Author Archives: Ariana Gargano

Goji Berries

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Goji berries have been grown and imported from China for over 20 centuries because of the so-called health benefits of the berries. Goji berries have been known to treat a great deal of ailments according to Chinese and Asian culture. These berries either dried or fresh are filled with over 18 kinds of amino acids and over 21 minerals and vitamins mostly vitamin A, B & C. According to wedmd.com, goji berries have high levels of antioxidants that help protect the liver, eyesight, immune benefits, skin benefits against the sun, protects developing antiaging diseases and can be anticancer. Three studies were done to see if goji berries are really the superfood the Chinese and Asian culture has said it to be.

Many people think goji berries benefit eyesight because they are high in antioxidants (Bucheli, 2010) the first study was a 180 days a study was where 75 elderly people got the goji berry, and the other 75 randomly got a placebo. Each group of elderly people was tested to see if a goji berry supplement would reduce the risks of developing a disease affecting their eyesight from old age, but that was slightly in their eyes already. After the 180 days of the study,13 subjects in the placebo group showed the progression of macula hypopigmentation causing slight blindness in the eyes but the people who received

Red dried goji berries in wooden spoon

Red dried goji berries in wooden spoon

the Goji berries, supplements showed much less macula hypopigmentation than what they started with. (Bucheli, 2010) Another study was done in healthy adults measuring their eyesight,  too, but it showed no effect on visual activity because there was nothing wrong with their eyesight in the first place (Bucheli, 2010) however, their antioxidant levels did increase. Anticancer studies have not been tested on humans, but male lab rats with prostate cancer were feed dried goji berries daily to see if there were any effects. The results of the study showed that the goji berries killed the cancer cell growth in the mice and found less amount of cancer cells in their bodies. (Environmental Nutrition, 2010)

Other heath benefits that the Chinese also thought that came with the daily intake of goji berries is mental health like calmness, sleeping, increased energy and being able to focus better through the day (O’mathúna, 2010). A study was done  (O’mathúna, 2010) to 34 healthy people randomly picked either drink goji juice or drink a placebo juice and each subject was questioned before the study and after. The studied concluded was that over the time of the study the people who drank the goji juice had increased scores in calmness, sleep quality, ability to focus and feelings of happiness.

Thanksgiving

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One holiday my whole family likes is Thanksgiving. Every year we go to my grandmas house where my mom, two aunts, and my grandma cook everything starting from the preparation from the night before. My grandma’s favorite thing to make on Thanksgiving is the turkey; she loves turkey so every year she buys and cooks the biggest turkey she can find. This year she cooked a 30-pound turkey and by the end of the day more than half of it was gone. My favorite dish that she makes is lasagna; her lasagna is the best! Most of my family members can not wait to eat her lasagna on holidays she even makes an extra tray for everyone to take home. When she makes her lasagna she uses the tomato sauce we made over the summer and her homemade mozzarella.

IMG_1263My family does not only just make lasagna and turkey on Thanksgiving it is much more than that. There are four courses that my family prepares for just about every holiday. The first course my grandma calls the antipasto that is peppers, hard boiled eggs, different kinds of cheeses, different types of dry sausage and my favorite little pieces of pizza that she made and cut up tiny. The second course is the lasagna, but everyone has to be careful with this dish because if they eat too much they will not be able to eat anything else. The third course is the turkey, but along with the turkey is sweet and regular potatoes, broccoli rabe, corn, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. Finally last but not least dessert, which is everyone’s favorite part of the day. My grandma makes butter cookies, some filled with jelly and some covered n walnuts and what I love the most that she made this year was her homemade seven layer cookies. This year one of my aunts made brownies, my other aunt made cream puffs, and my mom made a homemade vanilla cake from scratch that is to die for!

Making Wine

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Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 10.07.22 AMEvery year my family makes wine, every since I could remember one thing my family would always do every October was make wine. Both my grandparents were born and raised in Italy until the moved to America, when their families moved to America both my grandma and grandfather made wine every year with their families. My whole family gets together at my grandparents house where everyone gets dirty to squeeze the grapes to make wine. My two youngest cousins have been around this since they were born and they are now three and five and can not wait to make wine every year.
Making wine Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 10.07.54 AMis not just a one day and done type of thing it takes days. First the grapes are delivered to my grandparents house in portions on the first day 20 cases of white and red grapes are crushed through the machines to start to get all the juice out of the grapes then it sits overnighScreen Shot 2015-11-10 at 10.07.39 AMt until the other 20 cases of grapes get delivered and crushed. Once both sets of grapes are crushed, they have to sit for three days. After the three days are over we squeeze the grapes. This is when everyone comes to my grandparents house and spend the whole day squeezing grapes. My family usually starts doing this around 10:00 in the morning and it does not stop until midnight depending how fast everyone works. For the past couple my grandma has been getting shirts made for everyone which just makes getting messy more fun.

