I am working on a collaborative research project with Kat, Olivia, and Casey from my WRT class. We had come up with many questions, but we narrowed ours down to the broad topic of organic vs. inorganic foods. To make this narrow, we decided to focus on:


1) Is there any way to truly know if the food you are eating is organic, and what causes certain foods to slip through the cracks?

2) The price of organic food vs. inorganic food. Is organic food really that much more expensive?

3) Interviewing a non-organic farmer and a woman (my mom, Sharon Winter) who believes that through traditional methods, supplements, and organic foods that she was cured of her cancer. (She had Hodgkins Lymphoma, cancer of the white blood cells and the lymph nodes.)

I think we may need to make our topic even narrower, so any suggestions and feedback that you have is greatly appreciated.

Reading this article made me a little mad. It reminded me of an essay I wrote when I attended Camden County College. It was for Comp 1 and about gay rights. I’m a straight A student, so when this essay came back with a big fat B on it, my heart dropped into my stomach. Maybe this professor, I believed, was just too old and conservative to see things from a democratic standpoint. But there is a difference between writing a persuasive essay and shoving your view down someone else’s throat.

In my essay, there was a line I wrote that went something along the lines of, “It’s a wonder gay people have any rights,” or, “I’m surprised gays have any rights at all.” I don’t have the back-up file, so I can’t know for sure. But my professor had underlined this line many times. There are many lines from this article that I can bring to your attention that come off as abrasive and one-sided.

1.       “That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.”

2.       “And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.”

3.       “The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp.”

To make yourself credible, you are supposed to carefully weigh/examine both sides of a story. And these are just a few lines. Sound abrasive? Read the whole article, The Pleasures of Eating, here. I’m sure any World War II Jewish victim can tell you that being overcrowded in a field of cabbage is not as torturous as the agony he or she received in a concentration camp.

Ok, I’m getting a little bitter, but you get my drift. It’s not that I disagree with this article. I think it’s important to learn the seven steps of what one can do to eat responsibly. I just disagree with the way Wendell Berry wrote the article. Calling the American people lazy and passive isn’t the best way to get them to take action.

1. Should GMO foods be labeled?
2. What effect does the growth hormone that is injected into meat have on our bodies?
3. Is the FDA doing enough to keep consumers safe?
4. What are the implications of passing Kevin's Law, and why are so many against it?
5. Can a country thrice on organic food alone?
6. Do genetically inserted pesticides affect our health?
7. Is there any way to truly know if the food you are eating is organic, and what causes certain foods to slip through the cracks?
8. Is there a cost effective way to keep healthier foods in schools?
9. Do GMOs have any effect on childhood diabetes?
10. How can food labels be made more user friendly, and will processing corporations be willing to do this?
11. Should the place of origin be included on food labels? How would this affect businesses, and is there a way to protect businesses if this is implemented?

At first, when I started reading What is Oral History?, I had to keep re-reading the first paragraph to understand what oral history was. I was searching for a complicated answer to an easy question. Oral is spoken, and history is our past. So, oral history is spoken accounts or interviews with people about our past. As I was reading, I started to make connections so that oral history could be more meaningful to me as a learner. The first thing I thought about was a novel I used to check out at the library all the time; I was probably around twelve years old. It was about Harriet Tubman, and I can't remember the exact name, but I think it might have been Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (looking at Amazon). I thought of this book because the article mentions that the Federal Writer's Project gathered histories from former slaves, or slave narratives.

     Another connection that I made was from my first semester at Rowan in the fall of 2009. I took Magazine Article Writing, and for this class we learned a lot about how to conduct meaningful interviews. By meaningful interviews, I mean that we didn't just go down a list of questions that we wanted to ask the interviewee. If something interesting comes up, and we go off down a completely different road, then that is good, and sometimes even creates a better story. Alessandro Portelli comments on this for the website, saying, "Oral history . . . refers [to] what the source [i.e., the narrator] and the historian [i.e. the interviewer] do together at the moment of their encounter in the interview." Once a rapport is build between both, hopefully the interviewee will be able to open up in a way that allows for a significant history to be told.

