Recipe

Jamaican Potato Salad 

Ingredients 

• 4 cups of diced potatoes 
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup of mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup of corn
• 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper
• 1/4 cup of corn
• 1/4 cup of peas
• 1/4 cup of carrots
• 1/4 teaspoon of salt

Directions

1. Wash, peel, dice and cook and the potatoes with eggs
2. When the potatoes are boiled, you need to drain it instantly.
3. place everything in a large bowl.
4. Add corn, peas and carrots. 
5. Stir the pot with the mayonnaise with salt and pepper.
6. Add chopped eggs and stir lightly once more

Analysis 

 Health- Now that I have went through what goes into making this dish, I do not think it is as healthy as I originally thought. After making the dish I realized that it was really high in calories due to the amount of mayonnaise needed to finish it. Also, the carrots and corn come from a can so they are most likely processed. The Corn was low in sodium, depending on what they define as high. I do not believe that the eggs and potatoes were processed, and eggs can be bad if too much is consumed, but the entire dish only required 2 eggs.

Environment- I think that the canned foods came the farthest away because I am sure that the farms that produced the eggs and potatoes are relatively closer that a factory to process the food.

Economic- In all making this dish, which was made to feed 8-10 people, cost my family 10 dollars.  At a fast food place it would cost around 20-30 dollars to feed the 6 people in my house. We would have saved a lot of money if we did this regularly. Since all of my ingredients can come from a farm, those in control of the farm industry would have made the money.

Social-  I would think that the foods that were not processed would only have to go to packaging then to the store to me. Mayonnaise would need to be the collaboration of other ingredients for it to even be mayonnaise. The canned foods would need to be preserved and canned. 

Producing eggs myself would quickly become too expensive. I would need to get chickens and keep them in proper living conditions. Even if I grew the vegetables. I would need to buy a place to put them and keep them healthy as well.

Ingredients

• 2 jars of Ragu Chunky Tomato, Garlic & Onion- 125 g
• 1box of Barilla spaghetti noodle. 56 g
• 1lb of Cargill ground beef
• 3 tablespoon of minced garlic
• 2 cups of sugar

Procedures:

1. Start by boiling a tall pot of about 4 cups of water.
2. Next, add the pasta to the boiling water. As you add them, break them in half. It would be easier to put them in there in sections, and not all at once when breaking them up.
3. Meanwhile, as the noodle are getting soft inside of the boiling water, start to cook the ground beef in a pan, make sure you have the top. Chop up the beef up with a spatula so it wont burn, after about 5 mins, add the top and tend to the noodles but keep your eye on the beef so it wont burn. Keep chopping it from time to time.
4. Check the noodles, take one out, taste it and determine if it is soft enough for you. 
5. Once the noodles are done, check that the ground beef is all brown, you should not eat any red meat because its not cooked all the way.
6. Drain the beef once its all done.
7. You then mix the beef with the noodles, add the sugar, 2 jars of Ragu, and the garlic. Mix together very well so that each noodle has sauce on it! And ENJOY!

Analysis

This meal is 95% processed and each of its ingredient starts of from a raw plant or vegetable, but eventually goes through a process to get the delicious taste it has. The 5% is from the minced garlic which came from actual garlic cloves from a Farmers Market. If you ate this everyday, you could be in risk of having heart disease and diabetes. This meal gives off a lot of fat and salt from the ground beef and the sauce. Without moderation of this meal, you could get diabetes or high blood sugar. The added sugar makes this meal less nutritious. Sugar in the sauce plus the added sugar is unhealthy. 

Since most of the ingredients was commercially grown, it had a negative impact on the environment. A cow had to be killed, which decreased the CO2 it produced and let out into the air, while making the sauce, chemicals had to be sprayed on the tomatoes, then to smash the tomatoes up into a sauce like structure was most likely done by machines which released gas into the air, Im not too sure about the pasta was made, but I do not think it have a big negative impact on the environment, the making of the sugar used some type of machinery to crush it up into small grains and I don't think the garlic had a negative impact on the environment. The ingredient that may have traveled the farthest to end up in your meal is probably the sugar. Most of the U.S’s sugar comes from the Caribbean. and the tomatoes comes from California. The beef comes from different farms in Canada and the U.S. 

Overall, this meal cost $12.82 if you buy each ingredient from ShopRite. Which is not bad when comparing it to buying spaghetti when going out to a restaurant which will be about $15 dollars or up. You also will know that it is safe and you know how its being cooked and how is cooking it because you are making it at home. It is also better than going out and buying it because you can modify it yourself so that it tastes just how you want it to. 

