Throughout the world various people make decisions, whether it be what to eat for lunch or if they should go to school. These choices are driven by various things, but which choices are by our wants and needs? Our wants and needs drive our choices with wealth shown in The Golden Touch by Hawthorne, perfection shown through Mathilde in The Necklace by Maupassant, our quality of life in Civil Peace by Achebe, and with food shown through obesity in Obesity in America: Are Factory Farms, Big Pharma and Big Food to Blame? by Hyman. Our wants and needs drive our decisions with wealth shown through “The Golden Touch” by Hawthorne. In The Golden Touch the king craved for gold and he wanted as much of it that he could get his hands on, literally. The king wishes to have ‘the golden touch’ which in turn causes everything he touches to turn into gold. At first this gift seems like a blessing, but his want of ‘the golden touch’ becomes an issue when he can’t eat for his food turns to gold. Soon after, his daughter is touched by the king and is turned into gold. His greatest want of wealth and gold has became the demise of his precious daughter. Midas shows how …show more content…
by Hyman. Inside this article it shows that the foods we decide to put into our bodies determines our quality of life. Often humans will want a candy bar or something else that's unhealthy, but this isn’t what we need to give our bodies. By humans wanting to eat unhealthy food it usually causes obesity. Often obesity is caused by our choices with food and these choices with food are driven by our wants and needs. If we are starving we need food to live, but our wants most of the time effect what we end up eating. Our wants and needs drive our decisions with food are shown through obesity in Obesity in America: Are Factory Farms, Big Pharma and Big Food to Blame? by
By growing more and more corn, to get rid of the surplus, companies have switched to corn sweeteners, and have begun to feed more corn to livestock. “Researchers have found that corn-fed beef is higher in saturated fats than grass-fed beef. ” Capitalism has paved the avenues that allow the government, which is always supposed to be in the public’s best interest, to alter the human diet to such extents that we are now gorging ourselves to our inevitable demise. The American diet is not the only thing that is affected by government
When you hear obesity, do you imagine malnutrition or simply an individual who “eats too much?” Well, these health threatening issues go hand and hand. Learning that a large number of obese individuals are low income, it can be concluded that a lack of funds results in cheaper, more fattening and unhealthy food purchases, which ultimately can develop into malnutrition and unsafe weight gain. The eye-opening film, A Place At The Table, provides viewers with a true representation of how the issues of hunger and malnutrition in the United States affect individuals on a daily basis. Throughout this movie, the filmmakers, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, examine the lives of three individuals who suffer from hunger and and lack of nutrition.
The intake on “cheap” daily food are slowly killing the human race. As social incomes decrease, obesity increase. Fat is no longer a rich man’s disease (Saletan). William Saletan the author of, “Please Do Not Feed the Humans: The Global Explosion of Fat” tells a vivid story of how the human race allowed themselves to fall into the hands of a pig. His arguments stayed strong next to him side by side.
Is Food Has the Same Value As Money? Young children are getting obese because of eating too much junk food and that can lead to serious health problems. These problems affect can stay temporary or permanent. In “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” Michael Moss and “Confronting Inequality” Paul Krugman makes a discussion about money affecting their decisions.
When the dinner bell rings in America, many families are not flocking to the table, but running to the car and the call of the “Golden Arches”. In today’s over-scheduled world, food has now become an afterthought and America is paying the price, literally. Obesity is now an epidemic and a crisis that is not slowing down. The nation is not only paying the price with sky-rocketing medical bills from the effects of the American diet, but also with the deteriorating health of its citizens and for the first time in history, a generation with a shorter life expectancy than the generation before. Food today looks nothing like the food of just 40 years ago, and now instead, is making people sick and obese.
Three examples of greed and its effects are shown in the stories of “The Necklace”, “Civil Peace”, and “The Golden Touch”. The short story “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant tells the story of a woman, named Mathilde, who borrows a very expensive necklace, ends up losing it, and spends 10 years of her life repaying the debt it took to buy a new one, only to find out the original was fake and not expensive at all. This alone states the extent at which we will go to replace materialistic items. The lady had been part of the middle class, living comfortably, and even had a maid and a cook.
