Earnin' Cred and Makin’ Bread: Dietitians Riding the Career #strugglebus

This post was written by Elizabeth Briasco, whom I precepted fall 2015. She is now a dietitian pursuing a Master of Science degree in Sport and Exercise Nutrition in the United Kingdom.

Several words typically come to mind when we hear the word "intern": naive, coffee, and free labor might be some of them. Most internships pay nothing or, at the very most, minimum wage.

However, there are actually internships out there with a less than 50 percent acceptance rate that require interns to pay thousands of dollars just to participate. No stipend is offered for housing, food, materials, transportation, or any other miscellaneous internship costs. The internship consists of at least 1200 hours of practical experience across three to ten different sites and can last anywhere between eight months and two years. Hours range from forty to fifty hours a week, giving interns very little leeway for a part-time job, assuming their internship director even allows them to get one.

Welcome to the confusing, costly, and demanding world of dietetics.

Renewal. Retool. Remake.

This lyric essay is an adaptation of the piece I performed at April's MNFYP event, part of the storytelling series. The topic: renewal.

I read a poem last November, when the world was wrapped in mono gray. It was the climax of MyTake: A Story to Nurture in Five Food Groups.

As nature squeaks into color, life, and growth, this protean poem unfurls tightly packed stanzas into the broad notes of spring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One thing broke me;
         two built me back.

Fall in FScN 4612, Human Nutrition,
each lecture softening the edges of my circumscribed truth.
Studies strive for stolid statements,
         but humans refuse to cooperate.
We fictionalize what we ate yesterday,
we guess at how often we eat fish,
we tick the same box for grass-fed beef,
         for venison,
         for McDonald’s Hamburgers.

I crumbled under the weight of peer-reviewed articles,
at odds with each other,
squinting their way to the truth.

Winter, and I watched a dietitian speak with precise passion
         of an ecological approach to food and health,
         of environmental health and natural resources,
         of starting with oneself.

Essential building blocks condensed
         into a strand stretching
         from a protein machine, bending and twisting
         into a tertiary structure,
The Food System.

Summer, and I was swept along on a sustainability safari:
landing in locations
         from labels off co-op shelves,
scuffling with scripts
         from scholars and scientists,
facing furrowed facts
         from farmers and foragers.

I transcribed novelty into neurons,
I put my hands into the blackness and pulled.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What is protein?

Amino acids line up according to ancient instructions, attract and repel each other, furl into microscopic protein machines, group and grow to make this protein machine, complex and communal.

Dietetics: It's like water

I had a moment last year. You know the kind: When you hit a bend in the river of life and you're not sure you're headed the right direction anymore. I fretted over the field of dietetics, feeling I relegated myself to the edges by working at Extension in communications.

"Food is hopelessly broad and complex," I complained to my fellow #rdpoet Garnet one night. "I just don't know why I'm a dietitian right now."

Luckily, Garnet knew.

"Yes, it's a harder-to-conceptualize position than say, an architect, or a lawyer, or a construction worker," he said. "But a dietitian's greatest asset is in REALIZING that the scope of humans and food is broader than you can really understand. It leads one to seek out research and knowledge that is more broad and holistic—to make connections that might not be obvious and might not be taught in a narrow setting."

I lapped it up.

"It's like water," he continued. "Society can use water in a variety of different ways. You can grow your crops, you can generate power, you can swim in it. So you can decide what you want to do with food, whether it be economics, or preventative health, or nourishing children."

Or tweeting about SNAP-Ed in Minnesota.

Anyway, happy registered dietitian nutritionist day to all you RDNs out there, working at the edges of this broad and beautiful field. Especially my beloved HEN DPG colleagues.

Me and GB on the New River Gorge Bridge in WV. #rdsatwork

Get out there and swim upstream.

Why am I here?

I am here to read, to think, to write about the connections between healthy land, healthy food, and healthy life. It’s a broad theme. It has to be.

That’s the justification in a nutshell. For the whole meal deal, keep on reading.

The seminal reason for starting this blog is selfish and has to do with my high school social studies teacher, Mr. Scarlett. He had us write one-page reflections on almost every reading he assigned. Standard practice for students, but he claimed he did the same in his own life. Always attracted to record-keeping, I continued the practice outside the classroom and diligently wrote down something about almost every book I read. I wrote on lined paper, scrap paper, colored paper, and white paper, sometimes for several pages, sometimes just one line.

These pages are three-hole punched and sit quietly in a big black binder next to a big blue binder of financial records. Keeping a record of what I've read for its own sake seems increasingly pointless to me. I need to not simply absorb and document, but also read and reflect. This blog will help me to reflect.

Also pointless is relegating the thoughts and reactions I had to a static binder when I what I read nowadays feels so urgent. People don’t need to know what I thought about The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, but I would like to tell them about Coming Home to Eat and the Heathy Food, Healthy Lives Institute. I want to share with others the complex and fascinating fields I'm picking my way through.

I am no longer focused on the corner of Nutrition. In fact, my love affair with the topic imploded earlier this semester. Our relationship was tested when I began making reluctant friends with the Food System. Things came to a head during a Human Nutrition assignment to frame a nutrition-related question and review the relevant literature. I found that studying the effects of a single nutrient in a randomized clinical trial involves asking very specific questions with a limited vocabulary. I found that the data analysis from epidemiological studies is beyond my comprehension. In short, I found that all the nice tidy details I found in my intro textbooks are not tidy at all.

Nutrition is certainly not the unique in this aspect. Push any area of study far enough and you will find its limits. One could view these limits as opportunities, take up research, and find more answers. My reaction, however, has been to step back - way back. I asked Nutrition if we could just be friends. I need some space right now. I need to see what else is out there.

Since my classes are not designed to address the Food System, I happily seek access points elsewhere, both on and off campus. I read books, I attend seminars, I watch the occasional movie. These are what I want to digest and disseminate. So stay tuned! I hope to post updates once a week. Send me things to read, events to attend, movies to watch, and ask questions. I look forward to engaging with you.

Updated January 2015.