Liquid Gold

This week's reading was the fat section of Salt, Sugar, Fat. Fat gives us the texture, the oiliness, and a hidden taste that is much more hidden than salt or sugar. Fat has been targeted for causing bad health way before salt and sugar made their way onto the scene. Butter and other oils have been around for ages, and it's common knowledge that too much of an oily, fatty product is bad for you. However, the use and consumption of fats have drastically increased over the past few decades, and now nearly everything we eat is packed with fat. A key point for the proliferation of fats in our diet is that they don't set of "alarm bells" like salt or sugar, but we barely eat anything that doesn't have the wonderful texture or amazing taste of fat.

One of the most interesting parts of this section was the section about cheese. Historically, cheese has been regarded as generally healthy. But as Moss points out, the food industry has reformulated the process and now cheese is loaded with fats, and we have been coerced in to eating more and more of it per year. The aging process has been replaced with enzymes to speed things up. Now, many foods are loaded with cheese, purely because Americans really like it, and will buy products with more cheese. A specific example is the frozen pizza: historically, as the food giants competed to win over the American populace, adding more and more food to pizzas increased sales. Over the last decade or so, the amount of cheese consumed by Americans per year has increased drastically.

Although fat has been under public scrutiny for the longest of the three killer ingredients, we still tend to turn a blind eye when it comes to flavor and price. Everything from fried food to cheese and and kind of dessert are loaded with fat, and we just continue to consume more. The next time you prepare a meal and think you're eating healthy, be sure to check the fat content - you'd be surprised at the difficulty to escape this chemical sensation.

Omnivore's Dilemma, part 3

This last section of the book detailed Pollan's quest to forage and gather his own natural meal. He details a hot hunting trip and foraging for mushrooms and other plants. The experiences he shares is a good conclusion section, to both this class and the reading.

Pollan wraps up the book, in which he details all of the problems that our culture has grown into due to modern food. By foraging and collecting his own meal, it's a section that is similar to a call to action. Pollan walked through everything he thought wrong about modern food, then tried to show a way to do something different.

It's also a good time to examine that foraging a meal like Pollan did isn't very practical in modern times. It's difficult to do for even those in rural communities, much less suburban. I think this is a good example Pollan uses to identify his argument of the "American paradox." Although we may seem more health conscious, we don't really have that much of a choice.

The section was definitely a good conclusion to most of our reading. Personally, I would enjoy going looking for my own food or hunting something. I like fishing and hunting, and any time I can get something from somewhere other than the store I go for it. However, this section also does a good job of exemplifying that eating truly natural isn't practical at all.

Fastest Conquest ever - And we're all captives

This weeks reading was the first section of Salt, Sugar, and Fat, detailing the obsession with sugar. We are walked through a very recent history (within the last 100 years) of how sugar came to dominate nearly every food and drink we have on a daily basis. We are given a chronological explanation of how a shift occurred, mostly after World War II, that changed the vast majority of American's diets and caused the epidemic of obesity.

In the prologue, we are given the details of a secret meeting between food industry CEOs and their views on obesity and the contribution of their products. In short, they don't care. We will be seeing just as much sugar in the coming times.

The chapters in this section detail the different marketing efforts of several iconic companies. Dr Pepper, Coke, and the cereal industry, to name a few, were among the examples showing how marketing and demand has driven for foods saturated with sugar. As a result, nearly every food in the grocery store is not sugar frosted, sugar blasted, or just colored sugar.

There are numerous ethical issues that arise from this. And since I have to present this to the class tomorrow, I won't go to in-depth yet. But when we read about sugar's conquest, and how we are completely subjugated by sugary foods and bad nutrition, there comes a point when we have to decide that it's too much and something needs to be done. What is the best way to turn things around?