You know the saying “You are what you eat”?

Well, here in PLP 9 Health and Career, we’re taking that quote quite literal. This is the “I Am What I Eat” assignment, and be ready to laugh, because my end product of it is quite ridiculous (in a good way, don’t worry!)

To begin our healthy eating portion of H&C we watched a few videos. I think the video that stood out to me most was the Ted Talk by Ellen Gustafson where she talked about world hunger as compared to world obesity and how we can make change over the next thirty years. You can watch the video here and comment what you think!

I think this video really spoke to me unlike the other ones because it made me take a moment to think about how (as I was eating a bowl of popcorn) there were other people in the world that hadn’t tasted a bite of food in months or even longer. It made me want to learn more about how I could help the insanely large tally of one billion starving people in the world.

Ellen was also a great Ted talk to watch because you could see how passionate she was about the world hunger problem. Her and Lauren Bush didn’t back down from their passion when United Nations disapproved of their idea and they instead took it upon themselves to create their own company to help children in poor countries get school meals for a full year. I was really inspired by how Lauren and Ellen distributed 550,000 bags in three years — that’s 550,000 kids being fed at school everyday!

Another point that I found interesting was the extreme contrast between the tally of obese vs. starving people in the world. I was educated throughout the video about how agriculture really impacts how we eat and how certain parts of the world retain their food.

Overall, I thought the Ted talk was very educating and inspiring and it made me really interested in what Ellen would be continuing to conquer for the years to come. I visited her website and was impressed, if you want to check it out you can click here.

Now, for the assignment portion of this part of Health and Career, we have the food portrait!

We were assigned to create a portrait of ourselves that was portrayed in you guessed it, food. Inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, we had to think about the food we eat and use those foods to create an image using our sweet image editing skills from grade 8. His work is pretty cool, so I have some pictures you can look at below.

I have made it a habit in the past six months to eat quite healthy, so it wasn’t as bad as you’d all probably assume. (By the way, my title is misleading due to the fact that I don’t eat Fruit Loops. Oops.) Mine included things like granola, spinach, goldfish crackers, chicken, rice, quinoa, muffins, smoothies, salads, berry bowls, etc. It displays basically what I found in my fridge and pantry.

The apps I used included Back Eraser Paper53 and PicCollage. I used Back Eraser to turn the JPEG images into PNGs, and then I collaged them on PicCollage. I searched up a silhouette on Google and layer my images over top of it. I wanted to make it a silhouette of me rather than a portrait with eyes and a nose and such because I thought it looked best. Lastly I imported the portrait into Paper53 and drew on an eye and lips.

I thought this project was really good because it allowed me to reflect on how I’ve changed my eating habits and how I can continue to change them so I’m healthy. When I was making a list of foods I ate a lot of, I thought about why I ate these specific foods and it also made me reflect on the foods I may have been more embarrassed to include in the portrait. The images are supposed to use food to reflect who we are, and show us that what we eat does show on our bodies! I’m really happy that even though yes, pizza, Chipotle, a hamburger, chocolate, a muffin and fishes are on there they are out shone by the healthy foods I make a habit to eat constantly.

To conclude, I think this introduction to healthy eating was very insightful and I learned not only about my eating habits but also eating habits around the world and how we can work to change them.

Brb, the pizza man just arrived at my house, he has 5 large pizzas for me…

 

Till next time!