Monthly Archives: December 2018

Embracing Natural Hair

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Black students at Bryn Mawr discuss their natural hair journeys

By Khari Bowman

In Bryn Mawr’s Erdman dining hall on a Friday night, at least 100 black students sat dispersed at tables eating and chatting with each other during the African-Caribbean week dinner celebration. Interestingly, most of them had their hair in afro puffs, curls, braids, and twists. It was evidence that many of them were a part of the natural hair movement.

Within the last decade, the natural hair movement has reached new heights within the black community. Women are ditching relaxers and opting for healthy black hair products that don’t contain ingredients like silicones and sulfates. According to an article on Mintel, a web-based marketing site, relaxer sales have continued to decline, dropping to 36.6% between 2012 and 2017.

Black women are now using styling products that allow their curly, coily hair to freely flow. They are also embracing the protective styles, like braids and twists, that make it easier to maintain their natural hair.  Black college students nationwide are navigating their natural hair journeys away from home through wearing their afros and protective braided styles.

Black Student at Bryn Mawr

 

Bryn Mawr has students on varying parts of their natural hair journeys, from those who have had natural hair all their life to those who just recently have gone natural within the last few years.

“I’ve always been natural because I grew up in Ethiopia, and it’s a country where everyone is mostly black”, said sophomore student Rihana Oumer, “It’s a very homogenous country so it was normal seeing people wearing their natural hair.”

Oumer admitted to wanting to style her hair into marley twists for her performance in an upcoming culture show hosted by Bryn Mawr’s African and Caribbean Students Organization (BaCaSo).

“It’s just easier to maintain that way and one less thing I have to worry about during that busy time,” she explained.

For another student, Bryn Mawr junior Kameice Francis, braided protective-styles served as a transition into her natural hair journey. Continue reading →

In the Lab as an Undergrad

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Students aren’t waiting for grad school to do hands-on research

By Stephanie Widzowski

Emma Bullock, a Haverford senior, has a full plate. She takes physics, advanced German, and multiple high-level chemistry courses at a time. She gets up early to run and sings in an a cappella group of which she’s been a member since freshman year. She spends long evenings in the lab, but it’s not for classes. Bullock does research, a chance many undergraduates get to solve intriguing questions or help them get into graduate school.

Emma Bullock does research on bees

The number of Americans going to college, including grad school, has increased steadily over the past few decades, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

With higher enrollment comes opportunities for STEM undergrads at four-year schools to do research. Often all it takes to get involved is asking a professor if they need help with a project.

Bullock studies the health of honeybees and whether chemicals in their bodies can show disease. She hopes to find a cheap, easy way for beekeepers to check on their hives. She started as a sophomore on a senior’s project and has made it her own.

“So, what I did was I took the methods that I worked with her to develop, and just worked individually my junior year to do them,” said Bullock. Her adviser Helen White steps in if something is confusing, but otherwise, Bullock adds, “You’re on your own.”

This might sound scary, but it seems to foster independence.
Junior Lily Bennett studies conifers with biology professor Jon Wilson, and senior Divesh Otwani develops new ways to write computer programs with a professor at Bryn Mawr. Both attest to the freedom and confidence their work gives them.

Research is also a chance to get to know a professor on a deep level. Mentors can also help students get more out of the learning process.

“[Jon] helps me analyze my data and suggests readings for me,” Bennett wrote. “I honestly can’t speak highly enough of Jon, though. He’s really the best.”

Haverford Student Lily Bennett

These three students do research on top of their coursework. How do they balance it all?

“So it can be tough, but Jon is flexible with when I get things done, so long as I get the work done,” Bennett wrote.

Bullock just laughed. “I had no choice,” she said. Continue reading →

Please Pass the Pickled Pepper

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On the forefront of fermentation in Philadelphia

 

By Sasha Rogelberg

At Martha, a bar and restaurant in Fishtown, Philadelphia, a pickle is more than just a cucumber wading in a salty brine.

The winner of Philadelphia Magazine’s Best Pickle last year, Martha has lots of fermented fare, including olives marinated in pickled peppers and preserved lemons, local cheese plates and charcuteries, and pickle boats with whatever vegetables are in season, from beans to broccoli to radishes. They even have a sandwich made up of almost entirely fermented foods called the “Vegan Jawn,” which is filled with a carrot terrine, consisting of fermented, pureed, and cooked carrots set with agar that gives it the consistency of a deli meat, fermented radish, and dried, miso-cured eggplant.

Though unique in their ingenuity for the uses of fermentation and pickling, Martha is not the only Philadelphia establishment with a fiending for fermentation.  Local breweries like Fermentary Form, bakeries like Mighty Bread Company, and small distilleries across the city, are all fermenting foods and drinks for the public.

In fact, the process of fermentation — or the growth of healthy bacteria on foods to preserve and give them their funky, sour notes — has grown in popularity all over the country, mostly thanks for the slow food or “locavore” movement putting an emphasis on eating local foods, instead of buying from huge industrial companies.

