GMO's More Like OMG's

This class is called food. In this portion of the semester, we learned about GMO's vs. organic food. I have learned so much and had some very difficult struggles. One thing that really stood out to me was a number of lies are told about the GMO industry. I never thought that people would criticize something so hard that they use every day. A hard struggle that I had was finding the time to finish this project. I found that trying to finish three projects within the last five days of school was a real struggle especially since I had interviews, outside classes, other homework, orthodontist, and doctors appointments. I overcame this challenge by staying up late and working whenever I had an opportunity. For this AP we had to choose a side (Pro-GMO vs. Anti-GMO). I chose pro-GMO because I feel that GMO's are very important to society.

Chicago Fire

At Chicago Fire Soccer Club I practiced soccer, played games and learned to work as a team. I learned a lot about teamwork and how to play as a team vs playing individually. I made a difference to others because I was a good teammate and I helped them learn team work. This experience impacted future jobs or volunteering experiences because in future things I will have lots of knowledge to work as a team rather than a individuale. I will share my experience with others by teaching soccer and also teaching teamwork. At the present time I am planning on playing soccer all four years of high school. I have 140 hours because I have played 3 times a week and had 1 game per weekend every week since December 1st 2016.

MSI Science Achievers

At the Museum of Science and Industry I did many things. First I would come in and learn the content that I needed to know for presenting to guests on the floor. Second I would go to the fab lab (Fabrication Laboratory) and create diffrent things with diffrent machines such as laser cutters, vinyl cutters, 3d printers, and 2d printers. Third, after lunch I go to the floor to present the current topic such as bed of nails which we demonstrate with a balloon and a bed of nails, for this I talked about how surface area affects weather the balloon would pop or not. Another topic I presented was the heart anatomy where the guests had to guess the diffrent parts of the heart and I would let them know if they were correct or not then I would explain what the part does. Fourth I would go to a class where we learn teamwork and we bond as a community. I made a difference to others because I taught hundreds of people new things and they really benefited from this because this was their first time hearing what I was teaching so they got a great first impression and wanted to come back for more. I plan to share my experience with others by telling them about the program and  also teaching them things I have learned. I plan to stay in the program for all four years through high school.

Chicago Lights

I have been introduced to Chicago lights through my church that I attend, Fourth Presbyterian. I've found this to be a very useful resource for having a mentor that I look forward to meeting every week and talking about everything from math to working out. I have also been coached on my platforms such as my resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn all for future job prospects. I am grateful to be part of such a great organization and my mentor has coached me through a lot of learning. I am so grateful to be part of such a great organization. I look forward to staying with them until I graduate. My focus is to use my time wisely.

In this program, I learned about how to apply for a job, how to do interviews, how to dress for them, and we made different things such as LinkedIn, my resume, and cover letters. I made a difference to others because when I get a job I will be helping people in need or teaching people new things. This has impacted future volunteering or work I do because now I will be prepared for it and I will know what to do and how to do it. I will share my experience with others by telling them about the experience or even teaching them new things.

Death By Monoculture?

This class is called Food For Thought. In this course, we talked about death. We learned about everything from the Irish Potato Famine to where certain foods originated from. In this course I encountered many struggles, one was right now during this action project and my computer wouldn't work and I couldn't receive feedback. I solved this by charging my computer when I got home and asking my parents and sister for feedback. We also did multiple FE's which gave me more insight into what we were learning. For this project, I had to write about a problem that's facing our global food supply. I brought up the topic of monocultures. These monocultures are massive problems because they make it easy for a single disease to come around and wipe out all the crops. I also talk about solutions and why they are good. If you have ever heard or even don't know what a monoculture is then kept reading to find out.

 

Did you know that during the Irish potato famine according to encyclopedia Britannica the population fell 25% in 1872? A monoculture is when you plant clones of the same plant in the entire field. The global food system relies on people all over the world to help produce food and if any place has a monoculture then the entire system can collapse because of one simple disease. Monocultures make the global food system extremely susceptible to failure and so if everyone changed to a polyculture then everything would be safer. I will be proposing solutions to SDG 2 which is no hunger.

