Blog 9
The films and articles that we read for today were honestly disturbing at a bit hard to handle at times. There have been a number of people in my life who have been directly affected by various eating disorders. I am sure many of us watching and reading these materials have either had personal experience with these things or know someone who has. While watching the film Killing Us Softly 3, I initially patted myself on the back for not watching much TV or taking much notice of the advertisements that are happening everywhere around me. Then when the speaker mentioned that everyone thinks that they are immune to the messages and consequences various ads have on our psyche and subconscious. That made me realize that I am likely less of an independent thinker than I believed. I see advertisements in various publications such as The Stranger (Seattle weekly magazine) and What's Up! Music Magazine (local music magazine) for things I often buy and stores I like to shop at, and I wonder how much of that has to do with me viewing some of the same ads week after week in the pages of these magazines.
It was quite disturbing to read out the young lady's teeth rotting out of her head and disintegrating from vomiting so often. I often feel invincible just like she did, and I guess it is a hard realization to know that your body will not regenerate and fix whatever is damaged or goes wrong (although the anatomy of human beings is impressive, the body cannot do everything!).I think one of the reasons that the media continues to push extreme thinness on the consumer is to sort of gloss over the problem and pretend that it is not really happening. It is no secret, with numerous studies done and TV specials and news reports on the increasing size of Americans, yet sometimes it is easier to pretend the problem does not exist by focusing more attention on this "ideal beauty" portrayed in advertisements.
Executive personality traits and eating behavior. Spinella, Marcello; Lyke, Jennifer
Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Pomona, NJ, US. International Journal of Neuroscience. Vol 114(1), Jan 2004, pp. 83-93.
The New Yorker in 1950
The first thing that I noticed as I went through the pages of December 1949 – February 1950 New Yorker was the name brands that I recognized. From many of the liquors (which I know we are not commenting on, but still) to the airlines company TWA, Norelco razors, and Rolex watches. Although I am not sure if TWA went bankrupt recently or not, I am fairly certain the rest of these companies are still in business today. Even Abercrombie and Fitch had an ad! With few exceptions, the people featured in the advertisements had big bright smiles and looked absolutely thrilled with whatever the product was they were attempting to sell. The people are mostly cartooned figures usually positioned towards the product (very lifelike) with great interest and/or enjoyment. It looks to me like the typewriter that is being advertised on one page is the greatest thing that has ever to the family and will be life changing. The only advertisement I found that was food related was Kippered Herring, featuring a mother herring bathing her baby herring in the bathtub to show how well cleaned and packaged in the can this brand of herring is. Wow, does mother herring sure look happy about scrubbing her child for your consumption! The message that this ad seems to be putting out is how much Crosse & Blackwell care about your health and safety by taking the time to package the herring in such a way. Every other ad is mostly for tobacco, alcohol, and clothing/perfume. I suppose readers of The New Yorker were more concerned with fashion and things of that nature that what kind of herring they were going to eat for dinner that night.
Ameena Batada, Maia Dock Seitz, Margo G Wootan, Mary Story. American Dietetic
Association. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. Chicago: Apr 2008. Vol. 108, Iss. 4; pg. 673
Government Involvement
While watching this film, I felt very frustrated and angry about the way that our government has handled the treatment of family farms throughout the nation, as well as in Canada and Mexico. The information presented made the U.S. seem to be this monster that is set on receiving royalties from everything and everyone they can by patenting organisms and seeds. I think this is just plain wrong. I also feel irritated that so many of the politicians that should be allies for these small family farmers are the same people that are benefiting at their expense, profiting from either part ownership or employment in the very companies that seem to be trying to put these farmers out of business. I feel the same way about Dick Cheney’s involvement with Haliburton. This energy and oil company (and consequently, the vice president) is profiting off the Iraq War after being contracted by the U.S. government to build and maintain military bases in the Middle East through the Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program.
I fully support the alternative foods movement, as we’ve been discussing in class, that encourages buying produce from local farmers at Farmer’s Markets. It builds the community by supporting one another and fights the tide of corporate take over with the food that is delivered to groceries stores (which as they said in the film, travel thousands of miles on average before getting to the consumer). I really had no appetite after watching this, and I am now weary and nervous to eat most things for fear they are likely genetically modified. I don’t know what the long-term consequences would be for me physically, but I do understand how it is affecting people globally now, and that is enough to make me want to change my food choices. I hope in the future that foods will be labeled as being genetically modified so we know what we are eating. But I suppose ignorance is bliss, eh?
Smith, Ron. “GMO peanuts could improve health.” Southeast Farm Press; 4/9/2008,
Vol. 35 Issue 11, p6-11, 2p. EBSCOhost Research Database. http://web.ebscohost.com.
post 4
After reading The Scavenger’s Guide… I have a new outlook on hunting. It would be difficult for me to kill and butcher an animal myself, but I think I would be far less likely to waste any part of the animal. I would also be less likely to throw away unfinished food if I grew, gathered, harvested, or killed it. Thinking back to eating in the dining halls on campus my Freshman year, I thought very little about the food I was wasting since I did not have to gather it, prepare it, or clean it up. I would feel better killing a wild animal because it is more likely they have a more natural diet than factory farmed animals and I would know directly how it was butchered and what part of the animal I am eating. As for middle and upper class people hunting more for sport, as opposed to those below the poverty line, this is an interesting question. I hate seeing animals heads mounted on people’s walls like trophies. So I suppose I don’t really have an answer to that question. As for Steve Rinella killing so many animals for his mammoth feast, at least it was only once (I hope). He also seemed to be an avid hunter-gatherer with an understanding of wild animals. I’m sure a meal like a 10 oz. filet mignon, potatoes, salad, etc… has a huge impact that I will never see, effecting lots of different things. For the steak to be harvested, possible forests were likely slashed and burned to give them grazing land, completely changing the ecosystem and dynamics of the area. That’s a huge impact!
