




"ZhengTianyu's Blog." ZhengTianyus Blog. Web. 24 May 2016.

External Credit

For my community service hours this year I did a bunch of different activities to help my school community and my own community. For my First External Credit I planted trees. I worked with the good people at GCE Lab School for 5 hours. The thing that I can take away from this is that it is good to help the earth. For my second External Credit I did a run with GCE that was a 5 hours event. What I got out of participating in this event was that running for a cause is a good thing. For my third External Credit I went to Under One Sky SDG's Event. I went with my classmates. The thing I got out of it was that it was fun. For the fourth External Credit I went was went to the Oxfam Hunger Banquet. I did this with my classmates. It was an interesting experience to see how much people can eat and can not eat teaching us about hunger and poverty. For the fifth External Credit I went to The Grove went to The Grove to do magic for seniors I did it three times it was for 3 hours. What I got out of it was that I like to see seniors smile. For the 6 External Credit what I did was work at my school. I did it with a friend and workers who worked on the new GCE school. I did it three times and it was for 16 hours. It made me happy to help my school. For the 7 External Credit I worked at my church. I worked with some of the people who go to my church. I did it three times it was for 17 hours. What I got out of it was I like to help my church.

Magic, One up, (2016)

Growth Population

This is my second Action Project for my last term, Food For Thought. In this course we are studying in this unit is to see what a global food system looks like, and to understand the human and environmental impacts of this system. For this Action Project we had to choose a global issue that is happening in the world. We had to research a lot about our our issue and how to learn more about it. We had to find way to fix that issue and named three ways we could do that. We also had to find a way to address that issue that we are learning about. The thing that I am most proud of is making the whole project. Something that was hard for me was recording the project. Since I had to record something I made many mistakes but it all ended well. Please learn more about the project down below.

 

How many people can the earth hold? There are about 7.125 billion people living on Earth right now. Many Scientists think that the Earth can hold up 10 billion people. According to Live Scientist: “So 10 billion people is the uppermost population limit where food is concerned. Because it's extremely unlikely that everyone will agree to stop eating meat, Wilson thinks the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth based on food resources will most likely fall short of 10 billion.” My position is that I think too many people are being born in the world and soon the earth won’t have any more room for more people. One of the reasons why we have so many people here today is because many years ago people died much younger due to disease and lack of proper nutrition. Life expectancy was very short. Now people are much safer and healthier than they were before with food security. My solution is that we need to colonize other planets. In 2027 nine people will go to Mars and start a community. That community and others like it will have to grow dramatically. The development of food systems can be traced back to the origins of the production of food surpluses. These surpluses enabled the development of settled areas and we can use this on Mars.

We may have to have more than one earth by the rate humans are growing. “One possibility they consider is that future world fertility rates will remain what they were in 1990. The consequences of this, with accompanying small declines in death rates, are startling. By 2025, the world would have 11 billion people, double its number today. Another doubling would take only a bit more than 25 years, as the fastest- growing segments of the population become a larger proportion of the total. By 2150 there would be 694,213,000,000 of us, a little over 125 times our present population.” This is a global issue because in the next 9 years the world population would be more than 11 million more than the earth can hold. This means soon there would have to be more than one earth.

Many civilizations had a growth problem but each one had a different way of fixing it. According to BBC News: China had a one-child rule. If they had a girl, sometimes the girl was killed or abandoned in order to get a boy. Other countries use ultrasound to abort girls and have boys. This is causing a population imbalance with too many men in some countries and not enough women. That may lower the birthrate. The earth had less people before because there were a lot more diseases like the Black Plague. After the Black Plague a lot of the people were dead and the food was bad. The Black Death it was caused by Yersinia pestis bacterium. The Black Plague first exploded in Europe between 1347 and 1351. According to Empires Of Food: “It’s likely that 10 percent of Europeans starved to death around the year 1316.63 Worse carnage lay ahead. In October 1347, a mere generation after the famine, the bubonic plague hatched in Sicily.” The estimated number of deaths was 75 million people. After that it got better since they made food better and finds ways for people not to get diseases. Now people are still dying from some diseases but less than it was before. What we can learn from history is that advances in food and health change the birth rate. Now we have cures that can help us with some a disease. According to the Empires Of Food book: “By growing and storing food surpluses, the monasteries became business, cultural, and financial centers, as well as dietary hubs. Monks were such noted businessmen that one medieval writer observed that, around one monastery, the River Seine was a channel for vessels that trade in many goods. Abbots signed trade agreements with other abbots. The monks at St. Denis, for example, had a long-term arrangement to buy salt, wine, and oil from their colleagues in Marseille.” What this quote means is that the monks fixed the food that caused so many deaths. They used that to preserve food and made it better to make the food healthier.

