One Thing to Do About Food

"One Thing to Do about Food" is a forum edited by Alice Waters. The forum includes responses from twelve different from twelve different food writers, each writing about one thing that should be done to fix the problems associated with the modern industrialized food system. One of the biggest problems resulting from industrialized food is obesity. People are less healfully than in the past and obesity rates are rising. In the first response, Eric Schlosser explains that obesity stem from advertising to children. Companies market their products to children becuase they tend not to understand the health detriments and can persuade reluctant parents to purchase the products. As a result of this, children today consume over a third of their daily calories from "soft drinks, sweets, salty snacks and fast food." Michael Pollan explains the the prevalence of unhealthy foods is also spurred by the government by means of the farm bill. He argues that if people were more aware of the consequences of the farm bill, there would be more votes to change it. The simplist and most effective solution, however, accoring to Peter Singer, is to stop buying factory farm products. More specifically, he believes that we need to avoid factory farm meat. He explains that the process of converting nutritious grains into meat through animal feeding loses much of the nutritional and caloric value of the grains. For example cattle produce meat at only a 13:1 weight ratio of feed to meat product. In the end, Jim Hightower emphasizes that the only way change can come about is through the people and that we must take initiative in solving the problems surrounding the food industry.

I thought that the authors in this forum made a lot of interesting points. I thought that one of the most interesting concepts was the role that children play in national obesity. As some of the authors explained, children are easily influenced by advertisements and often don't understand the negative effects of the products that they consume. As Marion Nestle mentions, "children cannot distinguish sales pitches from information unless taught to do so." This seems like a problem that can be hard to avoid. It would be hard to teach kides "to do so." It seems that that the only way to get to the root of this problem would be to impose regulations on advertisements.

Discussion Questions
1) What kinds of health and political issues arise from the factory farms and the food industry?
2) How can we solve these issues?