Our food system depends on farmers to produce food. Three reasons that monocultures are not good are monocultures fail really easily according to control freaks they are 94% more susceptible than normal crops. This can become a massive problem for obvious reasons. Another reason is when monocultures destroy places they are known to kill thousands of people. A good example of this is what happened in Ireland and they lost thousands of people. The last one is monocultures use way more pesticides than average crops. All these things combined create a really dangerous crop that is susceptible to disease.

Ireland is a good example of a place that suffered from monoculture but there are other examples. California had a monoculture problem with their grapes and they were forced to replant 2 million grape vines. China also has one,“For instance, China is now a vast “sea of monocultures” dotted with little islands of native rice.” (pg. 488)

If you decide to depend on a single monoculture that could spell disaster for your country. The only way you could say Ireland addressed its problem, after the fact, was to stop planting monocultures and start planting polycultures. There is one really simple thing that we can learn from history and that is to never and I mean never plant monocultures. The safe way to go is to plant a polyculture. In case you're wondering the reason places are still planting monocultures is that they are what are considered cash crops which simply means they are produced for their money not for the farmers use.

There are a few things farmers can do to address this problem. First, I think that the government from where you're from can subsidise farmers who grow different crops so that a disease doesn't come through and wipe everything out. In the past governments have subsidized farms many times. According to Wikipedia the U.S government has given farms $1.4 billion in subsidized money. Second, Eat locally grown foods because small local farms don't grow monocultures. You might be wondering how we will get everyone to eat locally grown food and a solution is for more people to start their own gardens, especially in the city. You also may be wondering how we'll make the prices affordable, if enough people buy local then the prices will start decreasing since the farmers are getting more business. Third, don't buy from places that plant monocultures because it supports these farms and allows them to keep growing monocultures.

Our planet can't afford a mess up to the scale the Irish did, it wasn't just the Irish people's fault that they're crops messed up but I just am pointing out how disastrous it was. So we should never grow a monoculture. What you should take from this is that the best way to avoid the effects of planting a monoculture are to plant a polyculture. Polycultures are way safer and they create a nice variety of plants for people. Polycultures don't use nearly as many pesticides as a monoculture because they aren't as susceptible to disease as monocultures are. One way for you to support polycultures is by buying local since local farms aren't normally monocultures and you won't be supporting a farm that relies on a monoculture crop.

It will be addressing SDG 2 because it is zero hunger and if we find a more sustainable way to produce food then we will be able to feed everyone. When you're in a grocery store and are ready to pick up the cheap generic potato remember how many people died from something just like that.


Kniss, Posted By Andrew. "The problem with monoculture." Control Freaks. N.p., 17 Aug. 2013. Web. 23 May 2017.

Monoculture and the Irish Potato Famine: cases of missing genetic variation. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2017.

Mokyr, Joel. "Great Famine." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 19 Apr. 2017. Web. 23 May 2017.

"Monoculture." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 15 May 2017. Web. 23 May 2017.

"6 Problems with Monoculture Farming." Regenerative. N.p., 16 Dec. 2016. Web. 23 May 2017.

"Agricultural subsidy." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 22 May 2017. Web. 23 May 2017.

Clash of the Leavening Agents

This class is a STEAM class where we discussed food. To be more precise we looked at baking, leavening agents, the history of mankind related to food and fire, and we even got a chance to bake our own foods. I especially found the part about mankind's history to be interesting because I didn't know the impact that food and fire had on us. I definitely did not know that we used to have massive arms since we had to live in trees and we had super strong guts so that we could combat bacteria that was in the food that we couldn't cook before. I really like learning about how we completely changed after we figured out that we could create fire and cook our food, it's the reason our brains are so large now. For our action project, we had to bake bread to see what kind of leavening agent rose the highest, my group cooked sourdough bread which uses the sourdough starter as a leavening agent. The other two groups were baking soda and yeast. This was a difficult project because my group had a very hard time getting the bread to bake correctly and in the end, we did not manage to make it work. It was still a valid experiment and we used it which meant our bread grew the least.

