Writing

The most important project in my AP Human Geography class last year was also the one that seemed the weirdest, at least at first. We were tasked with finding 20 items from the grocery store, and writing about their origin. I wasn’t too eager to discover how disgusting everything I ate secretly was. Some items (looking at you, Tyson chicken nuggets) didn’t disappoint, but there were also pleasant findings.

All of H-E-B’s seafood was advertised as sustainably caught, including their gulf oysters. These were caught using a towed dredge, a type of fishing gear that is dragged along the bottom of the ocean. Only when I read this article did I realize there is nothing sustainable about using towed dredges, or bottom trawling in general.

Bottom trawling means destruction, pure and simple. Imagine a five year old dragging their shoes, destroying every beetle and crushing every anthill in their path. Multiply that scale by 100,000, and the reaction still seems to be the same – a weak protest.

Even if the issue of bottom trawling was broadcasted more, I doubt people would refrain from indulging in seafood harvested using it. By now, the fact that lobsters feel pain is pretty widely known. That doesn’t stop people from devouring them. H-E-B could replace their sustainability signs with ones that say “WARNING: you’re endangering thousands of species!” and a mom looking to buy dinner for her kids, or a student who needs one last item for their project, will probably pick it up and keep walking on.

“Why are Americans so fat?”

They do say Germans are blunt, and my exchange trip was proving just that. I stared down at the kid; I was completely unsure whether to be offended by the question or not. Back then, I certainly didn’t know how to answer it.

Americans are pretty renowned for being incredibly unhealthy. Even in the past few weeks, I’ve heard of Europeans visiting for the World Cup going crazy over all of our extraordinary creations, from Chili’s triple-dipper combo to 7-11’s Big Gulp.

As much as German teenagers may believe, the fault does not lie with Americans. There is not some gene in us that drives us to seek the most high sodium, sugar laden products in the market. 73 percent of the U.S. food supply is ultraprocessed. Food marketed to kids is made to hook them (I know, I was a Gushers’ fiend).

On top of not having many healthy options, what is healthy is also expensive. If the House of Representatives just cut $141 million dollars from the vegetable and fruit allowance in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program, how can we expect America to be healthy?

Food prices are rising everywhere; I see it in my own city. Many Americans resort to fast food because it’s cheap, and, well, fast. Not everybody can afford to pay extra for food that isn’t ultraprocessed. Everybody should be educated on the dangers of chemical additives and artificial dyes, but nobody deserves to be shamed for simply trying to put food on the table.

“Hey, if you were Aaron, would you be jealous of Moses?” was not a question I would have expected to be casually asking my friend. At least not before 11th grade English, when we were tasked with reading three books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, and Matthew.

My mom and I were not excited to hear that the Bible was required reading for my class. “Why not add the Bhagavad Gita to the list, too?” my mom had argued ferociously. But after reading it, I started to understand: the Bible is EVERYWHERE, WALL-E and Coldplay songs included. I finally grasped why phrases like “City on a hill” are so popular in American literature, from John Winthrop to Reagan’s Farewell Address. Reading the Bible felt like being included in some huge American inside joke.

For all my protesting, the Bible gave me great historical insights. So I say: analyze the Bible, don’t use it to indoctrinate. If Texas education officials want kids “understanding America’s founding and culture,” they need a wide range of literature. My English class read many other books: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien; and my choice memoir, They Called Us Exceptional by Prachi Gupta.

The Bible supplied me with a strong foundation for understanding American culture. But it was Gupta’s story of a second-generation brown girl like me that helped me understand my place within it.

I hate the SAT. It’s not exactly fun trying to keep your eyes from glazing over during reading passages. And there’s nothing I detest more than gaining confidence from the first question in module one math (2 + 2 = ?) to be greeted by the horrors of module two. Yet with all my grievances, I still see the SAT’s importance.

The SAT is a good benchmark. Sure, it’s not impossibly hard, like the infamous Gaokao, but it's clearly a decent evaluation of reading, writing, and math skills; SAT scores correlate to how well students will do at highly selective colleges. And although there are inequalities in the college application process – wealthy families can afford more expensive extracurriculars like sports and paid programs – the SAT may actually be an opportunity to even the playing field; a committee from the University of California system found that high test scores were good at finding talented low income students and underrepresented minorities.

Bringing back the SAT seems like a solution to the UCs’ struggle with unprepared students. But there’s another problem: cheating. When proctors don’t do their jobs, it becomes incredibly easy to score well on the SAT. AI has already made essays less useful, and it now threatens to undermine the entire purpose of the SAT. The question shifts from how accurately we are assessing a student’s skills to whether we are even assessing them at all – is it Michael who earned this score, or Claude?

Trips to India guarantee three things: fresh mangos, insane traffic, and having to listen to my family duke it out over politics.

The fights are almost always over BJP: the ruling political party in India, led by prime minister Narendra Modi. Mention his name around my parents, and you’ll be met with instant frustration; they often talk about the divide between Hindus and Muslims that Modi is actively strengthening, not understanding why most of our extended family – and India – supports him. But according to this article, that might be changing.

A massive protest in New Delhi broke out on Monday, July 20th – one of the largest in a series that began as a response to a medical school entrance exam paper leak. Students, fed up with the government’s corruption and lack of accountability, started a movement: the Cockroach Janta Party – derived from India’s chief justice’s comparison of unemployed youth to cockroaches.

I learned that the July 20th protest faced a major police crackdown; protesters were beaten up and tear gassed. Despite this, five days later, the protestors achieved a massive victory: the resignation of the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

While Modi’s government has suppressed dissent in the past, these protests show the power of Gen-Z in uniting for a single cause. My parents and I hope that this force of unity will overcome the religious divides the BJP thrives off of.

It’s safe to say that we’re excited to see what the cockroaches will bring next.