What is food? Is food something made with purely natural ingredients? Can it just be a product with nutritional qualities? The sole definition of “food,” has drastically evolved throughout the recent years due to industrialization. Michael Pollan argues that the mass production of these fake food-like products ultimately damages the American food industry, hoping that we “avoid food products that… Read more »
It’s time for spring cleaning in my house, and my roommates have already begun to break out the all-purpose cleaners, the disinfectant wipes, and the bleach. The excitement of ridding our house of dust, crumbs, and stains is intoxicating–perhaps literally. This spring, as we prepare for a deep clean. I find myself wondering what compounds and chemicals we are leaving… Read more »
My new word and my new question: Nutritionism. How do I find what I need to eat I’ll be sharing my most recent take away assignment from class, far up to this point from , there have been a lot of interesting things that open up my mind to the way we consume our food. . This week, the term… Read more »
During this week in lecture, our class had the pleasure of watching a ‘commercial’ put out and created by an organization called SumOfUs that showed the devastating effects that the palm oil ingredient in Doritos chips can have on our planet’s forests. The commercial showed a couple who met and bonded over their love of Doritos, only to eventually visit… Read more »
When did eating become so difficult? There is a dizzying amount of conflicting information about food. The result is a multitude diets like: keto, gluten-free, low-fat, paleo, high-protein and liquid to name a few. Pollan attempts to cut through the confusion with his book In Defense of Food. Pollon exhorts a simple answer to my food question “Eat food. Not… Read more »
I work at a bar, so I see how much the sugary drink tax affects consumers and business. We have to charge an extra $1 when people want a chaser for a shot. A cup of pineapple juice is $4 and a vodka redbull will be $9 (redbull on its own is $5!). Now, alcohol and drinking culture is… Read more »
Michael Pollan paints a comprehensive and convincing picture of the industrialized food system with his book “In Defense of Food”. However, despite his references to economic determinism, “Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce…as industrial agriculture has focused its attention on…high yielding (and usually patented) varieties” (116); he offers no tangible or actionable solutions to the… Read more »
This week’s reading of Brown’s Full Planet Empty Plate I found to be very eye opening. Not only is Brown a phenomenal writer, he brings into perspective the people that are being destroyed by our eating behaviors instead of just focusing on what the industry does to our bodies. I think we as readers tend to sometimes get caught up… Read more »
There are many factors that limit our food choices: what we eat does not always reflect what we wish we could eat. Every person is limited in what they eat, most often because of the cost of living. As college students in Seattle we are forced to pay rent in a city with skyrocketing rates, we are forced to pay… Read more »
The integration of food and the economic market has made for an interesting paradigm within global food systems. To this end, food systems revealed themselves to be a more complex interaction between people and their environment (economic, ecological, or otherwise). Though I did not agree with all of Michael Pollan’s arguments throughout Part III, or the whole book for that… Read more »