A couple of ways I have so we can reduce the population growth is Even some people will inhabit Mars that is only 9 people out of 7 billion people that won’t do anything to help the population be smaller. We need population control. Supplied can be sent to Mars for the people and more people can stay on Mars and other planets. People could try and make a rocket or something that can travel to Mars and back to earth more easily and faster. A last way to reduce the population growth is to have everyone educated or to focus on having every young person educated. Three ways to address the population growth is “provide universal access to safe and effective contraceptive options for both sexes.” “Guarantee education through secondary school for all, especially girls.” “Integrate lessons on population, environment, and development into school curricula at multiple levels.” People will say it will be expensive to educate and it will take too long to give the supplies to Mars. Yes it will be expensive but we could create robots to help us. We could also find away to make it shorter for the time to get to Mars. In the meantime people need to have less children.

Soon there would have to be two earths in order to withstand the population growth. “One possibility they consider is that future world fertility rates will remain what they were in 1990. The consequences of this, with accompanying small declines in death rates, are startling. By 2025, the world would have 11 billion people, double its number today. Another doubling would take only a bit more than 25 years, as the fastest- growing segments of the population become a larger proportion of the total. By 2150 there would be 694,213,000,000 of us, a little over 125 times our present population.” My recommendation to achieve slowing population growth and finding new planets we must make it's a priority. My last thoughts are that we need hope for our earth because of how the population is growing. If we keep on making more and more people be born on earth the world might die of hunger and diseases.

WORKS CITED

Abhiprerna, Abhiprerna Smit. "10 Effective Ways to Control Population - List Crux." ListCrux. 31 Jan. 2016. Web. 02 May 2016.

Bryan Bryan. "Civilization and Economic Growth." Civilization and Economic Growth. Web. 02 May 2016.

"China to End One-child Policy and Allow Two." BBC News. NA, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 10 May 2016.

Cohen, Joel E. "June 2016." Discover Magazine. Web. 02 May 2016.

"Food Systems." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 10 May 2016.

Fraser, Evan D.G., Andrew, Rimas “Empires Of Food." Arrow, 2011. Print.

"Nine Population Strategies to Stop Short of 9 Billion." Worldwatch Institute. 11 July 20012. Web. 02 May 2016.

TechMediaNetwork, 2011. Web. 02 May 2016. 

Wolchover, Natalie. "How Many People Can Earth Support?” LiveScience.

The Making Of Bread

In the STEAM course "Food" we are learning about leavening agents and which is best for bread. We also learned about the mathematics of making bread. The group I was in had to use yeast for the leavening agent. I like how the end results of my data turned out. I also like the graph we had to do. What I am proud of is my group’s bread, it was delicious. The one thing that I could have done better would be to make the bread a little tastier.

Sugar Is Me!

     This is my first Action Project for my last term, Food. In this course we are studying food and where it comes from and framing. For this Action Project we had to choose an ingredient and write about it in first person from where it was made to our recipes. We had to research a lot about our ingredient and the center origin of it. The thing that I am most proud of is making the whole project. Something that was hard for me was recording the project. Please learn more about the project down below.

                                             Sugar is me! from AA on Vimeo.

A Rooftop Garden Delight

In the STEAM course "Food" we are learning about planting food/crops and plants. We also learned about the mathematics of planting plants and the science behind it. We learned about a farmer named Mr. Fukuoka who uses new ways to plant plants in a way that is better for the environment. I chose to plant my garden on the roof of my building. I will begin planting some vegetables and flowering plants in the garden. I like how the end results of my garden turned out. I also like the plants that I chose for the garden. What I am proud of is my garden overall and the illustration for my garden. The two things that I could have done better would be to choose some better ways to plant the plants in the garden and I could have made my drawing more specific.

My garden will be located on the roof of my building. I put it there because it is sunny, it is big, and small animals like rabbits and squirrels won't eat my plants. I will have to make sure that the wind doesn't destroy the garden or blow away the plants. I will be constructing a top over it so the wind won’t ruin it, but so it still gets sunlight.

I learned that plants need three main things from the soil to stay alive: Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K), and Nitrogen (N). My volume is H16 in x W60 in x L84 in = 80,640 cubic in or 47 cubic feet. My garden will have soil in 10 squares surrounded by water. Instead of going on the roof every day I will go once a week because my water system will keep the plants moist over a longer time. I would find a way to keep the water in the garden without it coming out, probably some kind of plastic sheet lining. The plants for my garden are called mutualism because they all work together without one plant taking chemicals away from another plant.

AA Garden (2016)

The materials I will use for my garden will be seeds for vegetables and seeds for flowering plants. I also will need some soil, wood for the base and bed. I will need nails and a hammer to put the wood together. I will need water to feed the plants, and some clear plastic panels to block the wind. I also will have to find a waterproof material to keep the water in its holding area. I will line the area where the water will be with thick plastic sheeting so the water won't seep through the wood and ruin the garden.

My sample soil pH was a 7.9. I needed it to be lower, around 6.7 to 6.4. Therefore I will need to add organic matter to the soil to lower the pH level. The Potassium was only 200 parts per million. I will need to put Sulfate of Potash which is 1/2 per 100 square feet for the quantity. After that my soil should be good because I don’t need to add anything for Nitrogen and Phosphorus. Both at their current levels.