The rising health problems in the United States of America are caused by poor nutrition, people who are sedentary, the lack of healthcare prevention, and many more. As reported on the Tikkun website, “Of the many systems in our world today that need to be reimagined, none is more important for our future than our food system” (1). The lack of our food system is one of the many factors that has led the United States to its uprising dilemmas; one of the many factors are the food deserts across the U.S. Food deserts are geographic areas where access to affordable healthy and nutritious food are limited, or impossible to purchase, by residents in the area. Food deserts are prone to low-income areas that can’t afford transportation, and due to the lack of grocery stores and supermarkets that sells fresh produce and healthy food within convenient distance to resident’s homes, there is a difficulty in obtaining healthy food options which leads to countless health issues. According to the Diabetes Forecast website, “About 18.3 million Americans live in low-income areas and are far from a supermarket” (1).
According to the Economic research service of the U.S department of Agriculture that the family had at times, “limited or uncertain access to adequate food, caused by either economic or social conditions.” In other words the family didn’t always have enough food to feed everyone. Among households with children, one in five 7.8 million households were food insecure. (Hunger Pg.1) How can so many Americans be hungry in a country whe4re obesity is an
But why? Pollan suggests that how we eat is just as important as what we eat. And that is the other thing that Americans don’t think about. Claims about being healthy aren’t the only way that food marketers draw our attention. There’s another one- convenience.
In “What You Eat Is Your Business,” Radley Balko tackles the issue of who is responsible for fighting obesity. Balko argues that the controversy of obesity should make the individual consumers culpable for their own health and not the government (467). As health insurers refrain from increasing premiums for obese and overweight patients, there is a decrease in motivation to keep a healthy lifestyle (Balko 467). As a result, Balko claims these manipulations make the public accountable for everyone else 's health rather than their own (467). Balko continues to discuss the ways to fix the issue such as insurance companies penalizing consumers who make unhealthy food choices and rewarding good ones (468).
Americans today are well-known for their eating habits. With all the options the food industry gives us it makes it hard to go to the grocery store and resist picking up that bag of barbeque-flavored chips or blueberry flavored candy. Due to these processed foods obesity is a growing epidemic in our country and who is to blame for it? In an article entitled “What You Eat is Your Business” by Radley Balko, Balko argues for less government intervention. Balko believes is it our responsibility to take care of ourselves and make it a priority.
Junk food is responsible for the growing rate of obesity. This is outlined by David freedman in his article of “How junk food can end obesity.” David Freedman has credited the “health-food” motion, and followers of it along with Michel Pollan. Freedman claims that if the America desires to stop the obesity epidemic, or at least reduce its effects, they must shift to the fast meals and processed meals enterprise for assist, now not the “health-food” movement.
In both David Zinczenko’s “Don’t Blame The Eater” and “ Radley Balko’s “What You Eat is Your Business”, the argument of obesity in America is present and clear from opposing viewpoints. Both articles were written in the early 2000’s, when the popular political topic of the time was obesity and how it would be dealt by our nation in the future. While Zinczenko argues that unhealthy junk food is an unavoidable cultural factor, Balko presents the thought that the government should have no say in it’s citizens diet or eating habits. Zinczenko’s article was written with the rhetorical stratedgy of pathos in mind.
In the world, there are one billion people undernourished and one and a half billion more people overweight. In this day and age, where food has become a means of profit rather than a means of keeping people thriving and healthy, Raj Patel took it upon himself to explore why our world has become the home of these two opposite extremes: the stuffed and the starved. He does so by travelling the world and investigating the mess that was created by the big men (corporate food companies) when they took power away from the little men (farmers and farm workers) in order to provide for everyone else (the consumers) as conveniently and profitably as possible. In his book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Patel reveals his findings and tries to reach out to people not just as readers, but also as consumers, in hopes of regaining control over the one thing that has brought us all down: the world food system.
The fact that Americans, home of some of the most obese humans in the world, are going hungry is indiscernible. Today I stand before you to explain why we, as fellow Americans, need to extend help in the growing effort to fight the war against hunger in America. Before learning what you can do to help, we must first understand the extent of hunger in America. Then we will discover the cause of hunger in the United States. Finally I will present several ways you can contribute to the fight.