{"id":450,"date":"2018-04-14T23:40:33","date_gmt":"2018-04-14T23:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/?p=450"},"modified":"2018-04-14T23:46:50","modified_gmt":"2018-04-14T23:46:50","slug":"oh-the-choices-we-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/2018\/04\/14\/oh-the-choices-we-make\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh, The Choices We Make"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regardless of what foods we eat or diets we follow, we all have something in common: we\u2019re all consumers. None of us are plants, we can\u2019t survive off of sunlight (unless plants are pretending to be humans, in which case we have bigger things to worry about than our diets), we need food to survive, and you can bet food corporations are going to try to capitalize on that. If there\u2019s money to be made, someone is going to try to sell it. Cheap? Organic? Low-fat? Gluten free? There\u2019s a market for that and you\u2019ll be bombarded with advertisements everywhere you go. TV, billboards, Instagram, your annoying neighbor Karen who thinks she knows everything about proper dietary care because she saw a special on <\/span>Dr. Phil<\/span><\/i>, they\u2019re all trying to sell you things. Some are forward with their intentions when they use slogans like \u201cpile it high and sell it cheap,\u201d which makes it clear that they know their customers want cheap food, and if the food can be piled high then it\u2019s probably not healthy produce that would rot before a dent was even made in the pile (Pollan, 184). People have less time to cook, and corporations know that, so they sell you something cheap even if the product is unhealthy. The health benefits don\u2019t matter, what matters is that they\u2019ve got your money. Have a lot of free time, money, and enough freezer space to fit the carcass of a deer so that you\u2019ll always have fresh meat? Read Michael Pollan\u2019s book <\/span>In Defense of Food <\/span><\/i>to learn about all the unrealistic options he provides to try and sell you on the idea of healthy living, because that\u2019s what he\u2019s doing. It might just seem like yet another informative book, but he\u2019s actually trying to sell you on a certain lifestyle, just like the big food corporations. Their goals might be different, but they\u2019re still trying to sell a product to you, the consumer. And how are we supposed to know who to believe? With so many different food lifestyles, how do we know which is right? It begins to make consumers feel less like people and more like just another cog in the machine. At the end of the day, how can I even prove that I\u2019m real? How can you prove that you\u2019re real? In truth, how can any of us prove that we are real? I don\u2019t know the answer to that, but I do know that I paid $4.99 for a box of Cap\u2019n Crunch and couldn\u2019t be happier. Pollan can eat his plants, I\u2019ll be over here spooning myself some diabetes, and you can decide what you want to do.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Regardless of what foods we eat or diets we follow, we all have something in common: we\u2019re all consumers. None of us are plants, we can\u2019t survive off of sunlight (unless plants are pretending to be humans, in which case we have bigger things to worry about than our diets), we need food to survive, and you can bet food… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":472,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions\/472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}