Personal Reflection

What I learned this unit, that I do no eat as healthily as I should, and I could eat so much better. I buy a lot of the foods that are processed without even thinking about where it came from or what happened to it for it to taste so delicious. I help support these farmers who do this to these animals and spray all of the chemicals on out vegetables and fruits to make them larger. I also learned that some of the animals are being treated harshly and in live in conditions that are not suitable for their life and they are not expected to live long. The foods go through a long process and is genetically engineered to grow faster than they are supposed to naturally. I think that the biggest problem with our food system is that lots of people don't know, or think about how their food first started out as. I think because it taste so good, and it meets their expectations in food, such as a big size. Changes I could make to my food choices is to look at the food labels and remember what I learned this unit. The biggest impact of these changes on me would be, I will become healthier, it will reduce my risks of diabetes and cancers or other health deficiencies that could come later in life from eating these foods. I am willing to make some changes, but I do not think I will commit to making all of them.

Spaghetti Recipe

Serves 4-5

Time: about 45-50minutes

a box of Mantia’s Italiano Spaghetti

a jar of Mantia’s Italiano Pasta Sauce, flavored with meat

Mantia’s Italiano Parmesan cheese (optional)

1/2 lb. of ground beef cooked and seasoned to taste (optional)

1 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of italian season

1 teaspoon of parsley flakes

1. Put a pot of water on the stove and bring it to a boil. Once the water is boiling, pour you salt into the water. Break your spaghetti and then carefully put the spaghetti into the boiling water without letting the water splash.
2. Make sure the spaghetti don’t stick by stirring it for a few seconds with a fork and let the water come to a boil again. Once boiling, turn the heat down, low to medium, to allow the spaghetti to cook. Occasionally stir the spaghetti and allow the spaghetti to get soft. Taste the a piece of the spaghetti (taste test) to see if the spaghetti is done.
3. Turn of the burner once the spaghetti is done and strain it with a strainer. Put the spaghetti back in the pot. DON’T put the pot back on the burner it was on.
4. While the spaghetti is cooking, put the pasta sauce in another pan and let it come to a boil. If you’re using ground beef, this is the time to add it. Cut off the sauce immediately after boiling.
5. Pour your pasta sauce in with your spaghetti along with the italian season and parsley flakes and mix. Put spaghetti on separate plates

Analysis

Even though the dish isn’t all healthy it surely is good. My meal is 100% processed. In this meal there is about 10 grams of sugar, 4.5 grams fat, 11 grams of protein. By eating this meal, the body will balance the amount of sugar in your body making sure your body stays healthy. And depending on the body, it will turn the sugar in the food into glycogen or glucose. However, eating this meal everyday wouldn’t be a good thing to do because you don’t get the nutrition your body needs and it’s not a healthy meal. 

Since the entire dish is process, that means that none of it is organically grown. The tomatoes in the pasta sauce can be assumed to be commercially grown because that’s how most of foods are grown now. Now a days people want to grow huge vegetables, this isn’t healthy for us or the environment because a lot of chemicals go into commercially grown foods. This can kill many animals who might eat it and it’s not healthy for other plants. 

This dish as a whole cost about $5 which means it about the same price as something a person will get from a fast food restaurant. I’m not one hundred percent sure on how my meal is regulated but I’m sure that there are some kind of regulations for the food because since the ingredients are processed, that means that we shouldn’t be consuming so much of it. The CEOs of Mantia’s Italiano makes money off my meal because even thought I get the food for my meal at Shoprite or Save a Lot, the company is still making a profit off of it.

Since the ingredients in this dish isn’t made in Philadelphia, people have to actually ship the products around causing pollution to go up because of the amount of gas that has to be used to get the food from one place to another. Also eating a lot of this can cause a person to be a little lazy because if you add ground beef to it, it can be a little greasy. This dish could be a little more healthy if I had made my own pasta sauce with fresh ingredients. Same with the pasta, making homemade pasta would be a better choice than buying it because I would know what’s actually in my food. 

Personal Reflection

For this unit, I found out many things that I didn’t know in the past. The biggest problems I think with our food system is that most of our food is made out of one kind of food which is corn. This is a problem because for one our body can’t digest corn and we don’t get enough nutrition from corn. Also if most of our food is made from corn or soybeans it means that most of our food is processed. And the food we eat aren’t organic, the farmers use so many chemicals that it might not be healthy for us. Also the video we looked at about nutrition showed another problem we have in our food system which is the fact that the animals to which we get our food from are getting fed corn. The changes I could make to my food choices is trying to eat more foods that are organic or foods that are made out of organic food. Also not buying as much processed food than before. If I change the way I can for one have a more healthy diet because I would be getting the nutrition. These changes is something I am willing to make but it will also be difficult because getting organic food isn’t easy. The prices are high and you don’t really see a lot of organic food in many supermarkets.

Food Rule Slide