     There's something beautiful about having dialogue, a piece of writing, or a part of oneself left behind for future generations to relish in. In my Magazine Article Writing Class, I interviewed my mother for an explanatory feature. Hers, I believe, is one worth telling--one I believe should be told to all generations. I have attached it here, because I think it directly relates to oral history. I had the courage to ask the hard questions. Do you have the courage to read it?

Diary of a Cancer Survivor

Sitting down with Sharon Winter proves to be an emotional experience. The forty-three- year-old cancer survivor of sixteen years is wearing a brown pair of corduroy boot cut pants. A subtly decorated Christmas sweater flows off of her skinny, yet strong frame. Her hair is pulled back into a simple, low ponytail, and her face reflects years of struggles and triumphs.

“Hold on,” she says. “I think I have a journal I wrote everything down in.” She rushes from the room to return five minutes later.

She holds up the medium sized journal to show me. It is covered with blooming flowers: pink, red, white, yellow, and purple. The green leaves delicately entwine the flowers together. I find it ironic that the outside represents growth, while the inside reflects someone who is slowly dying.  

“It was a gift from someone at church,” she says. It smells lightly of an old wool sweater, mixed with Beautiful by Estee Lauder perfume—the only kind she wears.  She flips through the now lackluster pages, briefly returning to a broken time in her life, when it all began.

Sharon Winter was at a very happy time in her life at the age of twenty-seven. After struggling with being unable to become pregnant after her first child, four years later she conceived a baby boy; the pregnancy, though, was extremely difficult. She battled with fits of extreme shortness of breath, chronic nausea, being unable to eat, and constant vomiting.

“The doctors accredited these symptoms to a normal pregnancy,” says Winter. “They said that some people experienced exacerbated symptoms depending on their pregnancy hormone level.”  

            What is more, usually by the second pregnancy, women begin to show earlier; Winter didn’t begin to show until her seventh month.

            David was delivered via C-section, and as soon as it was over, Winter spiked a high fever—along with feeling very dizzy.

“The first thing they did was take my baby away,” remembers Winter. “These were the possibilities: that I had collapsed a lung because I was on 100 percent oxygen during the surgery, or that I had pneumonia.”

            An x-ray was the first of many more medical procedures for Winter; it showed that she had a growth. But an x-ray couldn’t show the doctors exactly what they were looking at. The next step: a CT scan the next day. It confirmed what the doctors had been trying to dissuade Winter against.

            “My surgeons were trying to convince me I was too young to have cancer. They told me not to worry, saying that it was some kind of benign growth.”

The growth was the size of a grapefruit, and located next to her heart.

Cancer was inevitably the diagnosis.
***********************************************************************************************
            Winter knew she had to go the medical route; she was not, however, going to rely solely on medicine to heal her; the cancer death rate being so high in our country convinced her to try unconventional methods. She attended a two day seminar at a college in Pennsylvania for holistic awareness. There she met a woman, Anne Frahm, who wrote the book A Cancer Battle Plan, and healed herself naturally (along with traditional methods). She had cancer throughout her body: brain, breast, and bone.

The doctors sent her home to die after her treatments failed.

This is when Winter’s plan began to take shape. She learned that traditional medicinal methods, organic foods, and supplements could heal her.

Traditional Methods
Winter was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma—cancer of the lymph nodes; it attacks the lymphatic system, which is all throughout the body. According to the American Cancer Society’s website, the two main ways to treat Hodgkin’s Lymphoma are chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Chemotherapy treats cancer using chemicals that seek out and destroy cancerous tissue; it utilizes cancer killing drugs. This complex treatment affects healthy cells as well as the cancerous ones. Radiation therapy uses high energy rays that do not necessarily have to target the cancer, as in Winter’s case. This treatment affects everything in the area of the radiation beam.

“During my first stint of radiation, I was completely radiated from the bottom of my chin to the bottom of my breast, because that’s where lymph notes start—in the neck. Since the targeted area was so widespread, I lost hair in the back of my head, and the back of my neck was completely burnt; it was a third degree burn. I had to sleep on my stomach. My throat was so raw that I couldn’t eat or drink.”

Clearly, medicine is supposed to heal; with such detrimental side effects, though, Winter felt even worse. She couldn’t see how such a painful therapy could help.

“The doctors kept telling me to eat, but I couldn’t because the radiation was killing me. And this was only the first seven weeks.”

