5/22/2019 Food Essay- Cloe Ulshafer - Google Docs

Chew on This
Cloe Ulshafer

When I was in sixth grade, my family moved into a neighborhood with a community garden. I
was really excited because it meant my mom would be outside when I was out biking. My
excitement quickly faded when my mom started harvesting all the food she grew. For the rest of
the summer and even that fall, almost every meal we ate was derived from we grew. This might
sound like a really responsible and smart way to feed your family but from the point of view of a
twelve-year-old deprived of artificial foods and her teenage brother it was the equivalent of the
world ending. Fortunately for us, we had a loophole out of our vegetable caused doomsday, we
called it dads week. Although our father has always been on us about eating healthy, he also
took us shopping and knew that he couldn’t say no to every machine made sugar products that
we put in the cart.
I think that around this time in my life I found my food ethic. I was going a week on week
off and so half the month I would be gorging myself with garbage and the other half I would be
chomping down on a celery stock as an afternoon snack. This is not the ideal way to consume
food no matter what your age is. This cycle got so bad, that at the end of the week at my dad's
house, all I wanted was an apple, and after not eating junk food for a week had me craving
sprite and fruit snacks. I remember talking to my brother about it and we talked about how weird
it was for us to go back an forth, not only were our eating habits completely different, most
aspects of our lives changed week on week off. If I could go back and change the way I started
this habbit, I would, but I couldn’t stop myself
Although it is not easy for a twelve-year-old to admit they are wrong, I did. I told my dad
that I didn’t like eating junk food and he went back to buying all of the food that a typical family
would eat for dinner, meaning, no more twelve packs of sprite, but it also meant that I wouldn’t
be feeling desperate for a carrot after eating food with no nutritional value for an entire week.
Of course, I still eat my share of junk food, however, I have found a way to balance my
meals so that I am getting the most nutrition that I can before I dive into my gushers and iced
tea. It is very important to find what you like to eat, it’s how e survive, I, unfortunately, found the
food I like to eat and I am now anemic, meaning the amount of iron in my blood is really low
which causes larger health issues if you don’t take care of it, so the balance of the junk and the
nutrients is an important thing to find or else I can end up with some serious health problems.
I decided to make this change in my life and start accepting the never-ending
vegetables, because Durango Colorado is a rather expensive town to live in, and eating organic
is an expensive way to provide dinner for your family, my mother, however, was able to provide
nice organic meals to us every night for months at very little cost because most of what we had
been eating came from our backyard.
I had no idea what a food ethic was until we started this project, but it turns out that mine
has been developing since before I can remember, and the most important parts are still
coming. Everybody that we know has strong food ethics, whether they know it or not, I think we
need to push people to understand their ethics and grow on them if we do that, not only can we

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5/22/2019 Food Essay- Cloe Ulshafer - Google Docs

make our communities healthier, we can also create a higher demand for organic and help bring
sustainable farms into the eyes of the public on a larger scale.

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