My sketchbook pages mostly focus around my dietary lifestyle at home versus the everyday dietary lifestyle in Sicily. It was both a challenge and a thrill to try to accommodate myself around a new diet and teach the locals about my lifestyle at home. I wasn't surprised to hear that they've never heard of such a thing. My professor made a big effort to have everyone at least try the food and local cuisine. I did my best to follow this and did what was most comfortable for me. This later turned into my project idea focusing on local food, and the comparison of lifestyles. I've learned that the locals surround their lives around food, growing, preparing, harvesting and cooking etc. Food is important to them and they care about what they eat, they focus mainly on local food which is just becoming a new idea in the states. The bottom line is that Sicilians (and most European countries, if not all) really care and handle their food while in the states everything becomes so processed and saturated that it is hard to find local, healthy products (from my experience at least). It is clear to what local, fresh food is compared to something that isn't.