My Potassium calculations are:

35 square feet

0.5/100 = x/35

0.5 x 35 = 100x         

x=0.175 pounds of sulfate of potash

Test	Result	Parts per Million Equivalency Chart
pH	7.9	----
Phosphorus (P)	P3	50
Potassium (K)	K1	200
Nitrogen (N)	N4	80

Nutrient	Product	Quantity
Nitrogen	0	0
Phosphorus	0	0
Potassium	Sulfate of Potash	½ per 100 square feet

The plants I chose were basil, borage, dill, marigolds, mint, nasturtium, onion, oregano, radish and sunflower. The onion is the nitrogen fixer out of all the 10 plants listed here. Onion’s companions are basil, borage, dill, marigolds, nasturtium, oregano, radish, mint and sunflower.

What I learned from this project was that everything needs to be thought out in advance. You need to know a lot about the properties and the nutritional needs of plants in order to make the correct plant selection. You need know how to change your soil if you don’t have good soil. You need to know about pH level and how it works. You will also need to know about volume and how to calculate it.

The volumes for the three containers I chose to put my plants in are: Plastic milk jug V=H8in x W4in x L4in = 128 cubic inches; Water bottle V= 3.14 x 3^2 x 6 = 169.56 cubic inches; Plastic box V= H8in x W10in x L14in = 1120 cubic inches.

In conclusion my garden will have ten plants in it. I will only need to water them once a week. I won’t have to buy many vegetables at the store because I am growing them in my garden. The soil I have now is pretty good, but I will have to improve it slightly. This will be fun to make at home.

WORK CITED:

"Companion Planting Guide - Growing Tips Article at Burpee.com." Companion Planting Guide - Growing Tips Article at Burpee.com. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

"Cubic Feet To Cubic Inches Conversion." How Many Cubic Inches in a Cubic Foot? Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

"Top Ten Companion Plants." Porchside Gardening For Food and Fun. 2010. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Pollution Action Plan

     This is my third Action Project for my third term course, Fuel. In this course we learned how to balance chemical equations, and discussed pollution. For this Action Project we had to do three action plans to help not pollute the air and we had to see what pollution is and how it gets into our atmosphere. We also had to make a diagram, and make it look like a paper. The thing that I am most proud of is making the diagram and making the paper. Something that was hard for me was finding the equation. Please learn more about the project down below.

Who Am I Dream

This is my third action project for, Who Am I. In this course we did studying about dreams, and what they have to do with us. In order to complete this project, I had to study about my dreams, and when I am awake. I had to create a dreamcatcher. We also had to share a bad dream with our partner. Next I examined my partner's dream. For this we had to see what Id, superego, and ego does in your dreams and reality. What I am most proud of is the dreamcatcher. Something that was hard for me was creating the explanation for the dreamcatcher. Please learn more about my dreamcatcher. You can view it down below.

AA, Dream catcher,(2016)

I made a dreamcatcher it was hard at the beginning because I used a big hoop so my dreamcatcher. After I finished and started doing the loops it was easy and fun. The center of the dreamcatcher symbolize God protecting me. And how there is protection. The positive things the I want it to pass through is good wishes. Like thing I want or things I want for others. The bad things I want to get stuck is bad things like bad dreams. There are Fender guitar picks on it they represent by passion for music and rock.

AA, Dream catcher,(2016)

One of the vocabulary words is Id. The Id represents the middle the bead in the dream catcher because it choose what stays or goes like a boss. Id is when you are asleep the Id is like the boss. If I can study my dreams I can find out what the Id is doing. The second word is superego. The superego represents the good and bad dissensions in a person's life it choose what you do when you are awake even if it is bad. The superego is when you are awake it is like the one who make dissunitions even though they may not be good. If I study my dissunitions and how I react I can learn how my superego works. The lesson I learned was you need to be patient. The dream I told my partner was: I would wake up from hearing a scream. I would look in front of my door I heard a whisper saying “don’t look.” There was a man in black carrying a body away somewhere. Every night I been having that. Until a week ago it was me who was the dead body. When I woke up I was in my living room and my arms were hurting. I interpret this dream to be a fear or nervous. Maybe it was a dream I had when I was little and it is just recurring and I just did not remember because I don’t really remember my dreams that much. The only time I do is if it is important or a fear or even some bad dreams. My partner talked about my dream being a fear or being afraid of something that happened or will happen. It could also mean that I am nervous for something. The materials I used were a metal ring, a bead, string and thinner string. I got the materials from home and school.

Doubt

         This is my second action project for, Who Am I. In this course we will be studying about doubt, and what philosophers think about it. In order to complete this project, I had to study about philosophers and what they think is doubt. I had to think of a question for the base of my project. Why it is important to me? How did I arrive at the question? We also had to see how this fit Wilhelm’s definition of a guiding question. We had to see if it is a question that addresses humanity or if it is Universal question. Next I examined both external and internal risks. For the philosophers we had to choose one to study answering this question, I chose Descartes. For the last slide we had to choose which discipline that you agreed with the most. What I am most proud of was making the slideshow, thinking of the question and deciding how it finished at the end. Something that was hard for me was finding what a philosopher would say to the question and selecting which discipline I agreed with the most. Please learn more about the slideshow and you can view it down below.