After the three days the grapes are ready to be squeezed. Before the grapes can be put into the squeezScreen Shot 2015-11-10 at 10.08.52 AMer most of the stems need to be removed. Once the stems are removed the juice in the big pastic barrel with the crushed grapes is taken out little by little and put into barrels. The reaming grapes in the big barrel get put into the sqeezer for the rest of the jucie to come out of the grapes. The squeezer is a manual machine that the grapes are put in to with a piece of metal on top of the that pus
hed the grapes down to get as much juice out of the grapes as we can. The juice that comes out of the sqeezer is also put into wooden barrels afterScreen Shot 2015-11-10 at 10.09.12 AM it is done. This past year we squeezed over 80 gallons of grapes and got 3 barrels of wine. Once all the juice is put into the barrels the juice needs to sit for 40 days until it can become wine. When the grape juice is fermenting into wine the barrels do not get closed because when the juice is feremnting it bubbles and if enough pressure stays in the barrels they can break or brust since they are wooden.

 

 

Flushing, Queens

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When I first got to Flushing, I did not realize how big this part of Queens was. I started out on main street where it is mostly Chinese immigrants that populated the area. Everything was in Chinese, the signs, menus, prices and the writing on the products. The thing I found most interesting about this area of Flushing was the stand of all different kinds of food, hot food, fast food, fruits, vegetables, fish and meats and a lot of things that I have never seen before. One of the mini supermarkets that I went to on Main Street had an enormous variety of Chinese candies mostly hard candies and chewable candies like starbursts shaped and flavored all differently. The drinks were even foreign to me, mostly the types of soda. The soda sold in the markets along main street and the Hong Kong supermarket are not like coca cola or sprite the colors of the drinks are even unique, there was bright green, purple, red, pink in thick glass bottles that had this little ball in the cap that had to be pushed through into the bottle so it could become carbonated. The food was not entirely strange to me. A lot of the Chinese food was the common things we see in Chinese restaurants around Staten Island, but there were a lot of things I did not recognize. The different kinds of fish cooked in various ways I have never seen before was this fish I saw at a street vendor was the whole fish just grilled on a stick.

Ten minutes away from Main Street, Flushing turns into an entirely different place. By Kissena Blvd, it becomes populated with Jewish families and a lot of Muslims. Around this area, there are only about three supermarkets that sell fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats. Compared to Main Street there were markets that sold all different kinds of food everywhere. This part of Queens had mostly fast food places to eat with a couple pizzerias, one of which I went to called Valentino’s and a lot of food stands and restaurants that sold Hallah food because the area was highly populated with Muslim families. Another thing I found most interesting was the parks; there are tons of parks by Kissena Blvd. The people who live in this area hang out in the parks more often then people in my neighborhood of Huguenot does with a park being right down the block from my house. The park was crowded with all different kinds of people; some people seemed like they were just talking a walk through the park if they had nothing to do. I asked people in the parks if they had any other information about Main Street, but they all said the same thing “it’s full of Chinese people” and that’s all they had to say. One thing I found funny was that one person told me they call the area where Main Street is “chino main” because of all these Chinese people and that you can only buy Chinese food and products there.

Fat And Carbs- Good or Bad?

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Something I often hear everywhere is how you are not supposed to eat bread, pasta or cheese because they make you gain weight and is bad for your body but in an Italian family that is a little hard to do. High saturated fat foods can not be good for anyone if eaten in large amounts or daily but not all fat is bad fat, in the healthy diet you are supposed to eat some fat. Carbs like bread cheese, pasta, and potatoes is known to be the worst things you could eat on a diet for losing weight. But those are not the only kinds of carbs, and fat people are scared of. People do not realize that there is no such thing as an unhealthy food it is mostly dependant on how much of that food you eat to make your calorie intake over the amount you should be eating a day. You could eat a 1500kcal breakfast with fruits, vegetables, organic juice, oatmeal and eggs but if you choose to eat a different kind of 1500 kcal meal it would be less than half the amount of food you could be eating that has one piece of cake, a cinnamon roll, and another fatty, high sugar food and a cup of orange juice. The food density in the first meal is more than the second one making you more likely to eat again in a less amount of time rather than if you ate the first meal filling you up more.

