My Family in NYC

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Peyton Beck

This past week, my family decided to visit me! It was family weekend here on campus and they wanted to experience New York City, especially because they had never been before. But instead of spending the extended weekend here on campus, we spent most of it in the city. Usually I would meet up with them because of my classes or soccer practices, so it was a good experience for me traveling and navigating the city by myself.

After our exploration of the city, we would usually try and find something to eat. If we weren’t rushing to eat or didn’t feel like waiting for the usual 2 hours at Hard Rock Café, they would usually ask for my opinion, knowing that my friends and I have ventured into the city a few times for the search of a good restaurant. Fortunately, we found one and it was successful enough to suggest: Adrienne’s Pizza on Stone Street.

My family loved the atmosphere of this street and the many different cultures that was included on this street. The next day we even tried the Mexican restaurant right next store. They had very good guacamole, which is also the dish I picked for my food voice. My family cannot pass up a good Mexican restaurant, making even the “Big Apple” feel like home for my family. I think this street embodies this idea of “home” for everybody venturing into the big city; the street has such a variety of dishes and specialties that someone is able to find something they are pleased with or relate to.

But, ironically enough, the weekend we visited this street was the same weekend this street was celebrating “OysterFest”. In history class, we have been talking a lot about New York City’s relationship to oysters and their importance dating back to the beginning of the New World. My family had no idea why a lively street in New York City would bother to have a festival involving oysters, but I was able to inform them about the history of oysters pertaining to New York City’s economy and industry. It was an interesting history lesson for them, and they were pleased that I was actually learning something in college!The festival looked like a lot of fun. There was an infinite amount of oysters and an infinite amount of different people. It reminded me about the idea we discussed in class: oysters were special because they were a luxury for the upper class, but also cheap enough for the poor and enslaved. It’s a dish that has always brought different people together, regardless of the time period.

Film Review: “Real Women Have Curves”

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Ariana Gargano

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 sh t28434ugd59 ow 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 their bodies like they should be.

Freshman Fifteen

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Genesis Rivas

For tonight’s post I thought I would talk about the infamous freshman fifteen. First things first, I would like to begin with the new knowledge I’ve recently learned about and that is that the idea of the “Freshman Fifteen” is simply a myth. There is no study that actually proves that new college students gain 15 pounds their freshman year. It is actually shown that students gain a natural 2.5 to 6 pounds over a gradual period of time. However, although there might not be an excessive weight gain, there is indeed an excessive amount of unhealthy food options that do make bad eating habits easy to form. So, although this freshman fifteen may be false I have noticed a change in since I first started college.

Growing up I was never big into eating out or eating fast food. Whenever my mother would have a busy week at work and didn’t have time to make a home cooked meal, I would genuinely get upset by that. I would ask, “When are we going to eat home food again, I don’t want to eat at McDonald’s!” I don’t know what 8 year old did not want McDonald’s all the time but apparently, I was that kid. Thus, my eating habits, by choice, were never that bad. Long story short, I never indulged into bad food much when I was younger. Now a month into my freshman year at college I find myself constantly eating burgers, chicken tenders, fries, pizza and everything else that is just absolutely not okay! The worst part of it all is we do have the option of fruit, vegetables(although they don’t taste fresh at all), and chicken(that is chicken that is not deliciously fried into chicken tenders.) Before reading the article that I linked above, I believed that the freshman fifteen was bound to happen to me since all I have been eating is junk. Thus, recently I have made the promise to myself that I would attempt to eat the healthier options provided to me. One day at lunch I was looking at all my choices and on my plate that so far consisted of pizza, a slice of turkey and some potatoes. Then my friend grabs a piece of broccoli and I remembered the promise I told myself to keep.

In our psychology class we learned that more often than not the reason why people eat is not because they are actually hungry.There are many factors that influence why people eat when they do. One of these factors includes social influences. This is the idea that how much someone eats and what someone chooses to eat is altered depending on who they are with. Hence, if I was eating alone for lunch that day I probably would have stayed with my pizza on my plate and nothing more. However, watching my friend grab a healthier food option made me want to do the same. So although everyday that walk past the pepperoni pie is extremely difficult, I am highly successful in grabbing a more nutritious plate for dinner…most of the time. 🙂

Pizza for breakfast

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Amanda Akaliza

So today I woke up hungry for something, I didn’t know what exactly at first because it was breakfast time but i didn’t feel like having the regular cereal and pancakes for breakfast. I felt like my stomach was on a lunch schedual not a breakfast schedule. To be honest I was hungry for something salty and greasy, like a pizza or fries. But I was debating I didn’t know if it was ‘healthy’ to have lunch for breakfast, especially if the foods I had in mind were fat foods. And not only was I thinking health wise I was thinking socially as well, what would people think if they saw me eating a pepperoni pizza at 9:30 in the morning? Which then got me thinking are our eating habits, just like many other aspects of our lives, based on whats socially acceptable? Do we eat and drink milk and cereal, orange juice and fruit in the morning because our body needs only that for breakfast? or is this a menu that has been created by society? so this morning i decided to break the rules and have a big, greasy cheese pizza with a soda too! And you know what happened… absolutely nothing. I felt perfectly satisfied and my and i’d fed my stomach what it wanted not what I’ve been told over the years it should have for breakfast. Now, this is not to say that i’ll be having lunch for breakfast everyday, but I will at times go for what i’m really hungry for, if that means some granola and an omelette then sure, but if my tummy is just graving actual food then I’ll surely go for the pizza menu.

