Saturday, January 30, 2010
Post #1
I found Chapter 6 from The Omnivore's Dilemma to be particularly interesting out of the reading. Pollan starts off by commenting on how American obesity can be traced back to the 1970's with the rise of fast food restaurants. Aiding human obesity in this day in age can be attributed to the human body's ability at eating more than it needs to build fat restores for a future famine, which never comes in our society in which access to calories rich food in generally far too easy. He also says how our diets consist of too much corn and how people are getting the majority of their high fructose corn syrup through soft drinks and the like. In this day in age, it is more efficient for someone to consume soft drinks than juice from concentrate from a calorie/dollar perspective. I found this quote to back his statement up, "Since 1985, Americans annual consumption of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) has gone from 45 pounds to 66 pounds" per year. Pollan then states that farmers in Iowa, for example, are producing far more calories than we need. However, the fault doesn't totally lie on the farmers. It is more calorie efficient for them to produce corn in Iowa than anything else, so that's what they produce. Pollan puts part of the blame on the government for aiding corn's dominance in our diet through subsidiaries and other means.
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Good job mentioning all the aspects of the industry, but this seems to be mainly a summary of the chapter. If you expanded more with ideas of your own, instead of just what Pollan says it would wrap this blog up nicely.
ReplyDeleteThis was very well written but it is lacking your voice. You used a variety of information that draws the reader to there own opinion but we want to know what you think. Did you agree with what Pollan said or were you shocked by this? Other than a lack of voice, this was very well written and it incorperated quote to support summarization.
ReplyDeleteI thought that this post was well said. It might have been a little text like but the points were clear and true. What I personally found interesting about this is how you made it not boring, some of the things that Pollan discusses can be a little dull and this post doesn't show that. Well use of text information it was clear that you had done the reading as well as understood it.
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