THE POISONOUS LOVE

Tomato tomatoes, don’t you just love them?

 If you do then this is exactly the blog for you! Have you ever wondered where or how it cameabout or where exactly did tomatoes originated? Well this blog is going to tell you everything about where tomatoes first came from, how it spread and what spread them around the world. Well here it goes. First of all, tomatoes were first found in Peru, South America around the 700 AD. There were many factors to how tomatoes were distributed. It all started with one country and it continued on like chains. In the Caribbean, after the Spanish colonization of America they disperse tomato throughout their colonies. The Spanish also took them into Philippines, where it spread to Southeast Asia and into the entire Asian continent. The Spanish did not only introduce tomatoes to the whole Asian Continent but also to Europe. In Britain however, it took a different path. In the early times tomatoes have bad reputation. They believe tomatoes were poisonous and people believed it is unfit to eat them. Then by the mid-18^th century, they were then widely eaten and used in many recipe. During the 1799 to 1825 Tomatoes were introduced in the Middle East and as what happened in with the Spanish, it continued on into Iran, Turkey and Armenia. North America was the last major place to where tomatoes were first scattered around. Sadly, there were still a fair amount of people thinking tomatoes are bad food for the body and mostly they were grown more as ornaments for lawns than for food. Just from these 4 locations, tomatoes were spread all around the world!

You may think this is it, the end of tomatoes introduction to the world, but NO. Cultivation took an important part as well. It was another method of how tomatoes were widely known, grown and eaten around the world. The system of cultivation first began in the 1540’s and people just start eating tomatoes shortly after it was broadly used.

After knowing how they were distributed you may still wonder, well how where they transported?  People were migrating and countries were colonizing, they brought tomatoes with them and from that spread them on to different countries. Tomatoes were transported by ships, but it was not so easily done because they are very easily spoiled and has to be kept from direct sunlight in order to extend its’ expiring time. Tomatoes could not stay fresh for more than a few days. Of course during the olden time, there weren’t refrigerator and many tomatoes were ruined (because of the traveling conditions, temperature and length of duration). However portions did ‘survive’ since some voyages are shorter than the other or some were safely kept in boxes. Now a day, tomatoes are planted in almost every countries and cities and they just need to be transported to factories by trucks and in boxes.

 For some specific cases of imported tomatoes, these are exported from their country through airplanes in refrigerators. Transportation by air may cost a lot but it takes up little time and assure in the freshness of tomatoes.

Tomatoes are now used in myriads of recipes and are widely grown and eaten. It has become an important extra flavor to people’s taste wherever they go. TOMATOES ROCK!!!!

VIKINGS KING OF THE SEA

HI THERE PEOPLE!

Have you ever thought about migration? Like really THINK about it, I did that yesterday and came to a realization that people who migrate have reasons. Some of those would be, what is the point of moving? What is so great about that new place? What impact, both long term and short term would they have to face migrating to somewhere else? And many more. Myriad of migrations started long time ago and one specific group that jumped out is the migration of Vikings. As you all may know, Vikings are those strong hardcore people who sail around out in the sea of Europe. They also raid harbor, bay, small towns and cities stealing their goods. These groups of explorers decided to migrate from where they were (scattered around Scandinavia), mostly to Iceland and some to Greenland and later on England and Ireland. Did they migrate out of no reason? Not exactly, this is where the push/pull factor comes into action. The push factor or what caused the Vikings to migrate from their homeland to Iceland and Greenland is still inconclusive but one I thought was very convincing. Historian thinks that the reason was because the population of the Vikings increased so much so quickly that it outgrew the agricultural potential and natural resources of their land. This means that the resources of their land cannot support the overwhelming number of the citizen, therefore expanding oversea to other rich and fertile land wasn’t such a bad idea. Not only they get more territory to themselves they also obtain enough resources for their clans. The pull factor that pulled the Vikings into Iceland and Greenland was because, these two countries have similar climate and landscape to the Scandinavian region. With comparable temperature and weather, the land is relatively rich which is good for farming. One last motive was that Iceland was an easy target for raid and colonization which enables the Viking to live in peace without any major comeback. Impacts Vikings has been on Europe. They were the one who discovered the new world (i.e.; Newfoundland, Greenland) and established many trading posts. With great navigational techniques, strategies and strong ship structure the Vikings educate their colonies enabling them far numerous safe voyages that they have never imagines before possible. Because of the raiding they do at their neighbors, they explore new and more distant land. Vikings also impact Iceland and Greenland with their tradition and culture they exhibit. In my opinion I think these impacts are great for the European countries because mostly they provide the countries with knowledge that is useful for their survival (at the time) such as navigational techniques. The Viking’s migration history is an interesting one since they established motivating impacts; they have easily understandable reasons along with push and pull factors. Personally, I wish I was one of the Vikings since it would definitely be nice to know the real reason of what made the Vikings migrate from their mother land to Iceland and Greenland.

