In Radley Balko's Essay What You Eat Is Your Business

Thirty years ago, overweight children were barely one in ten, but now, in 2015, one in three American children are not only overweight but obese. This problem has reached epidemic proportions and has made established writers write what they think is the source and offer solutions to the problem. Radley Balko is a self-proclaimed libertarian that writes about civil liberties and the criminal justice system to promote limited government and individual freedom. He writes “What You Eat Is Your Business” because the government has been pushing for more federal control of health care and passed a new law that makes people pay for others healthcare. He repeats several times that people should be responsible for themselves, not other people, not the companies, and definitely not the government. On the other hand, Michael Moss is an established writer on the topic of healthy eating habits and fighting for the consumer. He won the 2010 Pulitzer prize for this article “That burger that shattered her life” This article that is

being analyzed is pulled from his book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. He wrote this book because he wanted to go against the food industry conglomerate that is plaguing the world right now with “legal narcotics” which he explains to be sugar, salt, and fat. Moss clearly explains and persuades his audience more effectively than Balko because he cares for the consumers rather than saying it is their fault and that because he adds more rhetorical appeals into his article to lean the audience to appeal for his cause.
In Radley Balkos essay, “What You Eat Is Your Business” he writes about healthcare standards and overweight people because the government should not have a say in what people eat.

This problem causes spiking healthcare costs for healthy people because they are also paying for the unhealthy people’s problems. In the beginning he explains why its not right for government to ban vending machines and junk food in schools for them to represent “responsible” behavior. Going on the describe how state legislatures have spent $200m of tax money to battle obesity. Blatantly stating that healthy people are paying for obese peoples health needs and that is simply wrong In Balko’s mind it is completely wrong that people should have to pay for others problems. Which is the main part of the text and gets reemphasized many times. Balko’s article makes a thought-provoking persuasive point on the de-regulation of the government on our lives promoting the libertarian

view.
The whole article Balko uses “we” and “us” to describe his audience and him all together, in one pool. But Balko’s point is that “Your wellbeing, shape, and condition have increasingly been deemed matters of public health instead of matter of personal responsibility” (467). He writes this to call out the obese people of our country for making him pay for their wellbeing. His ending paragraph “we’ll all make better choices about diet, exercise, and personal health when someone else isn’t paying for the consequences of those choices” (469) is his idea on what would happen if we had a limited government. His idea is that let the people chose, because if McDonalds is unhealthy and the government has no say, the people will choose to stop eating there and the company will die out. Like the stock market fixing itself in the long run.
This article really could boil someone’s blood. Balko choses to ignore many reasons why people fail to make healthy choices, specifically the confusion surrounding what is “healthy” and many hereditary diseases that lead to these problems. The argument that he makes about socializing healthcare interfering with everybody’s sense of personal responsibility just doesn’t convince, considering the way our country processes nearly all of our food. It can be hard to pick what to eat when there are no regulations displaying the misinformation that companies are allowed to show with advertising and packaging. Including the food, health, and organic industries. This is a new problem, since our ancestors were not eating food that was made 50% in lab, every meal of the day. It promotes investigation and accountability and in general, why our government is allowed to do this. This isn’t tobacco, or alcohol, or some other optional prescription, but our very nourishment provided by the food we eat in question. For Balko’s conclusion he states personal responsibility for medical bills would increase the health of our fellow citizens (469). He is quick to judge throughout the article and wonder how quickly would he change his mind if someone close to him was diagnosed with cancer, so he could see the real effects of these problems.
Moss’s article “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” gave a great informative background on a lot of major companies, and how they have become what they are today from the past 15 to 20 years and how they see things now. Sadly, it seems that the majority of C.E.O.’s working for the food industry companies have relayed very little interest with helping America fight through this growing obesity epidemic. These companies are aware of what they think their doing to produce profits is actually destroying our nation, health wise, and are exploiting this point to take advantage of and make their foods even more addictive to create sales. Companies that are worried more about their sales should not be companies in the first place. All food companies are targeting children, elderly, and any vulnerable audience they can think of to make sales and the hurtful thing is that they don’t mind doing it! The more people that try to start eating healthy, the more the companies will just make their own foods more addictive and toxic.
Michael Moss reported “…Moskowitz made clear that while he has worked on numerous projects aimed at creating more healthful foods and insists the industry could be doing far more to curb obesity, he had no qualms about his own pioneering work on discovering what industry insiders now regularly refer to as the bliss point, or any of the other systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave” (479). “Lots of things are trade-offs,” (480) he said. “And I do believe it’s easy to rationalize anything. In the end, I wish that the nutritional profile of the thing could have been better, but I don’t view the entire project as anything but a positive contribution to people’s lives” (481). This is the real problem stated outright. the scientists don’t even believe that they should be helping the industry create healthier products, rather soak in the profits. Do product inventers such as Moskowitz the inventor of the Dr. Pepper Cherry Vanilla drink, not understand what they do to the community? There is no denying that the people who create these unhealthy foods know just exactly what they are doing to the people around them, they just don’t mind it as long as everything is going right for them, is what moss clearly concludes.
The true question is, does anyone with enough power to change the way things are going care enough to do so? People such as Michael Moss are taking stands against unhealthy eating with his countless articles and support for the people since they have no say in what they eat. If the government will not try to fix the problem, how would a common person even try? Moss shows how a commoner can do this. He shows this by saying the average person can take it into their own hands and take a small amount of time to learn about the disastrous consequences that come with non healthy eating. This will make a great difference if you are really interested in becoming healthier eater.
Balko and Moss use a few different techniques to argue and portray his point throughout this article. One of these techniques displays logical appeal with undeniable facts. They use it to prove that the outrageous numbers they speak of are true, and this also gets the reader’s attention throughout the article. The next device they use is how to persuade the audience into believing them. This is an appeal to a reader’s ethics and if they really care about the issue. This also helps the writer establish credibility. The last devise tries to show emotion and appeal to the audience because they might have experienced it first hand and can feel that same pain. They use it when speaking of the future of children and how it is not looking as bright as it should when be dealing with health. Balko and Moss use all three of these devices constantly throughout their articles to make it convincing and effective. However, Moss’s article is more effective in its persuasion of the topic of the food industry selling food as though they are drugs. Although Balko is logically right, that we should not be paying for others health care, he is brutal and does not care enough about the subject to persuade his audience. Moss though, makes his motions clear through his emotions and logic and that is why his article is worth the read and supporting him would only better the problem.