Thompson, A.K. Postharvest Technology of Fruit and Vegetables. Harlow: Blackwell
Science, 1996.
Trubek, Amy B. Haute cuisine : how the French invented the culinary profession.
Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000
A Modest Proposal?
The work by Jonathan Swift was obviously quite shocking. I knew this article would be about cannibalism, but not about consuming peasant children to control the population in Europe. Wow. Several of Swift’s comments made me pause to reflect. He ends with the statement that he could think of no argument or objection against what he is proposing. Really? Not even one? I have little understanding of the culture in Europe at the time, but it is hard for me to imagine that the public embraced Swift’s ideas and no one would have any objections.
Swift is not just proposing the use of babies for food, which is slightly off-putting, but also using their skin for gentlemen’s boots and women’s gloves. I am sure many animals in the world cannibalize their own kind. I just wonder how many would use the skin or body of the dead animal for any purpose. I also began to wonder in what context would I be able to force myself to eat another human being? If I were starving and stranded on an island, maybe, but I can’t know without being in that situation. The living conditions for the people of Ireland and the United Kingdom would have to be exceedingly terrible for Swift’s ideas to be accepted. He makes one comment about how sad it is that “poor and innocent babes” are sacrificed by abortion and murder by the mother’s of these bastard children, when he is proposing the same thing. An objection to that claim I just made would be he is proposing to use these children to benefit society. Basically, I’m just a little disturbed by the whole idea.
Alive; the story of the Andes survivors. Read, Piers Paul, 1941. Philadelphia,
Lippincott 1974.
PETA and the meat-packing industry
The first thing that I noticed about the DVD “Meet Your Meat” (besides the fact that Alec Baldwin was the narrator) was the creator of the film: PETA. The images were shocking, the effects disturbing and lasting. Just as they were going for I’m sure. The People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) uses questionable ads and shocking comparisons between the meatpacking industry and the Holocaust and extermination of Jews in Europe to get the point across that vegetarianism is evidently where it’s at. After looking into PETA online, I found that there have been several cases of this organization taking pets from various animal shelters and performing euthanasia on the animals by injecting them with something (I don’t know what), leaving them in dumpsters in a pile. They did this with the claim that it was done to be more humane than other methods like a gas chamber for the animals. Unfortunately, the video did not provide any possible ways to combat the meatpacking industry besides becoming a vegetarian. However, there are ways to be a morally and ethically responsible carnivore and/or non-vegan vegetarian. It requires some research and depends on individual communities, but there are local dairy farms based nearby in Lynden providing dairy products from animals who aren’t pumped full of antibiotics and hormones. I felt the same way after reading the article “Hidden Cost of Cheap Chicken.” I wish the author’s encouraged research into farms that do not treat animals in the ways they focused on. The responsibility obviously cannot be entrusted to the major meatpacking distributors in this country, so it must be shifted to the consumer to become informed about what they are eating and to shop accordingly.
Buehr, Walter. Meat from ranch to table, written and illustrated by Walter Buehr. New York, Morrow, 1956.Wilson 4E-Children's CollectionTS1955 .B8 1956 Yeager, Mary. Competition and regulation: the development of oligopoly in the meat packing industry. Greenwich, Conn. : Jai Press, c1981.Haggard 3 -BooksHD9415 .Y4
Effects of Culture
I have grown up in American pop culture and have done a minimal amount of traveling through Canada and Mexico. These are countries that are not all that foreign to most of us, neighboring the United States to the North and the South. Due to my lack of travel, I have had little experience with what other cultures might see as acceptable foods to eat versus the perceptions and diet that I have grown up with. For the most part, I do not view my eating habits as being all that different from those around the United States. In Western Washington, we likely eat more salmon and seafood than some part of the country that is land locked like Kansas or New Mexico. There are regional differences, but I do not find them to be all that different from my daily diet. In the U.S., we have taken elements of different cultures and adopted them as our own from immigrants throughout much of the 21st century. Reflecting on the definition of a culture, I find myself at a loss. I use the word often without much thought to how I would define it. Perhaps it is a group of people who share anything from common heritage, interests, and/or traditions. There is much more to a culture than that, but these are the first things that come to mind. If most of my friends were vegetarians, that is a sort of culture that would likely influence my eating habits and change them based on that culture.
Ethical sourcing in the global food system, edited by Stephanie Barrientos and Catherine Dolan. Sterling, VA : Earthscan, 2006.
Location in library: Haggard 3 -Books HD9000.5 .E85 2006
Increasing the contribution of small-scale fisheries to poverty alleviation and food security. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2005.Location in library: Wilson 4W -Books SH329.S53 I53 2005
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