Category Archives: Week 1

Lesson 1 Takeaway

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This week’s lesson has been incredibly insightful regarding nutrition and the food industry. What really stands out for me is that as consumers, we are led by the food industry to believe that foods of convenience and longevity are also nutritious, as Michael Pollan describes it, food is being replaced by nutrition “…a great many of the traditional supermarket foods… Read more »

Truckloads of food are wasted daily yet thousands go hungry

The United States wastes about half of all its produce. Millions of dollars and thousands of pounds of perfectly good food is left to spoil or thrown out prematurely. At the same time thousands of people face hunger and food insecurity daily. How can both these things be true? How can we seemingly have enough food to throw half of… Read more »

Western diets and the link to Diabetes.

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Diabetes type 2 is on the increase. This disease has been identified as a new phenomenon which is linked to diet and exercise. Exactly, what is type 2 diabetes? It occurs in people whose bodies no longer use insulin. The insulin hormone helps the body regulate blood sugar. When the blood sugar is too high, the disease causes blood sugar… Read more »

The Politics of Food

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While food is typically thought of in correlation to comfort or nourishment, what I have found to be most interesting is the politics of food. In Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, he discusses the perils of Nutrionism, the ideology “that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient” (28). Nutrionism didn’t begin with average people attempting to… Read more »

Back to our Community Roots

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The root of our consumption of processed foods leads us back to our historic drive to consume sugar, salt, and fats, in order to sustain ourselves in an environment that was characterized by scarcity. Although globally we still have a staggering problem with hunger and malnutrition, in developed and food stable developing nations we no longer have the same scarcity… Read more »

Can organic farming feed the world?

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Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is persuasive that today’s industrialized agriculture model and the resulting Western diet has led to an American population that is overfed but undernourished, eating more calories than ever before (on average 300 more per day than in 1985) and showing alarming rates of diet-related disease including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and cancer. [1] In… Read more »

Food as an Experience

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When I think of experiences that stand out above the rest it includes: family or close friends, sometimes an activity, but the consistent element is almost always food. Michael Pollan explains in his book, In Defense of Food, that food in America can be seen as an item on our to-do list that needs to be checked off. However, in… Read more »

A Stronger Defense of Food

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Farm Sunset

The trends of food system industrialization and nutritionism outlined by Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food have not diminished in the decade since its publication. Neither have the global social, political and economic forces driving those trends. Pollan outlines the bodily and environmental dangers that our new food landscape presents, making a compelling argument that our food needs defending…. Read more »

Industrialized Food System is Depleting Our Soil

Repercussions are rippling through many of our living systems due to the industrialization of food. Monoculture farming is causing untold disruptions in plant and animal systems. Processes we have invented to feed the capitalist food system are rendering our soil biologically inactive, striping it of minerals and nutrients. This degradation of soil is disrupting the symbiotic relationship of organic matter… Read more »

Grocery Stores, The Psychologist’s Playground

The industrialization of food has brought along with it billions of dollars of food marketing to get the shopper to spend that extra few dollar on the newest product. Pollan mentions that the food marketing industry has an annual budget of about thirty-two billion dollars (4). Along with the marketing being shown on television commercials, on billboards, there are more… Read more »