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Factors that influence food culture and habits
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People often take in information without thinking about what it means or how valid it is. People also tend to consume food and beverages without thinking where it came from or how it was produced. The well-known saying, “do not believe everything you see and hear” is something more people should consider more often when thinking about the production and consumption of food in America. The American public is misinformed on many topics in the food industry. This can be compared to the message that the book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, delivers about how the public is deceived in regards to history. One specific food lie is how the Corn Refiners Association wants the public to believe that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is the same as sugar and is perfectly healthy for consumption. As some research suggests, this is a faulty food assumption.
Patriotic textbooks “leave out anything that might reflect badly upon [them]” (Loewen 5). Loewen argues that “if textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground” (Loewen 39). The textbooks want to be right for the sake of more simplistic information retention for students. Loewen says this was is “easier” (Loewen 41). This ideology is the same for the food industry. They want to be right for the sake of making a profit while maintaining calm and happy customers. This is what is easier for them. If the consumers saw products with a warning or cautionary label, they might think twice about purchasing that product and trusting that company. As for HFCS, why would the makers want to reveal that “when higher percentages of fructose are consumed, the liver becomes overworked and produces excess levels of uric ...
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... a Eurocentric view that ignores imperfections and covers up less than savory truths. Both of these instances show how the public is deceived about food and history. It takes a spark of curiosity, passion, and enlightenment to dig down into the depths of the truth. It is not an easy thing to do, but something more Americans could benefit from in their daily lives if they questioned more of what appeared to be true.
Works Cited
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print.
Parker, Hilary. "A Sweet Problem: Princeton Researchers Find That High-fructose Corn Syrup
Prompts Considerably More Weight Gain." News at Princeton University. Princeton
University, 22 Mar. 2010. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.
Porter, Mary. "High Fructose Corn Syrup: Really the Same as Sugar?" FortHuntPatch. Patch
Network, 7 Nov. 2011. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.
In Lavanya Ramanathan’s Washington Post article published in 2015 titled “Why everyone should stop calling immigrant food ‘ethnic’”, she discusses about people’s preconceptions on the type of food that should be labelled ethnic. Ashlie Stevens also touched on a similar topic in her Guardian article published in 2015 titled “Stop thinking and just eat: when ‘food adventuring’ trivializes culture”. She talks about how people assume that just by eating food from a certain culture, they are able relate to the culture as a whole. Both authors acknowledge the importance of appreciating authentic cuisines, but takes different approaches to convince the audience. Both authors establish credibility by using a wide range of substantiated evidences. While,
Shulevitz, Judith. The Liberation of Lying: What Wolff gets and the frauds don’t. 2008. Retrieved from
Kingsolver asserts that this lack of a food culture is the cause of America’s obesity epidemic, supporting her assertion with statistics that state that we produce twice as many calories as we need. Kingsolver also describes the process by which almost all of the produce, such as corn and soy, are turned into oils or fed to livestock in factory farms. Those high calorie oils make their way into all of our foods, especially into junk foods. Junk food ads specifically target children, and yet when the children become obese, it is portrayed as a “failure of personal resolve”, leaving the companies producing the
In “Gryphon” by Charles Baxter, a class of fourth grade students gets a substitute teacher. She is very eccentric but knowledgeable and tells the whole class a lot of myths and facts. It is up to the class to decide what is true or not.
In addition, the USDA is exposed for promoting products such as cheese, milk, and high fructose corn syrup in a fictional way. They provided no information that they were unhealthy in the
Fructose is having a negative impact on the modern diet, but a broader lesson than “fructose is the problem” will lead to better results. Looking back to America before Nixon signed the farm bill provides guidance.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
In Lee Ann Fisher Baron’s “Junk Science,” she claims that the “food industry with the help of federal regulators” sometimes use “[a science that] bypasses [the] system of peer review. Presented directly to the public by…‘experts’ or ‘activists,’ often with little or no supporting evidence, this ‘junk science’ undermines the ability…[for] everyday consumers to make rational decisions” (921). Yet Americans still have a lot of faith in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to a 2013 Pew Research study, 65% of Americans are “very favorable” or “mostly favorable” of the FDA. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, the FDA has a moral obligation to be truthful and transparent. The bottom line of the FDA’s myriad of responsibilities is to help protect the health of Americans. Deciding what to eat is a critical part of living healthily, and consumers must be able to trust that this massive government agency is informing them properly of the contents of food. While the FDA does an excellent job in many areas, it has flaws in other areas. One of its flaws is allowing the food industry to print food labels that are deceptive, unclear, or simply not true (known as misbranding). This is quite the hot topic because a Google search for “Should I trust food labels” returns well over 20 million results, many of which are blog posts from online writers begging their readers not to trust food labels. HowStuffWorks, a division of Discovery Communications, published an online article whose author claims that “[the food industry] will put what they want on labels. They know the game….” While the food industry is partially at blame for misbranding, the FDA is allowing it to happen. If a mother tells her children that it is oka...