After a one week break, Winter trudged back to the office for her second seven weeks of abdominal radiation. This was from the bottom of her breast to her pelvis. She developed even more harsh side effects, along with a permanent one. She had constant diarrhea, vomiting, and developed the Shingles Virus—a viral infection of the nerve routes. It may develop because of stress, injury, or a weakened immune system.

Winter’s Radiation Oncologist actually had to cut the therapy short because of her chronic sickness. They said that she would be fine; she’d had enough treatment, and at that point it was doing her more harm than good.

In September of 1994, at her eighteen month checkup, the doctors found yet another tumor in her lung. It was the size of a golf ball.

“All I remember thinking is: ‘I’m just not meant to survive this.’”

Organic Foods
When Winter was diagnosed with cancer, the doctors had to decide between three options after her surgeries: chemotherapy, radiation, or a combination of both. They never mentioned what she could do to her diet to help banish the tumor. But Winter was not going to leave it all to the “experts”; she did some research of her own.

In addition to attending the seminar in Pennsylvania, she picked up numerous books and magazines on the holistic way to cure cancer. Since she was physically weak, her friends went to the library for her and helped her with the research. Of the many books she researched, one has remained at home with her. It is called Prescription for Nutritional Healing, by James F. Balch and Phyllis A., and it does not just touch on cancer. It also speaks about healing migraines, depression, diabetes, and so on through the consumption of organic foods, natural foods, and nutritional supplements.

“To find organic and natural foods, I joined an organic food co-op and went to all natural and organic food stores in Vineland and Marlton. At that time, in 1993, organic foods were extremely expensive. To help lower the amount of money I spent, I was selling to people at my church and elsewhere for a discount. Since I couldn’t work, I bought what I felt was most important in curing the cancer-- fruits and vegetables. Normally, these products contain high amount of insecticides, which for a cancer patient is very bad.”

When she could eat, Winter would keep away from unhealthy foods, such as: sugar, coffee, processed foods, and soda. The book--Prescription for Nutritional Healing--specifically said to keep away from these types of foods and drinks.

“I would buy fifty pounds of carrots every two weeks to keep handy in the house for juicing, and I would have at least six cups a day.”

According to Prescription for Nutritional Healing, beta-carotene (found in [organic] carrots), is widely accepted today as a cancer preventative. It is a powerful antioxidant that works to destroy free radicals in the body. Free radicals are unpaired atoms that are extremely reactive; they can damage cells.

In addition to carrot juicing, Winter started eating tofu. She would eat tofu hot dogs, vegetable hamburgers, etc. 

She couldn’t afford, however, to buy all the natural foods she wanted, because they were so expensive. This is why—she believes—the doctors found the second tumor.

 Supplements
Kyo-green is a powdered drink mix made from barley leaves. It offers many health benefits, the most pertinent to Winter being its ability to control the progression of degenerative diseases through the use of antioxidants. It also strengthens the immune system. Benjamin Lau, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and immunologist at California's Loma Linda University Medical School, conducted a study on kyo-green with his associates. They found that “…barley green, wheat grass and Chlorella are all potent stimulators of macrophages. In the presence of small quantities of these compounds, macrophages produced powerful chemical substances that are known to kill bacteria, viruses and cancer cells.” She took this herb two to three times a day, mixing it with distilled water.

 Despite her financial setback, she still had all of the following in her medicine cabinet: red clover, kyolic garlic, echinacea, pau d'arco, a multivitamin, b12, shark cartilage, and powdered vitamin C. Of all of these supplements, the most important—she feels—is kyo-green and vitamin C.

“I had all my medicines lined up in a cabinet in the kitchen. A lot of times, it was hard to get everything down that I was taking,” she recalls. She took 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily—the maximum recommended in her book. Compare that to an average dose, which is 75-90 milligrams a day.

Winter’s cancer was classified as 2A, 2 meaning the cancer resided in her upper and lower body, and A meaning she had no symptoms. This was on a hunch.

