In the World of the Food Industry

This blog is posted a bit a late, so I am sorry for that. However, I do find this topic of food and health issues to be a very pressing issue in all aspects of our lives including teaching. There are a few different ways I want to approach this topic since it is so vast. On a personal level, I feel that food infiltrates all aspects of our lives. I never realized how much food and eating habits affect our daily lives until my freshmen year of college, when I was warned about the freshmen fifteen. Ever since then I have kept or at least tried to monitor what I eat and to try to exercise regularly. But as with most people, my weight and eating habits fluctuates with stress and other life factors.
With all the recent controversy and the House passing a Health Care reform bill, I feel as though it is our job as teachers and citizens to keep informed on the food culture and to teach our students to keep informed about their decisions regarding food and exercise. A recent article that I found in the New York Times, helps to give a better understanding of the tensions of health have come to. It is much more than a health issue; it has become a political and social issue as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/health/policy/08fat.html?_r=1&ref=health

I think to better understand the social context of food and popular culture we need to understand the huge change that has occurred in popular cultural since the invention of television and such models as Twiggy. The 1950’s classic case was a typical family, in which the mom stayed home to cook dinner and the family ate together every night. Grant it, this may not have been true for every family but as a whole this was the situation. Fast forward fifty years, to two career-oriented parents and kids playing in different sports and activities every night, there is just not enough time for the parent, most likely the mom to sit down and cook a meal and instead they have family dinner in the car going through McDonalds. Today’s lifestyle is clearly much busier and more complex then fifty years ago.


An interesting argument and idea that is mentioned in the New York Times article but also mentioned in Tooning In is that how do we make our personal choices. Some overweight people, as in the court case mentioned, sue or blame McDonald’s or other fast food restaurants for their weight problem. On the other hand, you have diet program after diet program being pushed into our culture every single day. It seems to me that the food industry pressures us to binge eat by getting our drink super sized and then to take these diet pills that will help us lose ten pounds in ten days. The marketing of food and health issues contradicts itself in the media and as consumers it is hard for us to reject this unhealthy pattern of eating. I feel it is our job as teachers to try to the best of our ability to help our students understand the importance of balance between eating and exercise as well. I remember it was either last year or the year before the Minnesota Daily published an article about over-exercising, which is also another issue related to unhealthy eating patterns. http://www.mndaily.com/2008/01/24/overexercising-potentially-dangerous

I think the key is to help students and ourselves understand that balance or the ‘gray area’ is very important. Excessively exercising and dieting does not help your body and healthy issues but also eating unhealthy and not exercising doesn’t fix the problem either. It is central to our lives that we find a healthy way to go about eating and exercising but it is hard with the media pressure along with political and medical pressure as well.