Jasmijns
Category: Uncategorized
January 24, 2016
Strange kind of emptiness
When I go shopping, it’s one empty shop after another. City centres seem emptier every day. And not only city centres, think about old office buildings just outside city centres, disbanded hospitals, schools. Is it a mass movement from city back to the countryside? We need to do something with empty spaces! And that’s exactly what’s happening now. All initiatives have the same cause. Emptiness. But they all solve this problem with different solutions.
The oldest mall in America now hosts 48 charming low-cost micro apartments. Quite a smart thing to get a building literally alive again.
Another cool initiative is the community garden designed by 3 students from Cal Poly Pomona’s architecture department. The greater LA area is an industrial wasteland. Many low-income and middle class communities have to deal with air pollution and other environmental issues prevalent in suburban cities. Like the availability of locally grown, organic and affordable vegetables. This way the industrial wasteland becomes a community garden that feeds families from the big city.
What do these initiatives have in common? They give a new meaning to an old place or building. A shopping mall can become an apartment complex. It’s not smart to put a new shop in a building where all the other shops failed ad well. We need to think more creative in stead of going for the same thing over and over again.
January 24, 2016
Netflix and chill?
Homeland, Breaking bad, House of Cards, Suits. It’s sounds like a Saturday evening with your friends on the couch. We don’t ask, are you coming over for a movie? No, it’s Netflix and chill now.
Less movies, more and better series. Something I noticed a while ago.. When was the last time I went to the movies? It seems series are taking over. At least, in my opinion. Sites like HBO and Netflix are more and more popular. And it seems not for their movies. Everyone I know only watches series and maybe when they have an entire day off they watch a movie. Funny thing because nobody watches just one episode so the amount of time they spend doesn’t make any difference.
Why is it so popular? Is it their series? And what about is it about with series? Do we like the fact we really get to know characters, maybe empathise with them and we recognise situations or ourselves?
A few days ago I saw an article about the ‘true crime genre’ and it’s popularity. Think about series like ‘making a murder’. Why is this so popular? Is it because we are seeking for transparency? This development has been here for a while now. This could be an expression of it. Our search for ‘the truth’. We don’t want to be told what to think and we like the confrontation between a powerful government and an ‘innocent’ citizen. Taking control of our own lives is a development that is also here for quite a while.
Nevertheless, Netflix knows what we want and they created the Netflix switch!
January 24, 2016
When your mother was young, we eat bird food because we thought it was healthy! Can you believe it?
After my setback about super foods I started to do some research and I found this article that pretends superfood isn’t a protected title. Meaning companies can call a chocolate bar super food. And that’s exactly what happened.
‘Gouden windei’, a price from foodwatch you’re not happy to receive as a food producer. The ‘superfood’ cranberries from Albert Heijn are voted to be the most misleading product of 2015. The cranberries exist for 68% from added syrup and for just 30% actually from cranberries. Sugars are being sold as ‘superfood’. Not cool, especially when you think you’re eating sugar free .. Check my previous post about my sugar free week!
But what are super foods? I mean, we can’t seriously call these cranberries and food we normally give to birds ‘super foods’. Right? That’s something ‘the green women’ thought too. People comment different on the article. Some say yes, I do eat super foods because they are good for you and some say, please just eat normal you don’t need all those health supplements.
January 24, 2016
Look vs see
Another development! Meat, what are we going to do with our meat system. We want to know things like; where does it come from? Were the animals treated okay? What did they eat during their supposing short life? I went to see a documentary about meat. Where our meat comes from and how the animals were treated during the breeding process.
Marijn Frank, the maker of this documentary has a history in the food industry. She worked for ‘Keuringsdienst van Waarde’. They examine whether products are what they pretend to be. Most of the time products were not even close to what they should be. Like crab salad or the snails from France that actually came out our own garden. Marijn asks herself why she still feels the need to eat meat while she saw how it was produced. Is she addicted to meat?
That specific question caught my attention. I saw YouTube videos showing chickens being shred in little pieces while still being alive when they went in the machine. And STILL I eat a chicken nugget when I’m at a birthday party. Why is this possible? What goes wrong inside my head?
I’m not proud to tell but it works the same with my clothes. I saw documentaries showing manufactories in Bangladesh where my H&M clothes come from. I saw the people working 18 hours a day so I can wear a 5-euro top that I’ll probably wear one time. Do I need to see things with my own eyes? Do I really need to kill a cow once in my life to respect meat more?
Am I really that used to cheap food and clothes? Like there is no way back?
January 24, 2016
COCO
This is a new initiative from Coco conserven. Their message? Food in a can, isn’t that bad! Our new desire for fresh food asks a lot of our nature, logistic and supermarkets. Food in a can is longer tenable and stops our enormous food waste! Coco conserven started developing cans with nice food inside. No longer the cans we Dutch people are used too, but a good soup and a good pasta sauce. I like this way of thinking. Cans aren’t that bad right ..
January 24, 2016
A health thing, I hope ..
This thing happened, a thing I thought I would never do. Talking about it alone makes me feel like a girl who is really focused on her diet and most of the time, I don’t really like those kinds of girls.
Sugar free. Sugar free. Sugar free.
I ate sugar free for an entire week. Yes, 7 days, 168 hours, 10080 minutes no sugar. Sugar free breakfast, sugar free lunch and a sugar free diner. No chocolate or cookies but also no cheese, bread, tea, and actually all pre-packaged food. And let’s not forget this, no alcohol. I know it’s a thing now and everyone is more and more aware of the things we eat, but I never thought sugar to be in so many products. I mean, normal cracker why is there sugar in it? It opened my eyes, and my naïve behaviour towards food I think. What sugar does with my body isn’t okay. I really felt a need, an urge to eat and drink sugar. I lost weight and okay, I might have felt a little bit better after that week. But an entire sugar free diet for the rest of my life isn’t going to happen.
After one week I had enough and I started to eat ‘normal’ again. Well, I didn’t go back where I ended before. I eat more basis sugar free products now and try to eat 1 sugar free meal a day.
It’s just, I’m wondering. Is this a health thing? An urge for perfection? We have super foods, fashion chicks became fit girls and we all want to post as many as possible ‘healthy food’ on our instagram and Facebook accounts.
Maybe that’s the motivation. We share everything. We share our morning run on Facebook, our healthy lunch banana pancakes on instagram and maybe sneek a picture of our abs in the evening on snap chat.
Why did I do it then? I hope it was purely a health thing. I wanted to feel more energy. And maybe look better?
Jasmijns 