 “The doctor was going on a whim, saying my symptoms were pregnancy related. I don't think he wanted to put me on chemo immediately after having a baby. I think he was just hoping for the best.” Stages can go as high as 4, either A or B. So, Winter's cancer was caught relatively early. What is more, Hodgkin's Lymphoma—when caught early—has a 90% curability rate according to the American Cancer Society. Winter knows this; however, how can one explain, then, Anne Frahm’s comeback? She had cancer of the brain, breast, and bone.

There are no guarantees that taking supplements and eating organic foods can cure cancer. Different circumstances factor differently into the equation. People do know, though, the benefits of exercising and eating well—it’s just taking the initiative and gaining the determination to start living a healthy and disease free life. Still, with all the research out there supporting supplements and their aid in the prevention and treatment of cancer, doctors and websites still don’t recognize their importance. On the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma page of The American Cancer Society’s website, it says, “Since we do not know what causes Hodgkin disease, it is not possible at this time to prevent the disease.”  

As stated previously, doctors found a second tumor in Winter’s lung.

“I got the phone call and was told I had the tumor in my lung. I was upset and freaked out, but I went to more seminars. I went to one in New York to learn more about better juicers—that's where I got my Green Machine. It goes for 600 dollars, but when the man found out about my condition, he gave it to me for 200 dollars. With the better juicer, I began to dose up more heavily. In the carrot juice, I mixed fresh ginger and dandelion leaves.”

She begins to read the last words in her journal. After this, the pages are blank.

“The biopsy was set, and I decided that I wasn't going to go. I would rather it be cut out of my body. The hospital called me back, and talked me into coming in. It was the best decision I made—I would have been gunning for a scheduled surgery that would have been unnecessary. When I was laying on the CT scan, the machine just kept scanning and scanning. The doctor wasn't coming out. When he did, he announced with a smile on his face, 'It's gone.'”

Her voice begins to tremble, and she stops after every two words when she says, “My oncologist said it's nothing less than a miracle.”

Response to first reading: Narrative Inquiry
--Honestly, it was difficult for me to get into the flow of this piece. On page 51, though, it began to read easier for me. What confused me about this piece was that it never overtly stated what narrative inquiry is. After reading the article, I had a basic understanding of the concept. I just think that defining it in the beginning would have been beneficial to the reader. Here is a definition I found online that helped with my understanding.
     A way of thinking about narrative inquiry includes this quote: "...Our terms for thinking about narrative inquiry are closely associated with Dewey's theory of experience, specifically with his notions of situation, continuity, and interaction" (50). These three pieces affect our place, and similarly affect how we look inward, outward, backward, and forward.
     I also thought the idea of a "world traveler" was unique. Yet, I feel like people are "world travelers" when they read fiction, poetry, nonfiction, or any other piece of writing that contains a separate viewpoint from their own. When people see the lives of others, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, doesn't their perspective on that person/situation change? Perhaps people need to look back to their own understandings and life experiences to be able to relate, as suggested by this quote: "She now recreates the narrative through memory relationships" (59). Maybe if people cannot relate on a personal level, then they are not a "world traveler."
     A line from Narrative Inquiry that I feel is powerful is, "What starts to become apparent as we work within our three-dimensional space is that as narrative inquirers we are not alone in this space" (60). Friends, co-workers, foes, bosses, and strangers have an impact on our views of the world and help to shape our inner discoveries.  

Response to Situating Narrative Inquiry

--This chapter made a little bit more sense to me than the first one. I'm not sure if it's because I had already read the first and so established some background knowledge, or if this one was just an easier read. This first thing I could relate to was qualitative research. I learned about this in my Adolescent Development course, and it was nice to be able to make a connection. Qualitative research is a naturalistic approach and interpretation (including interviews and descriptions of experiences), while quantitative research uses numbers and close ended questionnaires [to understand others].
     Still, this article never came out and overtly stated what narrative inquiry is—just like the first one. This line, though, began to help me understand: "Narrative inquiry begins in experience as expressed in lived and told stories" (5). Similarly, this line was a step toward my further understanding of narrative inquiry: “Concern with humans, experience, recognizing the power in understanding the particular, and broader conceptions of knowing..." (8). Narrative inquiry is all about "understanding humans and human interaction" (8).
     I also liked the stream metaphor used to describe the four themes in the turn toward narrative inquiry. It was much more vivid and helped with my understanding of the narrative turns.