The essay “Food for Thought (and for Credit)” by Jennifer Grossman was able to convey the relationship between obesity and fast food of today and the importance of home economics in schools. The definition of nutrition is the process of providing the food necessary for health and growth. This includes healthy and unhealthy food choices. Simplicity and convenience led to the rise of fast food restaurants in America, which led to an increase in poor nutrition. Grossmans argument was that nutrition education needs to change.
My belief is home economics was introduced to teach Americans about healthy nutrition around the time of WWII. Home economics is much more than teaching “Susie” how to be a homemaker. Susie also learned healthy nutrition, how to buy and prepare foods, how to budget the household finances and much more. While young women who intended to go to college were not encouraged to take home economics classes as early as the 1960’s because form that time forward many women were not expected to be housewives. It was then thought that women who were in a career track who were not expected to be homemakers would have little need for the skill set taught in home economies classes.
…show more content…
Through today’s television networks and programs, such as DIY and Food Networks, and Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray shows, Americans will attempt to learn bits and pieces about healthy nutrition.
Grossman touches on the idea of a low income family learning how to spend $100 for a weeks’ worth of food. This made me think of all of the low income families who receive hundreds of dollars in food stamps each month and spend it on frozen entrees, soda pop, snack foods and other less healthy nutritious choices who could benefit from healthy nutrition education, not just for them, but to teach their children healthy eating
habits. The thought of children’s nutrition leads me to Michelle Obama’s School Lunch Program and healthy snacks. I see firsthand the impact that has made on low income children. The school where I work is filled with children from low income families. Some of these children have never tasted any fruits and vegetables that have been provided by the school. While some do not like the unfamiliar tastes of fruits and vegetables, others enjoy every last bite and look forward to the additional healthy nutrition. Some parents are upset because their children come home hungry as a result of their not eating the healthy choices provided at school. This is the result of parents not having appropriate nutrition education. I agree with Grossmans final thought “It’s time to reevaluate the domestic discipline, and recapture lost skills.”
Michael Pollan, an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (Michael Pollan), writes in his book In Defense of Food, the dangers of nutritionism and how to escape the Western diet and subsequently most of the chronic diseases the diet imparts. In the chapter “Nutritionism Defined” Pollan defines the term nutritionism. Pollan’s main assertion being how the ideology of nutritionism defines food as the sum of its nutrients, and from this viewpoint Pollan goes on to write how nutritionism divides food into two categories, with each macronutrient divided against each other as either bad or good nutrients, in a bid for focus of our food fears and enthusiasms. Finally, Pollan concludes that with the relentless focus nutritionism places on nutrients and their interplay distinctions between foods become irrelevant and abandoned.
According to Dolgoff and Feldstein (2003), “the needs and goals of the Food Stamp Program are to alleviate hunger and malnutrition by enabling low-income households to buy a nutritious adequate diet” (p. 132). The program also improved the market for local merchants to produce food for eligible low-income households and other agencies such as the School Lunch Program which safeguard the health and wel...
Throughout the United States many American’s go through and eat at fast food places such as, McDonalds, Burger King, and Jack ‘n the Box. Mainly unaware of the amount of weight one can gain if consuming it on a daily bases or even two times week, can cause health issues, diabetes and possibly obesity. This was the main premise for writer Dave Zinczenko essay Don’t Blame the Eater, who makes an argument that many people are becoming obese and diabetic because of the fast food they eat. He asks a regarding his concern; Shouldn 't we know better than to eat two meals a day in fast-food restaurants?, As a way to engage the general public, like parents and teenagers, he expresses his argument through his own experience when he was a teenager eating at fast food places and information on the fast food industry in regards to how many calories are in the food.
This documentary takes a look at how our school’s lunch programs and government play a role in the spread of obesity across the nation. The film really attempts to drive home the idea that our children are being immorally brainwashed into wanting unhealthy foods. At some points of the film, it appears that the director uses big companies and school lunches as a scapegoat for our nations crisis. It is a valid point that our nation’s children are being
The first manual training school, established in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1879, set the foundation for modern career and technical education (Association for Career and Technical Education, 2013). The St. Louis Manual Training School became a model for other schools, establishing a long-lasting relationship with public education using hands-on learning as one of their techniques. By the 1900, domestic science reached the public school systems which began the rise of the Home Economics program (Vocational age emerges, 1876-1926, 1976). The evolution of Home Economics will evolve several times before it is finally known as Family and Consumer
The federal Food Stamp Program is an assisted nutrition program that helps millions of eligible, low-income individuals and families (United States Department of Agriculture). This program gives its recipients extra money each month to try to help them have better food security. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is also the largest program in the federal safety net (United States Department of Agriculture). In Ohio’s Appalachian counties, there are 515,300 recipients which is 25.4% of the population (Job and Family Services). The Supplemental Nutrition Program is a good program except for one problem that can be fixed relatively fast and one problem that it will take a little time to solve. The problem that can be fixed right away is that the Supplemental Nutrition Program can be abused by the recipients buying junk food instead of healthy food. The problem that will take some time to fix is that some recipients make unhealthy food choices because they do not have access to a local supermarket. In order to fix these two problems the Food Stamp Program needs to better regulate what can be bought with the Food Stamp card and items in convenient stores need to be better stocked in order to keep accepting Food Stamp cards.
