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  • Essay / An in-depth look at America's urban interconnectedness

    Today, when one walks through the city of Hartford, for example, he is more than likely to glance at his phone and takes the same boring, scheduled route to work. . Perhaps on Capitol Avenue, a traditional hot spot for morning bumper-to-bumper traffic; quickly pass the Colt Armory and remain completely blind to the magnificent brick walls and blue dome; My point? To us, Hartford's cityscape and the history it has preserved to this day is something that, for lack of better terms, is simply "there." But in reality, the ground we walk on and the trees we pass by have far more meaning and cultural significance than most of us realize. In fact, they tell stories of conflict, hunger, and despair that lead the settlers to become highly dependent on each other socially, politically, and materialistically in a frenzied attempt to survive. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayThe truth is that hundreds of years ago, cobblestone sidewalks, whether in Hartford or Jamestown, were just a dry, barren pile of dirt with a few passing tumbleweeds. For this reason, American settlers often turned to each other for materials. This could be seen during the “Starving Time” presented by the Jamestown documentary. The so-called “famine period” was marked by cold-blooded killings, conflict and extreme malnutrition resulting from starvation. For this reason, settlers, including John Smith, an English soldier who helped establish the colony, often turned to local tribes for relief, albeit temporarily. But good relations between the settlers and the tribes would not last long, leaving the settlers hungry once again. Worse still, the newly established colony would soon welcome another group of some 300 Englishmen who, in hindsight, arrived at perhaps one of the worst possible times. It was around this time that the condition of the colony began to rapidly deteriorate again after several fights with the tribes and various diseases taking hold in their settlement, weakening their already weak state. The settlers soon found themselves plunged into a famine that became so severe that they eventually turned to the corpses lying just feet from their beds in order to prepare their next meal, in perhaps the best example of the how settlers depended on each other. materialist. However, this interdependence on each other has not died out, even almost two hundred years later. In the first chapter of Urban Appetites, Cindy Lobel mentions John Pinard whom she describes as a "...New York gourmet 150 years before the concept existed." Speaking more about Pinard, she says he "...fought against scarcity and seasonality and developed personal relationships with food sellers to avoid scams, scams and poor quality food." It is at this point that Lobel puts forward the 19th century concept of “social dependence”. Through this quote, she explicitly tells the audience that "food culture" and its quality depended heavily on one's social ability to defraud and manipulate sellers in exchange for a higher quality product. For us readers, this statement is shocking because these days, food is a commodity that most of us take completely for granted, without thinking about the work it takes to grow,.