Diets today emphasize too much on eating low fat, low sugar, or low carb foods and totally pulling away from any good or bad fat and good or bad carbohydrate. Saturated fats found in meats and dairy products have been proven to increase cholesterol that is not healthy, but fat like olive oil is an imperative part of someone’s diet it’s beneficial for your heart and body weight, unlike cheap frying oil. “Sugars are simple carbohydrates and starches are complex carbohydrates; all are ultimately broken down into glucose, the body fuel that circulates in the blood. Sugars are digested rapidly, quickly raising blood glucose, but most starches take longer to digest.” (New York Times). Carbohydrates like white rice and white bread have been processed in a way that the benefits of the grains have been removed and react as more sugar when it is eaten; they are rapidly digested and absorbed make insulin levels rise very high in the body.Even though in China mostly everyone eats white rice daily the amount of walking and exercise the people there do can not compare to the people in America but all of a sudden recently the rise of obesity and diabetes became present, but still not as much as America.

Food Markets In Florida

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Over this weekend, I was in Florida visiting family and got a chance to go to parts of the city I have never been before. One of my favorite places I went to was the Lincoln Road Mall, which is a block that the stores are all outside on a strip and throughout the strip there is little markets in between both sides of the block. One thing I noticed was that there were many fresh fruit and vegetable markets in between both sides of the mall. I was expecting those little shops to have accessories or some clothing since it was a mall but when I saw it was fruits, vegetables, seeds, smoothies, and otheLincoln Shopping-on-Lincoln-Road-Mall-newr drinks I was a little surprised considering the setting where we were. Another thing that I noticed was that each stand and a line to the cashier, mostly every stand someone was buying something that made me even more shocked because who would come to a mall to buy fruits and vegetables or even think to stop to buy something in one of those markets while they are shopping. But even I stopped and got a strawberry and peach smoothie.

One that was my favorite was a stand that sold smoothies made from a coconut then the smoothie was put into the coconut. We do not see a lot of things or markets like this in Staten Island as often as it is available to people who live in this part of Florida. Every stand had something different one stand only sold types of oranges; another stand had tomatoes and basil and another stand I noticed sold seeds for all kinds of plants and trees.  Some of the stands did sell clothes, accessories, house decorations, and survivors, but another thing I noticed was that those stands were never as crowded or busy as the ones that sold fruit or vegetables. The peantique1ople who worked the stands seems to be lower and middle-class people and a lot of them were Spanish.

Film Review: “Real Women Have Curves”

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Ever women or even man want a “super model” body that in our society right now is considered attractive or sexy. In the film released in 2002 Real Women Have Curves, they are trying to sht28434ugd59ow the opposite and considering the other people who do not look like a model as sexy and attractive too. Women especially have always been the ones who have to look and be portrayed as “sexy” but Ana Garcia our main character in the film is the opposite along with the rest of the cast. Ana is a Mexican-American teenager that has an older sister with the same body type as her and is not married or does not have a boyfriend that their mother is constantly putting them down for and according to her it is because of their body that they are to fat and need to lose weight. Women who have curves can be sexy but if you are told so many times from someone who you value their opinion so much like Ana’s mother, Ana did not consider herself as attractive because of the words from her mother saying how she would never find someone because of how she looks. Ana during the film gets a boyfriend, and she was not so ashamed to show him her body while she is saying how she is embarrassed by her body he tells her “You are not fat. You are beautiful.” Ana’s sister owns a dress assembly company that they make dresses that Ana, her mother, and other close friends work for. All the women who work in the shop are not skinny like Ana’s mother Carmen wants and thinks everyone should look like while she is overweight herself. The shop is very hot so Ana and everyone in the shop start to show each other the things about their body they do not like but start embracing. Carmen is disgusted while Ana and everyone else learn the values of their body and being beautiful and comfortable in theirHow-dare-anyone-tell-me bodies like they should be.

The Sugar Film

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Soda, cakes, cookies, candy, ice cream, etc. are the most consumed high sugar processed foods in America.  But some “healthy” foods like yogurt and energy bars and whole-grain bread are also high in sugar. Obesity is not just a problem in America. A lot of people think that most of the causes of obesity come from eating the bad high sugar foods like soda or cakes and cookies but how could that be a big effect on obesity if healthy foods like yogurt and whole-grain bread have a high level of sugar? A film called “That Sugar Film” a man stopped eating healthy food and started to eat 40 teaspoons of sugar a day that is the amount consumed by the average Australian. In America, the average teen consumes 28 teaspoons of sugar a day. What Mr. Gameau does in his study is that he does not consume candy, soda, ice cream or other clear sources of high sugar foods but only ate foods that people think are healthy but are loaded with sugars, like low-fat yogurt, fruit juice, cereals and health bars. After one month of his experiment, he found out that his health and weight became out of control.After 18 days, he found that he had developed fatty liver.