ps. There are many branches of Vikings that traveled to different places (mostly in Europe). The one I talked about were ones who migrated to iceland and Greenland :D

pss. VIKINGS ARE COOL.

These links are quite interesting and NOT BORING :D plus you can know alot more about VIKINGSSSSSSS.

Trail of Vikings 1

Trail of Vikings 2

 Trail of Vikings 3

Development Well Under Wayyy! :D

In my Modern World Study class, we study about population development. This includes studying about demographic transition stages and dependency ratio. For clarification, demographic transition stages rely upon how developed each country is depending on its’ death rate, birth rate and dependency ratio. On the other hand, dependency ratio is the number of non-working citizens depending on the working number of citizens. We calculate this by find the total number if people age from 0-14 years old and 65-80+ years old, because these are people who most rely on others (kids depending on their parents and old people depending on their children). The gaps in between these age ranges are those who work (teenagers and adults) for the young and old. These are vital factors that lead to advancement of the country, taking it to the side developed countries. The country that I chose to perform my research on was Brazil. As we may all know, Brazil is the largest country in geographical area. It is consisted of approximately 201,103,330 (according to http://www.census.gov) which is also the fifth largest number of population. After finding out the number of population of each age range I have constructed a demographic pyramid. According to the pyramid, Brazil is a developing country, near to being developed. This pyramid tells you about how many people there are of each age range and indicates the dependency ratio which tells you the dependency ratio. This country is categorized to be in a demographic transition stage 3, or as you can see on the graph that the ends of both sides are starting to curve inwards. From the calculation that I have done, it says that approximately 24,526,319 non-working people are depending on 76,025,346 working people. This may not seem too good, but in reality it is a satisfying number. The aim of dependency ratio of each country is to have lesser non working citizens to rely on more working citizens (for example 5 people depending on 10). When this goal is achieved, it makes the country efficient with its’ economic and decreasing poverty as well. But Brazil has not reached its’ ‘developed’ stage yet, since there are still weaknesses in how the country is organized. there is a huge gap between social level, if you are rich, then you travel around in helicopters and live a very luxurious live, for if you are poor then you are incredibly unfortunate financially and 31% of the population are lingering in poverty! Many of these are children which cannot yet get a job and need the help from adults. The problem being mainly, because Brazil has such a huge population and less than 40% are employed and those who are employed as farmers and workers the wages paid here are significantly lower than in other countries. This problem is created by the labor surplus, meaning there are more workers in the country, than there are jobs available. Another problem is that despite the developing stage 3 they are in the government of Federative Republic of Brazil still is not very strong. They exhibit huge debt, which from $213 billion (in 1995) shot up to about $230.3 billion dollars!! Butttttt! The scarcity of natural resources in this country is not a problem to the country. Brazil is one of the country where its’ original forests are preserved. They also have laws that land owners have to preserve native plants. Although, the environment is threatened by mining, old and gas extraction, cattle ranching and more but their forests are pretty well protected. As for the problem of poverty, I believe that as the development continues, it will sure bring better living conditions to both the rich and poor.


Brazil is currently in demographic transition stage 2, according to the demographic pyramid. This means that it is half way developed. There are high birthrate but there are also small number or people who live their life to the eighties. Considering all the things they are doing, either economically or environmentally Brazil is really on its' way developing. 

THESE ARE SOME LINKS THAT MAY BE PRETTY INTERESTING IF YOU WANT TO KNOW SOME MORE :D
- Brazil Country Profile