Po(sey) Sessions

Individual, Community, and School Influences on Childhood Nutrition in Iron County, Utah. The world is evolving. Through the globalization of society combined with broader access to information, people encounter difficulty with data overload . Certain cooking practices, health techniques, and ideas about nature and agriculture are being overlooked, lost, or outright forgotten. As our access to information increases, our desire to maintain knowledge decreases. Skills are rarely mastered and often left to a Google search on demand. The availability of technology is inspiring for some, a hurdle for others. One of the greatest casualties of the technological age is the decentralization of local communities. Technology provides humans with so much, as individuals find more connections online than they do in real life; where people stare at their phones and look for their next pleasure fix, it still can’t solve many of the world’s problems. In some cases it is making them worse. Hung...

The desire to seek out and identify the authentic is a primary motivator behind many aspects of American life. Perhaps it is the focus on the individuality that is key to the American spirit that pushes us to celebrate the purity of creation by a single individual. Many studies have examined (1) the desire for the authentic, (2) the definition of authenticity, and (3) who is the ultimate judge. Every time we interact with food we have an opportunity for culinary tourism. Eating food can transport us to different places and expose us to different cultures. Culinary tourism is also the experience of traveling to another country or region and partaking in their food culture. Whether the food is a framework for the tourism experience or not is up to the eater, but there is no denying the way in which the two aspects of eating and travel are often linked. Authenticity, at it’s core, is essential to the sensation of transportation. But is authenticity a true marker of ethnic and reg...

Four semesters ago I returned to Souther Utah University to finish my undergraduate degree. I started on a new major. This time around I am a Sociology major and I am focusing on the topic of food whenever possible. Annually the school holds a conference where students can present the academic experience they have participated in. This year I had the opportunity to present on my work connected to a  series of trips I took to South Carolina. I chose to do a PechaKucha presentation to take advantage of the photos I took throughout my travels. What is a PechaKucha? It is a presentation style in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each (6 minutes and 40 seconds in total). PechaKucha is a Japanese word that means chit-chat. The focus of this type of presentation is to simultaneously be less formal and present concise information. The hope is that a presentation like this can start a conversation. The following are the slides I used and the notes I wrote to accompany them....

In my Food and Culture class we were challenged to find our food identity. For most students we had a deep desire to connect with our childhood. This video is a representation of my childhood food identity.