He decided to do this experiment because how many problems everyone had with sugar. Everyone knows that by drinking a lot of soda, eating donuts and cookies would make you gain weight but what people do not know that by following a ‘”low-fat”, diet with healthier foods or snack that you think you will not gain weight but those things contain almost the same amount of sugars added to it just like the candy and ice cream. Another thing he found most surprising was that with everything he ate he never felt full and it was affecting his moods and was trapping fats in his body.

A study also was done in Australia that 55 percent of people get their nutritional facts from food labels and only 25 percent of people get their advice from outside sources. The government had tried many different things to change the food labels to make people stay away from the bad foods. However, the  nutritional facts on the back of packaged foods is trying to convince people to stay away from high sugar foods only but not exactly every high sugar foods. There’s no risk of lowering sugar intake, but it was found that sugar is not just the only factor of obesity. Like the other film “Super Size Me” when Morgan only ate at McDonalds for 30 days and gained almost 30 pounds in almost 2 weeks.

 

Homemade Raviolis

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My grandma came from Italy when she was only 12 yeas old in 1959. She came with her mom, dad, five sisters and two brothers. In Italy, they made almost everything they ate homemade nothing was store bought except 11892358_1071945729483444_744013092827412635_ofor some ingredients. My grandma also grew up on a farm that had nearly every fruit and vegetable her and her family would need. When my grandma came to America, her and her family brought a lot of their traditions of cooking with them. The one thing that she loves to make all the time is raviolis.

It takes a lot of work and time to prepare and make raviolis. The first thing is to make the filling, my grandma makes her ricotta most of the time or she does something different like she did this time, and she made what she calls basket cheese that is pretty much ricotta just cooked and settled a little differently. She makes the cheese by boiling water and adding junket tablets to the boiling whole milk with lemon juice and little pieces of cheese start to float to the top and are spooned out and put into the basket mold to settle. The next thing she does is make the dough; she uses special dough flour that you can only buy in certain stores. She mixes the flour with eggs, water, and baking soda. She then rolls the dough into flat pieces and uses a ravioli mold to shape the dough into raviolis. First one pieces of dough is put1920031_764282193583134_537343406_n on one side of the mold, then the holes that are made are filled with the basket cheese that was made then another flat piece of dough is put on top of it and pressed down by another side of the ravioli press. The press then cuts and seals all the raviolis into individual pieces.

 

Food Deserts Are Everywhere

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Food deserts are something I never really thought was a problem, but after witnessing and learning about how it effects everyone in the community, it is more then just a community problem. Food deserts are most common in low income and low access communities. The USDA found out that there are nearly 23.5 million people in the US are living in food deserts and more then half of them are apart of low income families. To be considered living in a food desert you have to be more then 10 miles away from available and afordable fresh fruits and vegetables. The price of fresh fruits and vegetables in local markets or grocery stores are not cheap, instead of buying a bunch of grapes for $3 why not buy a bag of chips for only 50 cents. However, some people do not even have a choice, they can only buy those bags of chips or cookies. But with food deserts becoming more common and it being harder for families to get fresh foods it is challenging to keep a healthy diet. Not being able to afford or get to fresh fruits or vegetables caused the obesity rate to double in the past 20 years. The USDA is always trying to find new and healthy eating habits to lower the obesity rate in america but with food deserts becoming more frequent it is more challenging to have everyone try to follow their guide lines to a healthy diet.

Touring Port Richmond over the week made me see and notice things I would never get to see. There was one store that was completely empty that used to be a supermarket that now closed down. Even though there are a lot other supermarkets and farmers markets on the block that is just the first of many to close down. Instead of opening more farmer markets or grocery stores that provide fresh foods I also noticed that more and more chain fast food restaurants have been opening, in Staten Island especially there is a fast food restaurant on almost every other block. When I was on vacation this summer in Aruba, we had to pass the towns where the locals lived to get to our hotel. The airport was on the opposite end of the island so we had to drive through almost the whole island which is only 20 miles long. On the way to the hotel I noticed there was not a lot of grocery stores or farmers markets, I only saw about 3 or 4 farmers markets and 2 local grocery stores that sold fresh food. Even in Aruba there is fast food chains everywhere rather then more grocery stores.

In 2008, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg opened up the idea of Green Carts to help put an end to New York’s food deserts.The Green Cart is a stand on a sidewalk corner that only sells fresh fruits and vegetables in places with little access to them. Most of the costumers that shop at the green carts are from low income families that make under $25,000 a year. Since Mayor Bloomberg established the Green Cart over 500 permits have been issued to owners running Green Carts in New York. 350 opened in the Bronx and Brooklyn, 150 in Manhattan, 100 in Queens and 50 in Staten Island. Since the Greens Carts opened there has been a 71% report increased consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables.