Obstacles Shaped My Life

Do you know what is in the food that you are fueling your body with? Eating locally grown food or growing your own food allows you to know exactly what is in your food and where it is coming from. Award winning author Barbara Kingsolver ditched her urban life full of pesticides and GMOs, and uprooted her family to a farm where they were going to eat all home or locally grown food for a year. The Kingsolver family documented this one-year food journey in their non-fiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Barbara Kingsolver wants to educate, persuade, and inspire her readers to live healthier lives by first forcing them to question the food they are consuming. She uses allusion, figurative language, and rhetorical questioning

Holdstein, Deborah H. “The Gastronomical Me.” Food: A Reader for Writers. Ed. M. F. K. Fisher. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. 2-5. Print.

One of the chefs I identify is chef Francisco. He owns the restaurant La Cocina de Gabby. One of the struggles he had to go to was trying to provide for his family. And the one thing that stood out was when he was trying to fight for his house. And he said “ I will fight for my house and if they try to take it, I will keep fighting.” the reason I pick him was because struggles. Some of his struggles are hard to accomplish. But the one thing he does is he keeps trying. But everyone has a struggle. Some are hard to accomplish and some are easy. One of my struggles was when I was little, but I still find it a struggle to this day. The struggle was about my family. Mostly about my parents. And I know some people have bigger struggles, but this struggle in particular made me love cooking.

“Becoming a chef was never my dream. I had to feed myself however, so I ended up working in a restaurant. My first job was as a dishwasher,

When I went to the Community Foodbank in Hillside, New Jersey I wanted to see what it was all about. I always heard of many great things, but it doesn’t compare when you actually experience it yourself. So on October 25th at 9am I went there and volunteer my services. They had switch my post when I had gotten there, they were going to have me work at the thrift shop they had, but had me stocking shelves of food product instead. They had me partner up with a guy named Joe who was a retired Accountant and former student at Rutgers University – Newark Campus.

My story beings as many others do in my generation; I was brought to America by my parents because they wanted me to have a better life than what was available in our native country, Peru. I now understand the sacrifice my parents made leaving everything and everyone behind for my brother and I, and it is a difficult change when one comes from a closely bonded Latino family. This in itself forever changed my family’s life because

I was exposed to a variety of different diets and food modifications and assisting residents that have difficulty swallowing with puréed foods. I further honed my clinical skills and developed new ones throughout my entire college career by volunteering in multiple areas of dietetics. One highlight in my journey was developing and leading food demonstrations and nutrition education for the needy. The Food Pantry is a ministry program of the Wesley Foundation, which offers a bag of groceries once a month to the needy in the local community. My task was to implement food demonstration and pamphlets on how to make use of the foods in the monthly grocery bags. My focus was to teach easy to cook meals utilizing many of the ingredients in a simple manner. It resulted in successful cooking demonstrations, which engaged the public in nutrition

Throughout my high school career, I volunteered at a local nursing home called the Emerald House. There I would help serve the residents food every Friday. I also had the chance to shadow a registered dietitian who worked at the Emerald House. It was interesting to me how she individually tailored every person’s meal and how each person was taken care of. She would also explain why certain residents could not have certain foods and the science behind why they could not.

There have been many difficult obstacles in my life where it could be hard for me to just talk about one thing. Not knowing where you would start can also be difficult. Never let situations bring you down. It began when my mother had my most established sister by a mischance and on September 18, 1997 I was naturally introduced to this world, not comprehending what it had in store for me. I was told when I left the womb my father was not there because of him being detained. When we finally met I was a one year old. He then tried to build a relationship with me. Before long, me and my father developed a bond inside that year. We did what most father and daughter would do. We watched movies, went out to eat, and played with one another. At the point when that year passed by he had vanished again. I then discovered that he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. I deliberate to myself, "How could this be"? We had recently met each other. A long time had passed and my mother began to see another person. This man was exceptionally decent and he treated my mother and us with respect and affection. Time is beginning to slow down for my dad; despite everything he has three years left in prison.

We spent our summer vacations with muddy little fingers, planting seeds in our Grandmother’s vegetable garden. My siblings and I grew up eating naturally grown food as long as we can remember, so it upsets me to live in an area where the closest place to eat is a dingy burger joint a few blocks away. When my older sister Livia, took the next big step of her life after high school, our family was ecstatic when she chose a place that truly brings back high-spirited memories of Slovakia and grandma’s garden. She chose the University of Vermont. The culture and food in Burlington, invigorated my interest to expanding my knowledge in the nutrition field, particularly due to the lack of it, where I currently live.

Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean? Life throws many different challenges at us at the most random times. Depending on whether you are coffee bean, carrot, or egg, you will respond to life’s challenges in different ways. Personally, I respond the way a carrot would to boiling water. I seem strong and tough, but when I face pain and adversity I become soft and lose my strength. In the past, when life has hit me with adversity, it has been hard for me to regain my strength.

When I was ten, my mother moved to NYC for a new job and my life as I knew it changed forever. The extent of my vocabulary at the time didn’t extend much beyond hello and goodbye. At school, I constantly felt like I was dreaming. My classmates would talk to me, but no matter how I try, I couldn’t understand anything. Determined to master English, I watched everything from cartoons to the news, trying to make sense of the phrases I heard. I spent hours poring over books, looking up meanings of words. It all paid off six month later, when I suddenly realized I was thinking in English instead of just translating. The experience taught me that I should persevere when faced with adversity and that with hard work anything is possible. As a physician,

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.”- Molière. We have all faced some kind of obstacle in life. When the obstacle pushes us to are limit we tend to give up. But what I have found is if do everything in your power to overcome the challenge you will fill better inside and out. This is the story about the time I faced the biggest obstacle in my life. I will tell you about the obstacle its self,the treatments I went through,and the skills I gained. I hope you enjoy.

Everyone goes through obstacles in life, it's apart of life. Some so very small some larger than we think we can get through. When was in kindergarten I took my very first vision test little to find out that I had no vision in my right eye at all.They put glasses on me to see if they would help. But they just weren’t any glasses they put a lot of prescription in the right eye than the left so it made me look you were looking through binoculars when you were looking at my right eye only you weren’t and it was only in one eye. As a six year old it was really weird to look at myself in the mirror and not just laugh at myself day after day. I kinda thought I was a cartoon character of some sort. We tried that for about 6 months but nothing

Farmers markets serve as an excellent community center to bring families together around food, and this internship position can use this key setting show families how delicious, easy, and affordable healthy eating can be. At UWM, I have done many food demonstrations for faculty, students, and athletes, and created accompanying education handouts connecting food to improved health. I use Ben Franklin’s guideline of, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn” in my curriculum.