Yesterday a woman named Annie Novak came to educate our learning community about rooftop gardens. Annie works in Brooklyn at the New York Botanical Garden and she is founder and director of many programs around the boroughs. She explained to us how rooftop gardening is extremely ecological beneficial. Her philosophy is to transform roofs into gardens or farms.

Rooftop gardens are found in urban environments and save a lot of space. They are also at less of risk of being destroyed by animals being that they are not on the ground. Fruits and vegetables are grown in these farms and gardens and they are all organic. Nothing is sprayed with pesticides and nothing is processed. She told the class that if they ever wanted to buy a product that was “healthy” they should look at the label and make sure it says “organic” that way you know what you are eaten and how your food was grown.

Annie also explained that she never knew anything about plants and wanted to know more about something she never knew about. She went to school for journalism and she wanted to be a writer, but she came across this career and decided it was a better path for her. She is extremely passionate about what she does and I admire her for that.

Annie also spends a lot of her time with bees. She told us that honey is actually bee throw up which I found to be interesting and disgusting at the same time. Having bees around the rooftop garden helps with the soil and helps the plants grow.

After this lecture, I was inspired to eat more organic and rich foods. I never really had the opportunity to appreciate plants and trees but now since I am educated about them, I can now appreciate them more. Fruits and vegetables are an important part of any persons diet and they provide the body with proper daily nutrients. I really appreciated Annie coming to our school and now I will always truly appreciate plants.

Last night I had the opportunity to attend the Oxfam dinner with our learning community. Before this dinner, I had no idea what I was attending. When I walked into the banquet hall, I was handed a green card and was separated from my friends when I was directed to sit on the right side of the room. I was placed at the High-Income table with 4 other girls. My card said I was a 40 year old doctor living in India with my husband who is a businessman and two children who attend private school.

This banquet not only informed me with statistics about classes and different income groups, but also how people are living and what people are going through. A person truly does not know how good they have it until they have experienced poverty. POverty is extremely common but a lot of people, like myself, are not fully aware of it. I am from a fairly large town in New Jersey and poverty is not common at all.

Every year on Thanksgiving, my family delivers Thanksgiving dinners to elderly people in poverty. It allows me to be exposed to poverty and teaches me to be thankful that my family can provide me a meal on the dinner table every night.

The two girls presenting at the banquet had a lot to say about poverty in our area and really informed the students what it is like for people in need by giving us real situations and real people’s names and circumstances. This dinner was extremely informative and it makes me look at life differently than I did previously.

As I was starting to write my final paper for Psychology class, I came across an interesting amount of cleansing and detoxing diets that I did not even think were possible. We often hear these words but don’t really know what they mean and why we proceed to follow them. The claim that I came across that I believed to be extremely interesting is the 3-Day Apple Detox. Although this is not my topic for my paper, I thought it would be interesting to talk about.

Apple’s are said to be one of the best foods for you because of their numerous sources of nutritional value. As the saying goes “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”, well, what about 3 days of just apple eating? This detox plan is said to flush your system, giving your digestive system a break so that a person’s body can repair itself. This detox goes beyond just a thin, lean look. It is scientifically proven to be beneficially for your body.

The process is more simple than most detoxes. Although the name of the detox is the 3-Day Apple Detox, it actually takes 7 days. The first two days is spent preparing by eating a lot of greens (vegetables, salad etc.) as well as fruits. Next, the 3-Day Apple detox comes in where all you do is consume as many apples as you want. The only other thing you have to do is drink plenty of water. The last 2 days are transitioning back into normal eating habits similar to the first two days of the diet plan. Essentially, this diet plan resets your metabolism and benefits a persons body tremendously!

I was born and raised in a suburban area in central New Jersey called Freehold. In Freehold, there is an incredible place called Terrace Bagels. This was the place that everyone went to before school in the morning and also the morning after a late night out. When you walk into Terrace, you cannot expect to see no one you know, because everyone is always there from my town.

My favorite thing to get at Terrace is a pork roll, egg, and cheese on a bagel. Pork roll is a foreign term to most people besides native New Jerseyan’s. Some people call it “Taylor Ham” but in the Trenton area, it’s called Pork Roll and no one knows about it. New Jersey is known for more than just “The Jersey Shore”. Jersey has originated an incredible pork-based meat. North Jersey people refer to it as “Taylor Ham”, south Jersey uses the term “Pork Roll” and Central Jersey generally uses both depending on the area you live in.

Pork Roll is very easily made. All you have to do is slice 4 cuts on the circular piece of meat (so it cooks flat) and place it on top of the stove to cook on each side for about 2 minutes each.

Pork Roll should be distributed all around the country so that everyone knows how good it is- not just the state of New Jersey. Actually, part of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland are becoming aware of pork roll and distributing it throughout supermarkets, diners and deli’s.

For my Oral Tradition and Readers Theatre class I wrote a speech about being a college student-athlete. In this speech I touched upon the things I eat throughout my extremely busy days when I have class (Monday- Thursday). Usually in between classes I grab a bar to replace a meal and hold me over. I usually switch from different brands of bars every once in a while just to switch it up a little bit and not get sick of the same thing everyday. This past week I have been eating “KIND Healthy Grains” bars. These are small 35g bars that are supposed to replace my appetite and “hold me over” until I can eat a meal. Little did I know, the bars have too much saturated fat in order for them to be considered “healthy”. The bars reportedly have 1.5g (8%) Saturated Fat. I thought I was eating “healthy” foods that were low in fat the whole time, meanwhile, I was wrong. This can go along with the topic of the “Freshmen 15” and how it is also false and mislabeled similar to KIND bars.