Mike Landers, who does much of Martha’s fermentation, explained that people ferment and eat fermented foods for reasons ranging from the food being healthier, easier to store, and just as a way of using up food that would have gone to waste.

“Cooking makes things more digestible, but fermenting make food digestible and keeps more nutrients,” he said.

Landers, however, said that food becoming healthier through the pickling process was just a “happy accident.”  He enjoys fermented foods because the process of developing bacteria on the outsides of vegetables and cheeses extracts deep and complex flavors that can’t be created with other cooking techniques.

Despite now being popular and more common in restaurants and small-batch breweries, fermentation is nothing new.  Rather, it’s an activity that’s very old, but one that big corporations have lost interest in, as it takes time and resources that may only be available seasonally.

Ethan Tripp, the founder of Fermentary Form, started his business trying to resurrect an art he believes is now scarce.

The crowd at Fermentary Form

Tripp explained that back in the 1700s before people understood that there were multiple microbes, or the bacteria that is responsible for foods fermenting, or a “microbial world,” people would replicate the food preparation practices that worked for them.

This was how beer and wine were created, and after people realized one could consume spoiled beer and wine in the form of vinegar, this is how vinegar was created and popularized as well. Continue reading →

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

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How Rom-Coms made a Com-back on Netflix summer 

By Amana Abdurrezak

“As you wish.” – Westley, The Princess Bride

And don’t forget…I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” – Anna Scott, Notting Hill

Whether your favorite line from a romantic comedy came from 1987’s The Princess Bride or 1999’s Notting Hill, there’s no denying that the heyday of romantic comedies has passed. Behemoths like Marvel and Disney have figured out the formula to dominate every month of the year, leaving little room for romantic comedies to make a splash at the box office.

And that’s where Netflix comes in.

Netflix, the streaming service with approximately 137 million worldwide subscribers, hoped to expand its collection of original movies in 2018 with the “Summer of Love”, its initiative to revive the rom-com genre. Subscribers were treated to movies like “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “Set it Up”, a story about two twenty-somethings in New York City trying to trick their bosses into falling in love.

All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

 

Of the six original movies that were released throughout the summer, “Set it Up” and “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” quickly became fan favorites. At Bryn Mawr College, a women’s college in the suburbs of Philadelphia, many students heard about Netflix’s newer rom-coms through word of mouth.

“A friend of mine told me about ‘To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’ during the summer,” said junior Valeria Aguilera.

In the movie adapted from Jenny Han’s book with the same title, the story follows high schooler Lara Jean Covey after five of her love letters are accidentally mailed to her past and present crushes.

After hearing about the plot, Aguilera was hooked and searched for it on Netflix. “It hadn’t been released yet, but I always had it in the back of my mind,” she said, “When some people on Facebook mentioned that it was finally released, I watched it.”

Though many heard about Netflix’s Summer of Love lineup when meeting up with friends, more heard about it online.

“Netflix sent notifications, but I also saw those movies on the ‘Movies that Are Trending Now’ list on Netflix,” said senior Ana Meta, “Everyone kept talking about it on Buzzfeed too.”

Much of the praise that “Set it Up” and “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” received from the media and students at Bryn Mawr stemmed from how the topic of love was tackled.

For Meta, movies like “Set it Up” weren’t revolutionary, but they were less problematic. “They still have a lot of the old elements and tropes…they’ve kept some of the old fuzzy feelings.” said Meta.

“But they’ve incorporated new faces. You tell that it’s 2018,” emphasized Meta.

In “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”, Aguilera appreciated the diversity of the cast and the presentation of a different kind of family. The movie showcases a Korean-American family where the three sisters are half Korean and half white. Continue reading →

Where Vegetables Rule

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The couple behind Vedge create a new culinary world – with vegetables

By Sasha Rogelberg

Instead of the carved and notoriously dry turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and soggy green beans that don the tables of many American Thanksgiving tables, chef Rich Landau serves heaps of colorful vegetables—nine-to-12 different dishes-worth—at his holiday dinner.  They range from roasted and sweet purple, white, and orange carrots to shaved Brussel sprouts grilled on a sizzling plancha, or flattop griddle, topped with a smoked mustard dressing.  One year he served a centerpiece roasted Italian squash: plump and stuffed with braised red cabbage.

Landau strives to bring vegetables to the foreground of every meal at his own table. He carries over the same philosophy to Vedge, V Street and Wizkid: the three vegetable restaurants he runs in Philadelphia with his wife and pastry chef Kate Jacoby.

At 3 p.m. on a Thursday, Vedge is closed to the public, but it is anything but empty.  Men layered in khaki and gray shirts are mending the beer line in the front of the “house,” the part of the restaurant where customers eat and sip drinks at the bar.

