Daniel Chin Photography: Blog

“The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.
- Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Wow… what the heck were we doing to our bodies on the Atkin’s Diet?

Before the invention of chemical fertilizer, farms had to rely on the nutrients in their soil and the sun for the well being of their crops. This natural limit in resources was the basis on which optimum yield in crops could be determined. If too much was planted, the crops would be under-nourished and result in lower yield.

After WWII, the country had a large surplus of ammonium nitrate, which was used in the manufacturing of weapons and explosives for the war. The military factories were given large government subsidies to be converted to chemical fertilizer factories, which in effect, raised the potential yield for any given plot of land. However, this also equates to a shift of farming crops from earth-dependency to being petroleum-dependent.

(I don’t have as much information on pesticides, except that they are derived from poison gases developed for war use.)

“When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it – or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn… Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy to every calorie of energy invested.”

- Michael Pollan, The Onmivore’s Dilemma

I never realized that the food I eat is a result of government investment in military technologies… or that we’re consuming more energy to make food more “efficiently” than we did in a more natural state. It’s a little bit awkward to know. I have to remind myself that knowledge is empowerment, and not torment.

My parents are the farthest things from hippies, but I’m a bit of a tree-hugger. :P

I’m going to try to do a small series on food and how what we eat affects much more than just our bodies… as if our bodies aren’t enough. I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s book The The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and there are actually quite a few videos of him talking on YouTube. (His talk at Google is really good, but is almost an hour long, so you might want to start with a shorter one – probably the “Food News” series).

Anyway, I think the best way to do this is for me to try and put together one coherent thought per post. This is my second attempt at writing this post because the first one got ridiculously long. So with that, I guess I’ll start with corn.

Corn makes up a huge part of our diet, but not in the form of corn. A genetically modified corn called Number 2 is broken down and processed into lot of chemicals that goes into our food, including high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, and xanthum gum to name a few. (High fructose corn syrup and citric acid can be found in almost any soda.) Not only do we eat it in our processed foods, but the majority of our cows and chickens are fed corn as well. The stomach of a cow is not naturally made to digest corn, so the cows get fed “medicines” so that it can digest the corn. Cows are fed corn on the feedlots because corn is heavily subsidized by the government, making them a cheap commodity that contains a lot of calories to fatten up the animals.

To me, even just given this small bit of information, there are several things that seem wrong to me. It is moderately disturbing to me that we are basically reducing our entire food chain down to one crop – essentially a mono-culture of corn. It also bothers me to know that the cows we eat do not live natural lives… however, come to think of it, neither do we as Americans. We love our drugs and medicines, instead of listening to our bodies when something is not working properly. In the attempt to transcend the laws of nature, we have disconnected ourselves from the very thing that sustains life.

The reason I write about this one a photography blog is because as I delve deeper into producing pictures that reflect how I see the world, I have found the need to see myself in connection to the natural world around me. What I eat has a huge impact on how I connect with nature. I hope to document and share this journey in my blog.

I found this great resource a few months ago for fighting the fight against mail catalogs. Not only are they a nuisance to receive (at least the ones you don’t want), they are killing paper by mass quantities. I have to empty out my trash can every week in the recycle bin just from unwanted catalogs I’ve received. That’s where Catalog Choice comes in. The basically take all your information and send in the request to cancel your catalog to the company. Of course, not all companies respond very quickly, but it’s wonderful when they do and have my respect for it. Anyway, it’s better than what I was trying to do before, which is call every company and try to get them to cancel it over the phone. It usually takes about 2 hours on hold to get the person who can actually do that for you.

Jeannie’s really been into the book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma. From what I can gather, the author (Michael Pollan), went through some research to figure out where food comes from, and how it is made. His results, unsurprisingly, are rather unpleasant and grim. The biggest change we have made in our house is to reduce our consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, which is basically a highly-processed sweetener made from corn (see King Corn). Apparently, it’s very bad for you. He went on NPR to promote his new book, and I actually listened to this 35-minute piece. Mr. Pollan makes some very interesting points about nutrition as well as living a balanced life, particularly realizing that when he says “food” he means REAL food, and not the processed stuff that simulates food. This is just another part of deconstructing our very fast and manufactured lives in search of natural sustainability.

Most people who have spent time with me know that I’m a bit of a tree-hugger. However, photography is not very earth-friendly. From the chemicals used to make the prints to the enormous amounts of electronic waste it generates (is your 1-year old camera not small/fast/megapixel enough?). Of course, I would love to see thing change, and for our industry to reduce it’s environmental footprint, and I am optimistic that things are moving that way. In the mean time, if there are ways to “green” my business, you can be confident that I’m looking into it! The next few months will be dedicated to making my business eco-friendly: from the papers I use for stationary, the inks use the print them, to our electricity at the home studio. I just found out yesterday that Pasadena offers completely renewable energy as an option to its residents. This has me very excited because I’ve wanted to be on green-energy for some time now. I’m a firm believer that every little bit of effort in this direction helps.

I try not to post too much non-picture stuff on my blog, but this is something that Jeannie and I have been talking a lot about and is becoming a big value for us: sustainable living. For Jeannie, this started as a search for healthier ways to eat. For me, it has started with a simple search for custom printing supplier who use post-consumer paper and soy/vegetable based inks. I haven’t found one yet that’s remotely cost effective, so please let me know if you know of any.

This idea of thinking has also influenced how I think of shipping things across the continent. While very convenient for me (especially with “free” shipping), it has huge impact on the environment in forms of energy consumed and carbon emissions. I realized that “free” for me is not “free” for the environment, and the money I saved shipping it probably would not cover what is necessary to clean up the trail left behind on the way to my door. So just some quick things I’ve learned along this exploration for sustainable living that I am going to try to implement:

1. Line-drying laundry, especially things like exercise clothes and undergarments which get washed often, but don’t need to be particularly soft or wrinkle free.
2. Buying bio-friendly cleaners and detergents. (links: seventhgeneration.com, methodhome.com)
3. Develop some criteria of when to have something shipped to my home, and when to go to the local store, even if I have to pay a little more to put less strain on our ecosystem.
4. Try to be more proactive in asking for bio-friendly products from vendors I frequent.

Another organization I really like is terrapass.com, which is basically a self-imposed tax on my car’s carbon emissions to subsidize the use of alternative energy.

Off the soapbox, for now…