A Tasty Dinner Salad with a Story to tell

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Tasty Dinner Salad

Didn’t really have much to blog about today. Just thought my dinner salad look extra pretty, in spite of what are clearly GMO laden veggies (which I have no real choice about eating here in Chile).

Dang! Why are your fruits and vegetables so big here?

I noticed early on, here in Chile, what appeared to be super seed saturated fruits and vegetables.  Oh Monsanto!! You ubiquitous monster. I finally got up the nerve to ask the man at the fruit and vegetable store in my neighborhood if I could take pictures of the produce.  He kindly said, “Yes”.  As a side note, I showed a picture of a giant sized plum (it was as big as a Macintosh apple) I had purchased on Facebook with the caption, “I hope this isn’t a GMO fruit.”  One of my Chilean friends responded immediately, indicating that it was indeed a GMO grown fruit.  Le Sigh…  So here are the photos I took at the store this week.

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I placed a rather large onion next to these ears and corn and cucumbers so as to give the picture scale.  Pretty big corn there, yes?

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The stocks of celery here are twice the size I have seen in Ohio (which is a very agricultural state with support from the agricultural foods departments at OSU).  The celery here is 3x’s bigger than any of the celery stocks I have seen in Georgia.

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Above in this picture I am assuming that these were Kiwi fruit.  However, they had the oddest shapes I had ever seen.  I’m really not a big Kiwi eater so I had not problems staying away from these babies.  I also wanted to mention that the grapes are delicious here.  The ones in this photo to the right of the kiwi are a very deep dark purple. In most instances these would taste a little sour back in the U.S.  But, the grapes here tend to be very sweet and tasty.

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I get most of my fruits and vegetables at this place.  I love to cook so I stop by quite frequently during the week.  Plus they are waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy cheaper than the neighboring big chain grocery stores (both owned by WalMart).

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Well, I guess to compensate for the big produce in Chile, they make the portion sizes much smaller than what a typical North American would see.  I guess everything balances itself out that way.  I did notice that I rarely see anyone morbidly obese here in Talca, Chile.  Far less than you would see in the United States.  I always seem to actually loose weight faster here in Chile.

I am becoming more and more convinced that a lot of the foods we eat in the United States are processed in such a way that it promotes obesity or one becoming what would be called her a Gordita (if the person was being nicer about the insult).  Additionally, I am sure having to walk most places that I go here (for now) also contributes to my not getting too many more lbs. (pounds).  Correction, I meant kilos, since just about everyone else in the industrialized world is now on the metric system except the United States!  Ha ha 🙂

Well that was Pretty Awesome!

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Cultural Exchange Experiences

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Last Fall semester 2013, I presented in a class with Universidad Católica del Maule students.  I shared with them about the focus of my doctoral research and they also where able to interview me.  The course Professor Partrick Metzler informed me that this would be the first time many of them had ever met someone from another country (in my case the United States).  Their challenge was to speak and listen in English as much as possible, but if I would notice any furrowed eyebrows suggesting someone was not understanding me, I would translate by speaking the response or questions in Spanish which seemed to help allay many of the students’ nervousness.

Upon my return to UCMaule this semester, I finally had an opportunity to go by  Professor Matzler’s office and view the students’ project posters they used in their final class presentations.  I was pleasantly surprised to see how much they had  keyed in on particular topics.  I am sharing copies of their work in this blog post.  Their Professor  and I were very proud of the work that they did.  He and I  have plans to do something similar this semester with another class, and I will also do more of an academic teaching event with them in my Visiting Scholar capacities. 🙂

During their interviewing of me last semester, I spoke about my research focused on the civic engagement activities of adult learners following their careers as undergraduates (post-título).  I mentioned that my theoretical framework used Gravesian theory (Clare Graves) and it’s offspring of Spiral Dynamics a theoretical framework developed by Don Beck & Chris Cowan.  My scholarship and research also incorporates Multiple Intelligences theory (Howard Gardner) and Memetics, birthed from the early works of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine).  In essence, I plan to wear my “teaching hat” with the students here at UCMaule moving forward,  and I’ve also been invited to present to faculty and students at the Universidad Autónoma del Chile  her at their Talca Maule campus.

Being much younger than the adults I typically teach, these pregraduado  alumnos (i.e., undergraduates) were less interested in the ethereals of my doctoral level  graduate student life, but more attentive to discussing North American sports, racism, the University of Georgia, and my hometown of Akron, Ohio.  Clearly, some of the students did their research and visited my blog  site, because I noticed that a few of the posters focused on subjects I don’t remember discussing in their class.  Nevertheless, to those budding young scholarly researchers I say, “Well Done!”

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Issues of college sports, LeBron James, and athletic exploitation was discussed.  It’s ironic that subsequent to my visiting with them on these subjects, the courts have recently passed a law allowing college athletes to unionize.  Perhaps, that was the Futurist part of me coming out during our discussions. 😉

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Many student wanted to know about the history of American Slavery (Chile was one of the first countries to abolish slavery) and from my very limited research on these topic (not my area of scholarship), this country did not have as intricate a system of Chattel slavery as is historically documented in places like Brazil, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Cuba, etc…  Maybe that is why demographical Chile does not have a very large black population.  Honestly, issues of race rarely come up in conversations here.  I did witness an interesting exchange during my research with people trying to determine if they should call themselves white of latino/a.  That will be in my findings section where I mention possible future research.  But, I did learn that there is a supposedly thriving black population in northern Arica, Chile.  The name of the region is clearly named after the continent of Africa and I believe that there are some wonderful stories yet to be told by those inhabitants.

I will say that it was very interesting to me that no one really asked me much about my time as a field organizer during the 2008 Senator Barack Obama Presidential campaign.  I spent more time talking about LeBron James than President Obama.  That was different! lol  So, moving forward I am going to share the students’ visual aid documents and if any of them are reading this blog I want you all to know I think you did a great job on this assignment.  Kudos to Professor Patrick Metzler as well. 🙂

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I spent some time talking about North American racism and the historical legacy of both the Northern and Southern states in relation to the civil war and the Civil Rights movement.  That could easily be a class all by itself of course.  The interview and discussions had occurred fresh off of the recent court ruling in the George Zimmerman trial.  Seems liked someone must have pick up on some still raw emotions from me surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin.

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