One of the most interesting parts of this week’s readings was the video on order. The video described order as the less information it takes to describe something the more ordered it is. For example, in the video there are two metal bars one hot and one cold. The hot bar has molecules that are moving erratically while the… Read more »
Both Michael Maniates’s “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Ride a Bike, Save the World?” and the book from our previous lesson, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food grapple with issues covered in systems theory- albeit in very different ways. Pollan’s book dismantles the reductionist theories that are ever-so-present in “nutritionism,” saying that foods are more than a sum of their vitamins,… Read more »
This was a very interesting lesson, I have been trying to eat healthier and learn about nutrition this past year. After reading the book many of the questions I had about health became clear. For example, why are there so many differing opinions on health? Because we don’t know as much as we think we do about nutrition. I… Read more »
I was a child of a single father whose signature dishes included boxed mac’ and cheese with hotdogs and ramen noodle stir-fry. McDonald dinners were a regular occurrence. I carried this diet into my young adulthood. After taking a nutrition class during my first year in college, I was dismayed to find that most of what I considered food was… Read more »
Why do Afghans grow grapes if there are so many reasons not to? Wine is illegal there; they don’t have many refrigerators to keep grapes fresh; and it’s a hard crop to grow in many ways. But if you lay the grapes out on your rooftop to bake in the sun, you’ll eventually find a reason to grow grapes in… Read more »
As a professional chef, avid world traveler, and conscious global citizen, analyzing the industrialization of food is of particular interest to me, and equal parts fascinating and disturbing. Humans’ relationship to the food they eat, for most of history, was based on what food was available in a given geographic area. That same type of relationship continued as humans became… Read more »
In Michael Pollan’s book In the Defense of Food, his observation that people have become more sickly, more overweight, and less healthy since the inception of the social craze of nutritionism (81) is incredibly interesting. The opposite is suggested by the concept of nutrition, so how could this have happened? With a heavier focus on nutrition in society, or at… Read more »
In his book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan describes the phenomenon of nutritionism as the defining ideology of the Western diet. “In the case of nutritionism,” he writes, “the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.” The emergence… Read more »
Kloven, Leah. “Healthy Foods.” 2017 PNG file What does real food look like to you? On a recent road trip, I stopped at the store a bought some car snacks. A lemon vitamin water and a pack of corn nuts. As someone who tries to eat healthy, this has always seemed like a decent snack. Sure it’s not organic veggie… Read more »
We live in an era dominated by the marketing of big corporations. In no industry does this have a larger effect on our bodies’ health than in the American food industry. There are many factors which contribute to public health but one of, if not the greatest factor, is the food we eat. As our food system becomes more and more… Read more »