When we take a minute to look at these pictures side by side, several differences begin to show. The pictures show an American family and Egyptian family with the food they will consume in a week. The thing that first jumps out to me is the types of food that each family chooses to eat for a week. This… Read more »
Peter Menzel’s Hungry Planet depicts the various dietary and health lifestyles choices from various families around the globe. The Western diet, generally consisting of red meats, refined grains, processed foods, high fat and sugar content, as well as large food chains such as McDonalds have become popular making its way to countries like Japan, but not so much in countries… Read more »
The Western diet is an extension of our capitalist culture. We are told what to drive, where to live, what to buy, who to vote for and what/how much to eat. We have allowed the Western diet to take root because of our desire for cheap, fast, processed foods that are easy to ingest. Over-consumption is not just encouraged, it is… 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 »
Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food illustrates how the obsession with nutritional science has moved the Western diet into the wrong direction and has instead harmed the wellbeing of Americans alike. Pollan exposes the ideology of “creating and marketing all manners of new processed foods and permission for people to eat them,” demonstrating the food industry’s creativity in finding… Read more »
Like many Americans, I too spend a lot of time considering my food intake, and our collective food systems. I look forward to focusing my pondering, and hearing from peers, on the topics of nutrition education and food politics.
What was my grandmother eating? This is the question posed by Michael Pollan’s book, and is a query I found myself investigating. For me, I transposed the question onto my grandfather, who grew up on a farm. This farm, on which the family subsisted throughout the Great Depression, allotted him a status as a young man that few in South… Read more »