In the next room, the house bleeds into the kitchen. There, several line cooks are chopping peppers for a romesco, a Spanish red pepper sauce, coating a stout beer, peanut butter and chocolate cake with crumbled pretzels, and blending and seasoning a root vegetable soup-to-be.

Kate Jacoby and Rich Landau

Despite the bustling environment, Landau seems comfortable there.  The line cooks address him as “chef,” but he pointed at the different dishes and talks to his staff without pretension.

He found a quiet table, tucked in a small room next to the bar, to sit down in with me.  He said that the tables in the restaurant were new.  Landau marveled at them when Jacoby joined us briefly and reminded Landau of the upcoming appointment they had right after my interview with him.

But Landau and Jacoby did not always have beveled and stained wood tables in a downtown brownstone Philadelphia restaurant.  Landau began his professional cooking career when he opened up a vegetarian lunch counter in a strip mall in suburban Philadelphia.

Landau became a vegetarian when he was a teenager.  He found the slaughtering of meat barbaric and unethical, despite being “a carnivore at heart.”

He was self-taught cook, and in the 1990s, there wasn’t really much to eat as a vegetarian.  As a lover of bacon cheeseburgers, club sandwiches and chicken nuggets, Landau wasn’t pleased with the few vegetarian options he had at the time: “It was all, like, sunflower seeds, wheat germ, and carob powder, whatever that was.”

The little lunch counter was not intended to be like other health food restaurants at the time. Continue reading →

Conquering Stress

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One Haverford student uses what’s called cognitive reappraisal

 By Ryan Dukarm

Heather Robinson may be stressed, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at her.

The easy going and energetic Haverford College senior from the Boston area has dealt with her fair share of stress as a college student. However, she credits a new technique she learned in her Stress and Coping class to helping alleviate some of her worry in her final year at Haverford.

“It’s called cognitive reappraisal. It’s part of cognitive behavioral therapy” said Robinson, a Psychology major and Neuroscience and Dance double minor, “but it’s more of an easier everyday technique that you can do.”

“I had a little journal and whenever I had these negative thoughts I would write down the situation and what was happening when I had this thought, my mood during it, the thought itself and then whether or not the thought was helpful or accurate.”

Many of Robinson’s stressors were about the amount of responsibilities she balanced, both academically and other wise. When she would go through her responsibilities for

Heather Robinson

the day, things that she enjoyed and loved began to feel like chores among all the other obligations she had. That led to negative feelings around things she enjoyed.

“Say, I have Bounce rehearsal later today” Robinson said, giving an example of a potential area for cognitive reappraisal by referring to her hip hop dance group Bounce, a group Robinson has been in all four years of college, “I really don’t want to go, I’m so tired, I’m so exhausted, I just want to go back to bed. But thinking about it like that meant that I was dreading it instead of looking forward to seeing my friends.”

Cognitive reappraisal has helped Robinson change her outlook on things she can’t change her commitment to. She loves dancing, so keeping those negative thoughts in a notebook where she can analyze whether they are helpful or not allows her to put a more positive spin on stressors in her life and continue to enjoy her many obligations.

Robinson went on to say that as a senior her stress has developed into stress about managing her responsibilities and worrying about her future. As a first year, she was often worried “about the high school to college transition.” Continue reading →

Tending to Haverfarm

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Haverford College has a farm — yes, a farm — on its campus.

By Sally Pearson

Wandering between beds of produce–carrots sprouting in one bed, spinach in the next—Ellis Maxwell, my tour guide for the afternoon, identified plants as we walked. The spinach under the tarp here was recently planted and would grow quickly. The onions here would grow over the winter and could be harvested in early spring. These rows had already been harvested so the green ground cover was revitalizing the soil.

This day in late October the Haverford junior wandered in black sweatpants and a black hoodie. He was comfortable on the farm, a year-round farming and educational space on the Main Line campus.

The Lavender plants were hiding under a white cloth. Maxwell crouched down and pulled up the cloth and bent off a muted green stem to smell.

Many of his favorite plants seemed to be those with tea making potential. He said he liked trying different combinations of herbs in his tea. He taught himself to make his own. Now, he admitted, he makes it almost every day.

Outside the fence of the garden, Maxwell picked a sprig of Chocolate mint, a brown and green marbled plant growing along the ground near the outside fence and handed it to me, it could have been mistaken for a weed to a less experienced eye. It can also be used for making tea, he said. He rubbed his own stem between his fingers. “Or I just eat it” he smiled, and chewed his bit of chocolate mint.

Ellis Maxwell strikes a comic pose

Haverfarm was quiet that afternoon. It was just Maxwell, me, the Farm Fellow who was working that day, and the occasional dog walker taking a detour from Haverford College’s nature trail.

These walkers remind you of your close proximity to the rest of the world. A neighborhood was behind a few lines of trees, a road was within calling distance, and Center City Philadelphia was nine miles from the secluded community garden where we stood. Haverfarm’s existence is a bit unexpected.  Maxwell, too, is full of the unexpected. Continue reading →