Aubrie Olsen

I don't think I can express accurately in words how much I love iMovie and how happy I am that it came with my photo program or this project would have been incredibly difficult. I was able to edit our videos down to the parts where our interviewees were defining their allergies and talking about eating out with no problem. Once edited I was able to upload straight to youtube from iMovie. I think I mentioned this before but it certainly bears repeating. Once in youtube I was able to copy the links for the videos straight into prezi. Prezi generates little movie clips and they look amazing. The only difficulty I had was getting our video from a dvd into iMovie. It was way simpler than I thought but it took forever. Thanks to a film major in my writers mind class I was able to get the dvd onto my computer with ease. The project is finally coming together and I think all of our hard work will pay off.

So for our project we have decided to do a prezi. This works really well for what we want to do because we want to use a bunch of different elements including text and youtube videos. In addition, it is a little more fun and looks better than a boring traditional powerpoint presentation.We had a bit of difficulty getting this project off the ground but now that we have a clearer focus I think it will be a much smoother process. We chose to focus on the difficulty people with food restrictions have eating out and cooking at home. We are going to illustrate the home aspect by comparing recipes and the out aspect by using footage from our interviews. I feel like this will work really well and will look great when it is finished.

I was looking around online in search of various sources about food allergies and found quite a few that didn't really work. I did find one that caught my interest, however. I found an article about how restaurants and their workers don't really understand and grasp the magnitude of food allergies and patrons that come into their restaurants with these various types of food allergies. This really struck me because during our interview Liz talked about how hard it is to eat out with her food allergy. She said she is so allergic to dairy that even if a spoon that was in a cream sauce touches her food she will get sick. Like the article says, restaurant workers don't understand this. I feel like this will be really beneficial for our research project as it connects really well.

Let me just start by saying filpshare sucks and youtube sucks. I was excited to see that I could upload to youtube directly from flipshare. The catch is it can only be ten minutes though which doesn't work with a thirty minute video. In addition, there is no easy way to edit videos in flipshare. Thank God for viddler or else this project would've been a lot more choppy. I was able to update a full thirty-minute video by way of vidler. And also iMovie, a video editing program on mac that I didn't even know I had, was very useful. It allowed me to edit the video down relatively easy. It started out as a pretty frustrating process that was made much easier through the use of iMovie and viddler.

So over the last few days we have reworked our question, we made some changes that we could all agree on. And we have our interviews lined up. The people we are interviewing now are definitely more reliable and are appropriate sources for the topic we are researching. Hopefully these changes will make the road a lot smoother now for this project.

Coming up with a research question is not as easy as it seems. You think you agree on something and thoughts start to change. We as a group have run into some difficulty with our interviewees. We found that just a slight change in a research question changes who to interview and what to ask. Some change or uncertainty in the research question threw off an interview we had set up. Hopefully we can get back on track today.

Today our group decided to take a trip to the McDonalds in Glassboro to take a look at the prices to see if we could take our project in that direction. We sat there and discussed it for a while and came up with a couple of questions. We finally settled on this question:  Are McDonald’s efforts to be healthy successful for the corporation and the public? We really want to look at who benefits the most from this push for healthy eating, the consumer or the company? To do this we will look at prices and nutritional value of healthy foods in McDonald’s and Whole Foods. We will interview a Whole Foods worker and a McDonald’s worker. In addition, we have decided to interview my co-worker as she knows a lot about nutrition labels and shops at Whole Foods and eats organic.

So last week when we first formed our collaborative group we sort of just started talking, trying to come up with an idea for our research project. We kept coming back to fast food restaurants and their attempts at offering “healthy” food options. After watching Food Inc. you begin to question what is actually healthy.  Like you may think a salad is healthy but realize how unhealthy it truly is upon review of the ingredients. While talking we began to narrow in on healthy options offered at McDonald’s and I came upon two interesting articles: one about McDonald’s oatmeal and one about their smoothies. Two seemingly healthy options that may not be that healthy.

1.       How does income affect healthy eating habits?

2.       How can the government ignore the fact that feeding cows grass reduces e coli?

3.       Is being vegan a healthy lifestyle?

4.       What do food label statements like “all natural” actually mean?

5.       Are school lunches healthy?

6.       Why is unhealthy food cheaper?

7.       Is Monsanto a monopoly?

8.       How can Smithfield have an agreement with immigration?

9.       How do we know if food is truly organic?

10.   Are there any downfalls to eating organic meat?

Like the other piece this one was too about oral history except its focus was more on the process rather than the history. The section was all about conducting an interview which is very informative and will be very helpful when I go to do one. This piece reiterated the idea that the interview is like a conversation, not an interrogation. It is not simply question-answer-question. Going in with a list of questions is counterproductive. In order for it to be true oral history you have to allow it to take its own path. Ask a question and allow the answer to be a question that leads into another. It makes sense to me, I think.