Reunification of Families on Staten Island

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Urszula Pawka

This past Thursday, October 1st, Wagner College held a seminar titled “Transnational Families: Staten Island and San Jeronimo de Puebla.” This was a touching event in which families shared their emotionally moving stories of being reunited with each other after ten, fifteen, or even twenty years of being apart. This project allows the family members of the families left in Mexico to come to America for a week or more to be reunited with the family for a short period of time. The family members coming from Mexico had to learn a dance in order to come to the United States and the family members here in America worked hard for a year, attending meetings, in order to make the reunification possible.

The first speaker spoke about how the world now is not the way it should be and that nothing can be changed by just building giant walls between two countries. He emphasized that young people are the ones that must make the change in the world. Following his beautiful words, another family was able to tell their story of being reunited. A mom and daughter gave a beautiful statement on what it was like to be away from each other for such a long time and how great it felt to be reunited. When the mom came to America she left her three daughters behind (ages 4, 5, and 8) in Mexico and tried to do everything to be able to make them happy even though she was so far away. She talked about how difficult it was to come to somewhere where she did not know the language and did not know anyone here. Following her words, her daughter spoke about how wonderful it was to see her mom after so many years. Her mom left when she was four years old and now she is nineteen. She continued to say how she was raised by her grandmother and the only relationship she had was through photos and telephone calls. Thanks to her mom coming here she was able to get an education and was able to pay for her college. This would not have been possible if her mom wasn’t working in the United States and although it is very difficult there are some positive outcomes of it.

The rest of these immigrant’s stories are very similar. They all touched my heart in a special way because I realized how hard it must be for these people to be able to stay in the United States without having their families around.

The families that were reunited through the “Nani Migrante” project.

Personally this event touched my heart because at the age of 19, my mom left her entire family in Poland in order to come to America to work and create a life here for herself. After a long twelve years she was finally able to be reunited with her family. The stories my sisters and I have heard from her are almost identical to those told by these Mexican families on Thursday evening. They all came here not knowing the language, worked hard in order to support their families back home but most importantly they left the people they loved the most back in their home countries. This inspires me because I know how much dedication and work my mom put in into being who she is today. She came with nothing many years back and now has created something of herself. This was only possible through the endless hard work she put in and the mindset she had of achieving her dreams. I think we can all learn from immigrants today because most of them come not knowing anyone in the United States and not knowing the language but through believing in themselves their dreams become a reality in this beautiful country.

Food/Social Cues

Posted on October 3, 2015 by Ipek Miminoska

These past two weeks we have discussed hunger, satiety, taste and smell in psychology. We had also briefly discussed certain cues like food cues and social cues. I never realized how much these cues affect my life on a daily basis until I actually started paying attention to them. Food cues usually occur when we spot a familiar logo, scent, or conjure up an image and suddenly have a craving for that food or beverage. This almost always happens to me during the winter. I always had a habit to buy a hot beverage whenever it was a rainy or cold day before class started. So this past week, while the weather has been on and off I’ve had a craving for a hot latte, which I definitely indulged myself in. Social cues are defined to be “verbal or non-verbal indicators that give people an idea of how they are being accepted or rejected in any given situation.” Usually, this includes facial expressions, body language, and tone, but not always. On Wednesday, a group of us were having lunch at the dining hall before class. We had all eaten and were just talking when one of us decided to go and get some dessert. When we all saw her coming back with the dessert, we all got up to get dessert ourselves. I did not have a craving for dessert until she got up and came back with it and I wasn’t the only one. It was not until after we had all finished that I realized this was a social cue. In conclusion, cues are ingrained in our daily lives and most of the time we don’t even realize it.

New York Pizza

Posted on October 3, 2015 by Jessica Aletta

Yesterday my friends and I ventured into the city to go grab food and it was the best idea we had all semester. We had gone to this pizza place called Adrianne’s Pizza Bar. They serve the best deep dish pizza found right off the ferry boat on the Battery Park side. The pizza is old fashion and cooked just enough before it burns. My friends and i got a plain pie and a pepperoni pie, the classic choices.

While ordering and eating i tried to be observant and watch my friends eating habits. I thought it was interesting when deciding how many pies to get we always order more than we need just in case. Then no one wants to leave the pieces behind so everyone eats one more piece then they should just so there is no debate on who gets the left overs. I think its because people do not want to make conflict where it is not necessary and they avoid it when in a social setting. Therefore everyone eats more to avoid the conflict of who gets to take the leftovers.

All the money was worth those three slices.

Team Dinner

Posted on October 3, 2015 by Kimberly Fetto

Today, October 1st, my soccer team all agreed to have a team dinner at the soccer house. We have our first game of the NEC tournament tomorrow at home against Robert Morris. Having a team dinner would give us time to bond with each other and talk about the game. I enjoy being around my teammates because when we are around each other all we do is laugh and have fun. Having a team dinner would help us prepare for the game physically and mentally. As we walked down to the soccer house from harbor view building, we were all hungry and ready to eat.

We walked in and saw trays of pasta, salad, and bread. We ordered from Denino’s on the island which is one of my favorite places. I grabbed a plate and quickly piled food onto it. First I started with a nice house salad that contained tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, lettuce and caesar dressing. Next I had penne vodka with bread on the side. Pasta before a game is good for you because pasta has carbohydrates in it which releases energy. Along with that I ate chicken parmigiana and fettuccine alfredo. Finally, we had munchkins from dunking donuts for dessert. There was chocolate, jelly, glazed and powdered munchkins. I drank water with my meal so I could stay hydrated. The food tasted so delicious, I went back to my room with a full stomach and ready to play in the game the next day.

According to The New York Times website, there is an article that talks about carbohydrates and how it provides energy for the body, especially the brain and the nervous system. Carbohydrates before a game is one of the best sources for the body to take in before running around the soccer field. I remember my four years of high school, my team would have pasta parties before every game so we could get carbohydrates in along with a team meeting.

http://www.nytimes.com/health/guides/nutrition/carbohydrates/overview.html

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