However, the outcome was different from his desired result due to strong protest from the dairy and livestock industry, so the Congress instead urged people to buy lean meat and less fat food so the dairy and livestock industry do not go out of business. This created the fat-free boom in the market in the 1980s. However, food companies began to put more sugar in their products because the taste was bad when they reduced fat in the food. Now, the sugar intake of Americans has doubled compared with before. In the American market, there are approximately 600,000 different food products, and 80% of those include sugar. Although sugar is written in various forms and names, one suggests that it’s bad in any form, especially if taken too much. Sugar consumed naturally through fiber-rich fruit or vegetable should be fine, but the added sweeteners stimulate the hormones that increase insulin. High insulin prevents people from thinking they are full, and thus crave more food. This causes many diseases. Of course one meal high in sugar will not kill them, but the problem is that people generally exceed daily sugar intake in one meal alone when consuming process food. We eat more processed and convenient food instead of fruits, vegetables, and
This triumphant history is simmering beneath a complicated mixture of endearing and polarizing perspectives. As for many, these are dishes that celebrate a heritage of culinary genius, community-building, and resourcefulness. However, there are many who reach the opposite conclusion and criticize soul food as an exceedingly unhealthy cuisine that needs a warning label, or slave food that is unworthy of celebration (Miller,
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 2007.
Michael Pollan, a writer for New York Times and author of New York Times bestseller The Botany of Desire and named best book of the year by Borders, Amazon, and the American Booksellers Association, discusses some of these harmful effects along with many other facts in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan discusses how corn syrup has consumed our nation in chapter six of his book. He discusses how high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has snuck its way into the food of the American’s every meal. As restaurants line roads and food lines pantries, HFCS lurks in almost every meal. Marlene Bishop, editor of Chocolate, Fast Food, and Sweeteners: Consumption and Health, states: “In the last 35 years, high fructose corn syrup has replaced the use of sucrose by food manufactures in the US due to its steady price and availability (White, 2008)" (3). Because of the excess corn and low price to make HFCS, it continues to pour into the ingredients of the American’s diet.
In the article, “A Food Manifesto for the Future”, Mark Bittman makes his claim on how our American diet is unhealthy and unsafe towards our bodies and the environment as well. Within his piece, he includes multiple suggestions that could be implemented towards the foundation of a healthier, and safer diet. Within all these recommendations, Bittman states that, “When people cook their own food, they make better choices.” I decided to argue for this proposal, after personal experiences that I have had recently where I was able to see the difference between cooking at home, and eating out. Within Bittman’s piece, he states that we should, “encourage and subsidize home cooking”, which at first I did not understand how exactly our nation could subsidize home
Throughout the essay, Berry logically progresses from stating the problem of the consumer’s ignorance and the manipulative food industry that plays into that ignorance, to stating his solution where consumers can take part in the agricultural process and alter how they think about eating in order to take pleasure in it. He effectively uses appeals to emotion and common values to convince the reader that this is an important issue and make her realize that she needs to wake up and change what she is doing. By using appeals to pathos, logos, and ethos, Berry creates a strong argument to make his point and get people to change how they attain and eat food.
More and More people are becoming concerned about what they eat, especially if they consume food products that are manufactured in food industries. However, it is hard to know what exactly you are consuming if food industries provide false nutrition content and mislead consumers by placing false advertisements on the packaging. When a company produces a product that contains misleading label, consumers are not receiving complete information about the food they are eating which could lead to health issues including allergies and problems with diabetes.