In this project, we compared how much sourdough, baking soda, and yeast rose compared to each other. There were a few different variables in the bread such as the baking time, leavening agent used, and the baking temperature. Leavening agents are what are used to make the bread rise. All the loaves are going to be compared with rising height, taste, and texture. The research question we will be asking is which leavening agent makes the bread rise the highest. My hypothesis is that the baking soda will rise the highest because we created baking soda to replace natural leavening agents, and I don't think that we designed something that can't perform as well as natural things so I'm guessing baking soda. There are also different things called control groups and experimental groups. The control group was the yeast and the experimental group was the baking soda and the sourdough. A control group is a group we know the outcome of and is more predictable. The experimental group is the group that we not sure of the outcome so we compare it with the control group to see what changed.

Control Group: Commercial Yeast Bread

Ingredient	Calculations	Revised Amount
Water	3 x 1/4	¾ cup
Flour	7 x 1/4	1 3/4 cups
Salt	1 x 1/4	1/4 tablespoon
Yeast	1 1/2 x 1/4	⅜ tablespoon

Experimental Group 1: Sourdough Yeast Bread

Ingredient (copy from the recipe)	Calculations	Revised Amount
3 ½ cups flour	3 ½ x 1	3 ½ cups
2 cups of buttermilk	2 x 1	2 cups
1 teaspoon salt	1 x 1	1 teaspoon
1 teaspoon baking soda	1 x 1	1 teaspoon
1 teaspoon sugar	1 x 1	1 teaspoon

F
Experimental Group 2: Chemical Leavening Agent Bread

Ingredient (copy from the recipe)	Calculations	Revised Amount
4 Cups Water	4 divided by 4	1 cup
10 Cups All-Purpose Flour	10 divided by 4	2.5 cups
3 ½ Teaspoons Salt	3 ½ divided by 4	.875 teaspoons or ⅞ teaspoons
¾  cups of sourdough starter	¾ divided by 4	.187 cups or 3 tablespoons or 3/16 cups

Directions
-Yeast

1. Mix all the ingredients in the bowl to form the dough.
2. Cover the dough and let it sit for 2 hours then put in the fridge for 2 hours.
3. Make loaves out of the dough then let it sit for another hour.
4. Cut the top of the bread and put it in the oven for 10-15 minutes at 450 degrees.

-Sourdough

1. Put all the ingredients except for salt into a bowl then mix it.
2. Mix all the ingredients into the dough then let it sit for 15-60 minutes.
3. Knead the bread and add salt as your kneading it.
4. Let the dough sit for 4-6 hours.
5. Form the dough into loaves
6. Cut the top of the loaves then put them in the oven until the bread is 195 degrees.

-Baking Soda

1. Combine all the dry ingredients then put in the buttermilk.
2. Mix all the ingredients then put shape them into a loaf shape.
3. Slit the dough.
4. Bake the dough at 450 degrees for 30-40 minutes.

For this action project, we needed to make 1 loaf of each type of bread so we needed to convert the recipe to make 1 loaf. I put the conversion below.

Conversions

-Yeast

Everything x 1/4

1. 3x1/4=.75 or 3/4 cups of water
2. 7x1/4=1.75 or 7/4 cups of sugar
3. 1x1/4=.25 or 1/4 tablespoon of salt
4. 1 1/2x1/4=.375 or 3/8 tablespoons of yeast

-Sourdough

1. 4x1/4= 1 cup of water
2. 10x1/4=2.5 or 5/2 cups of flour
3. 3 1/2x1/4=.875 or 7/8 tablespoons of salt
4. 3 1/2x1/4=.1875 or 3/16 cups of starter

-Baking Soda

1. Already makes 1 loaf of bread so there isn't a need for a conversion.

-Results

Yeast: The yeast bread turned out really well and it smelled, looked, and felt perfect. This loaf of bread rose from 2 to 3 inches tall after being baked.

Sourdough: The sourdough bread was a complete failure and could not have turned out worse. Neither loaves rose at all and I think the reason for the failure the first time was because of incorrect kneading technique, dead sourdough starter, and incorrect baking temperature. The second time failed because of kneading and dead sourdough starter. The first loaf of bread we cooked I wouldn't try but the second loaf tasted a lot like salt.

Baking Soda: The baking soda bread turned out very well. It smelled, looked, felt, and tasted good. It rose the most going from 2.5 inches to 4 inches. So it turns out that my hypothesis is correct. 

RP, Sourdough 1, (2017)

DS, Sourdough 2, (2017)

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RP, Yeast, (2017)

RP, Baking Soda, (2017)