Obesity in the United States, which the media has labeled a national crisis, has also been connected to poverty rates. Big fast food industry’s target poor communities, and spend millions of dollars each year to create advertising that appeals to these specific areas. These industry’s also target naïve children when advertising because they know that eating habits developed in childhood are usually carried into adulthood. Children who are exposed to television advertisements for unhealthy food and who are not educated well enough on good nutrition will grow up and feed their families the same unhealthy foods they ate as kids. A big way fast food giants are able to make certain young people have access to unhealthy food is by strategically placing franchises in close proximity to schools. They will often place three times as many outlets within walking distance of schools than in areas where there are no schools nearby. The way fast food advertising is targeted towards children is very alarming considering how important good nutrition is for young people and how a child’s eating habits can affect their growth and
An important issue for Today is how can we make people pick the best nutritional option because giving the poor easy access to healthy food doesn’t mean they’ll buy It. For example, “In 2010, the Morrisania section of the Bronx
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has been very beneficial to many households that do not know where their next meal is coming from by providing them with resources to acquire food. Many of those food insecure households, however, are faced with high rates of obesity that leads to a variety of other health issues. Research has shown that increasing nutritional education through programs that teach people to read labels and balance their diet works and can decrease obesity rates. Low income and minority households, the populations most affected by the issues of food insecurity and obesity, are especially in need of nutritional education. By expanding nutritional education for those households most at risk of obesity, a public health initiative could decrease the obesity levels in SNAP participants.
Eating nutritious food may seem simple enough, but to those that hardly get by financially, affording healthy foods can be a major hindrance. This is proven by Dr. Jim Levine, a researcher with a concentration of the link between poverty and obesity. He is quoted stating, “In many poverty-dense regions, people are… unable to access affordable healthy food, even when funds avail.” (Sifferlin 1) For example, further studies show that the average cost of salad is $1.50 more than the average cost of a hamburger. Getting vitamins and minerals from the food we eat is substantial to survive in everyday life. Annually, it costs five hundred and fifty dollars more to eat healthier. Five hundred and fifty dollars may not seem like much, but to those that have low income, it is a crucial amount. While achieving a healthy diet proves to be necessary to maintain a healthy weight, it is almost inaccessible for those with low income. Low-income individuals confront the barrier of the cost of healthier choices in their everyday
44 percent of Americans eat fast food at least once per week (“Fast food statistics”, 2014) and kids between the ages of 6 and 14 eat fast food 157 million times every month (Ransohoff Julia, 2013). Just in the past 3 decades the obesity rates in children have more than tripled (Kalaidis Jen, 2013). Needless to say, whether once a year or 3 times a week, fast food is a definitely part of most Americans nutrition. Acco...
argue against, which is the position that the dietary choices of the poor are a reflection of availability, not of internal orientation. Jetter and Cassady conducted a statistical analysis of the food baskets of Americans in different income groups and found that individuals on food stamps purchase, on average, $36 per week less of food than individuals who shopped in a grocery store in a wealthier neighborhood, and who did not use food stamps. Jetter and Cassady used these data to reach the conclusion that what they construed as “healthier foods” (that is, the foods more likely to be available in the upscale grocery store) are more expensive, and therefore that the poor cannot afford to eat well. This result is specious, because (a) it failed to control for the actual contents of the test subjects’ baskets and (b) it conflated the cost of grocery baskets with the healthiness of food. Jetter and Cassady were attempting to lend empirical credence to the claim that food deserts force the poor to buy less nutrition food. In doing so, however, Jetter and Cassady failed to consider basket contents. If, for example, an individual on food stamps spent $200 on eggs, chicken breasts, beans, rice, and fresh fruit and vegetables, then surely such a choice would be healthier than an individual who spent $200 on candy bars and soda. Jetter and Cassady’s logical fallacy was to assume that the contents of the
Food is the essential vitality of life and the essence of survival. It nourishes one’s physical body to enable pursuit of passion. However, in overwhelming aspects of American society, food is viewed as an enemy. It is seen as the root cause of obesity which carries heavy condemnations of ugliness and weakness. Countless people have become obsessed with food as a means of exerting strength, displaying will-power, and achieving alleged beauty. The way society views nutrition has become misconstrued and disordered, resulting in unhealthy relationships with food, and thus emotional and physical harm. The most effective way to change society’s relationship with food is to target the presentation, practices, content, and intentions of nutrition
According to this research, the authors establish that “In this period, children are more independent, start making their own food choices and take personal decisions regarding what they eat. The family is less important, especially for adolescents, while friends, peers and social models are the key influences on their eating practices” (Pérez-Rodrigo and Aranceta, 2003). In addition, the USDA found that successful nutrition education occurred not only when learning aboutnutrition information and healthy choices alone, but when these lessons were included in other subjects like Math, Science and languages at early ages (Pérez-Rodrigo & Aranceta, 2001). For example, middle school students in nutrition education class measured the amount of water, wheat, and oil in measuring beakers before added to the cooking pot. Additionally, students worked in groups to develop skills in cooking, school gardening, exhibitions and other workshop activities relating to real life experiences. These activities included classroom discussions, worksheets, keeping food records, shopping exercises and taste-testing. By having all this knowledge combined with the practical skills, I and other students learned a lot of things from nutrition education which can help in real life experience such as
There are various definitions of nutrition education and the most widely accepted one is claimed by Contento as “any combination of educational strategies, accompanied by environmental supports, designed to facilitate voluntary adoption of food choices and other food- and nutrition-related behaviors conducive to health and well-being.” (Contento 2008).