HW - 6/5/13

There is no formal homework besides continuing to prepare for the final exam on Tuesday and working to make sure that Assignment 40 is complete by the end of class on Friday.

(Final) Assignment #40 - Food Rules

Introduction

You’re 18 (or you will be soon enough) and in the near future you will likely gain greater independence. One aspect of independence and choice that we have discussed throughout the semester was your control over the food you purchase and consume. As time passes, you will only have more say in your eating – whether it’s what you eat, where it comes from, how much of it you eat, how it’s prepared, or how much you pay. Thus, before you go out into the wide world of independent eating it could be useful to take a few minutes to hash out what you believe that you should eat. Saying that you should only eat vegan, organic, local food grown by people at the farmers market that you know personally and that you know for sure have happy, fulfilling lives with good wages sounds really nice – but it’s also a bunch of crap.

So the question remains… what should YOU eat?

Procedure

1. Develop a three sentence food mantra (a mantra is a commonly used saying or phrase). Think of the mantra as a statement of goals of how you think that you should eat. For example, in FoodRules: An Eater’s Manual our old friend Michael Pollan states his mantra as “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Your mantra should be not more than twenty-five words in length.

The mantra only needs to contain what you think you should eat… don’t worry about the why (yet).

2. Explain the rationale behind your mantra.

3. Develop a set of 5 to 7 rules that you can follow to abide by your mantra. The rules should be more specific recommendations for actions like “Eat only foods that will eventually rot.”

Your rules do not need to be all-inclusive, as in your 5 or 7 rules do not need to cover every single thing you need to do to uphold your mantra or your desired goals for eating.

4. For each rule that you develop, write a paragraph supporting that rule. Your support should connect to material that you learned in class over the course of the semester.

	Mastery – 4	Proficient – 3	Satisfactory – 2	Needs Revision – 1
Quality of mantra/ rules	Statements are all clear and well-reasoned.	Statements are consistently clear and well-reasoned.	Statements are logical but occasionally vague.	Statements are overly illogical or indefensible.
Support of mantra/ rules	Thoroughly supports all statements with detailed, convincing, specific reasons/pieces of evidence.	Consistently supports all statements with detailed, convincing, specific reasons/pieces of evidence.	Mostly supports all statements with detailed, convincing, specific reasons/pieces of evidence.	Occasionally supports all statements with detailed, convincing, specific reasons/pieces of evidence.

HW - 6/4/13

Tonight's homework is to continue to keep tracking and recording your food/drink consumption. This will be used in class tomorrow.

HW - 5/29/13

Tonight's homework is to simply to be ready for tomorrow's Data Analysis PBAT. To be ready you should:

1. review (and possibly revise) your hypothesis
2. analyze your data - make inferences, draw conclusions, and think about how you would support those conclusions
3. brainstorm sources of error that arose during the experiment and think about how they affected your data

HW - 5/28/13

There is no formal homework. However, please be ready to continue your experiments tomorrow and write extensively about the results on Thursday.

HW - 5/22/13

Tonight's homework is to complete Part 1 of the new experiment. See below.

On Cooking: How Does It Affect Food?

Aim: Scholars develop hypotheses regarding how cooking affects the nutrient content of foods in order to understand how we change food

Introduction

Previously we discussed the merits of cooking and why humans have adopted it so readily. However, it is worth investigating if there are any potential drawbacks to cooking our food. Could the heat applied to food during cooking somehow change the components of food and their qualities? Let’s see.

As we should already know, vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is an important micronutrient and foods high in it should be part of our daily diet. But what if the methods we use to prepare (or preserve our food) affect vitamin C in foods in a negative way? Oh no! This begs the question: how does cooking affect the vitamin content of the foods we at?

Your task is to get to the bottom of this question and determine the effect of cooking on the vitamin C content in foods. Below are your parameters.

Parameters

1. You will (and can only) investigate among the following vegetables: tomatoes, broccoli, green peppers, and potatoes.

2. Your in-class cooking options are the following: simmering (heating the sample in water to below boiling (to about ~180°F)), boiling (heating the sample in water to 212°F), and roasting (heating the sample over an open flame). Outside of class, you can cook the sample as you please if your parents allow.

3. In order to determine how much vitamin C is in your raw/cooked food samples you are going to perform a titration. Remember, a titration is a method of analysis that allows you to determine precise quantity of a reactant by observing the precise endpoint of a reaction.

4. The reactions that you will be observing are the reaction between iodine and starch (which produces a blue-black color) and the reaction between iodine and vitamin C (which interferes and stops the reaction between iodine and starch). Basically, you will add an iodine solution drop by drop to a mixture of starch and your liquefied samples until you notice a color change. This color change means that all of the vitamin C has been used up reacting with the iodine you were adding in the following reaction: ascorbic acid + I₂ --> 2 I^- + dehydroascorbic acid. So what is the relationship between the amount of iodine used and the amount of vitamin C in the sample?

Procedure

Today’s tasks are: 1. to conduct background research in order to inform possible hypotheses 2. to develop and submit a quality hypothesis and 3. to begin planning your experiment so that you can test your hypotheses.

For your planning…

Hypothesis:

IV:

DV:

Controlled variables:

Control group(s):

Experimental group(s):

Observation/data table:

Procedure:

HW - 5/21/13

Tonight's homework is to simply finish the lab report so that it can be submitted in class tomorrow for full credit. Good luck and see the previous postings for assistance.

Why Cook? - PBS Nova video from today's class

Spice Lab Report Overview

Your lab report should consist of the following:

Introduction

• Relevant background information
• Whatever material is necessary to introduce the topic to an unfamiliar reader 
• Whatever information/research led you from your investigative question to your hypothesis 
• The relevance of your topic 
• Vegetarian recipes tend to contain fewer spices than those that contain meat. Why might that be? Think about what you learned this week as well as the last few weeks (i.e. where does our meat come from?) 
• Your investigative question
• Your hypothesis with a rationale

Methods - The following should be discussed using only the past tense and in the 3rd person only

• IV
• DV
• Controlled variables
• Control group
• Experimental group
• Observation/data table
• Summary of procedure

Results

• Data table 
• A graph that shows how the number of colonies or boxes covered by bacteria was affected by the various herbs/spices.

Discussion

• Make inferences based on your observations. 
• Be sure to refer to your data/observations specifically to support your inferences. 
• Be sure that you answer the experimental question that you were investigating. Make sure that your answer to your question is supported clearly by data/observations. 

• Using the data you collected, make a claim about your hypothesis and the data. Was the hypothesis supported or not supported by the results of your experiment? 
• Be sure to refer to your data/observations specifically when evaluating your hypothesis.


• Draw a conclusion and answer your big investigative question. 
• It’s 12,000 B.C. There is no such thing as refrigeration and you just caught a tasty boar (nice job). Which spice would you use to flavor/preserve the boar meat so that it tastes delicious without being harmful? Explain.
• Discuss all sources of error, which may have impacted the results. 
• Discuss each error and the specific impact it may have had on the data and/or how you interpreted it. 
• Evaluate your experimental setup – Do you think that the experiment worked well? Why? What changes would you make? Why would you make them? 
• Based on any and all errors – how reliable are the results and your evaluation of your hypothesis? Do you trust your data? Why or why not?