Breakthrough Writer

Part of Lesson 3 and All of 4 for In Defense of Food

Part One. Not All Calories Are Alike

1.  Jean Mayer said, “Attributing obesity to ‘overeating’ is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’” In other words, to examine the causes of obesity, we have to look at more than sheer volume; we have to look at WHAT KIND OF FOODS we eat since some foods are trigger foods, inflaming our appetites, and some foods spike our pancreas and blood sugar levels more than other foods, causing a harmful chain reaction. 

2.  A starchy (carbohydrates, especially refined ones) diet increases hunger; it puts sugars in the liver and weight-gain. Calories from starches are metabolized differently than calories from fatty animal protein, which create satiety, a sense of fullness. 

3.  According to Taubes, the 5 foods to avoid are bread or anything else made with flour, cereals, potatoes, foods containing sugar, and all sweets.

4.  According to Taubes, the 5 foods you can eat are meats, fish, and birds; all green vegetables; eggs, cheese, and fruit with the exception of bananas and grapes. Of course, Taubes’ findings contradict Nutritionism, which says limit animal fats. Taubes’ finding contradict the Food Guide Pyramid, which puts fats and oils in the “be eaten sparingly” category. Taubes struggled with his own weight until he followed these outlined dietary principles. 

5.  Some people metabolize carbs better than others. Most of us become hungrier and fatter from a diet that has carbs, especially refined carbs, in it. These carbs are often called “trigger foods.” Pasta, bagels, muffins, garlic bread, etc., can make us hungrier and hungrier, putting us in a feeding frenzy.

6.   About six scientists in the 1950s fell in love with the Lipid (Fat) Hypothesis and selectively used their research to support their hypothesis. Other scientists with dubious motivations, followed the hypothesis and a critical mass developed. Michael Pollan makes the same point.

7.  The nutritional and medical community hated Dr. Atkins, who rejected the Fat Hypothesis and recommended a low-carb diet. They were threatened by his study, which contradicted their food pyramid. 

8.  Carbs create an enzyme reaction that spikes insulin and insulin is what puts fat in your tissue. Carbohydrates, not fat, put fat in your tissue.

9.  Insulin, which is a hormone, is the primary regulator of fat in the human body and carbs trigger insulin.

10.               Nutritionism focused only on cholesterol as a danger and in essence simplified science for mass consumption of information. But lipids, including free fatty acids and triglycerides, are also dangerous and contribute to heart disease. Both cholesterol and triglycerides circulate in particles called lipoproteins. Excessive fat in the blood caused by carbohydrates.

 

Part Two. Carb Glut in the Western Diet (from Part II of In Defense of Food)

1.  Metabolic syndrome from the Western diet is evident in people from the bush who move to the city. They move back to the bush and their health problems go away. Metabolic syndrome includes elevated levels of triglycerides, slowed-down metabolism, diabetes 2, and other risk factors for heart disease.

2.  The men ate fish, other meats, yams, figs, and honey and their Metabolic syndrome went away. I'm curious about the yams, figs, and honey since these are "no-no's" according to Taubes. 

3.  Since two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, Pollan contends, we might want to look at ways we can identity and reject the Western diet.

4.  Study after study shows that populations that don’t eat the Western diet are free of disease, including cancer and heart disease.

5.  Weston A. Price found that populations free of the Western diet suffered no tooth decay, among other diseases. There was no single ideal diet. Simply put all the diets WERE NOT Western. They ate no processed foods.

6.  One big difference in native populations: Meat eaters healthier than agriculturists, those who ate grain. See page 98. This has a huge anti-vegetarian implications.

7.  Grass-fed cows are far more nutritious than corn-fed. Even the butter of grass-fed cow is more nutritious.

8.  Pollan makes the point that health is our relationship with nature, not our ingestion of specific nutrients prescribed by nutritionists or the minions of nutritionism. See page 102-103.

9.  One of the biggest shifts from the Paleo to the Western diet: Processed foods, especially carbs made from corn and flour: See page 106.

10.               Refined carbs lost their original nutrients, but in the 1930s scientists learned how to fortify worthless carbs with vitamins. These fortified vitamins are worthless because they don't get assimilated into the body. See page 109.

11.               Another huge shift: The percentage of calories that come from sugars. Pollan links this increased sugar consumption with type 2 diabetes.

12.               Agriculture creates monoculture (one strain of broccoli, for example), which reduces diversity of nutrients. See page 116.

13.               75% of the vegetable oils in our diet come from soy.

14.               Few foods constitute the calories we eat: 554 calories come from corn; 257 from soy; 768 from wheat; 91 from rice. Not a lot of room in our gut for other foods. These 4 crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. Our ancestors in contrast ate over 3,000 edible species. See page 117. This lack of food diversity seriously compromises the nutrition of any omnivore and that includes humans.

LESSON 4

Part One. Reviewing the 4 Major Fallacies of Nutritionism:

1. Food is a delivery system for nutrients. Eating vegetables makes us healthier, but isolating their nutrients does not because we don’t absorb the isolated nutrients, such as beta-carotene. A lot of anti-oxidants, taken in supplement form, cause MORE cancer. We still don’t understand human digestion: How it breaks down complex chemicals into simpler nutrients. There’s a fundamental mystery and nutritionists who claim to understand it are deluded or lying or both. Pollan wants to continue science, but the reductive science thus far is young and unreliable and we cannot rest any dogmas or “certainties” on it.

2. If you can’t see or taste or smell a nutrient, then you need experts to tell you what to eat. We need scientists to tell us how to eat. Nutrition is an invisible deity so the “priesthood,” the scientists tell us how to eat. These “priests” were wrong about the low-fat diet. This has been the prevailing ideology since World War II. Since then, we’ve become fatter. Fat can’t be demonized. Seventy percent of our brain cells are fat. There are different kinds of fat. But in our low-fat craze, we gorged on low-fat, high-sugar, high-carbohydrates foods and got fat. The average American is 12 pounds heavier than the average American from 1980. Pollan blames the low-fat campaign. Pollan wants an apology from the health community. Another bad fat: The way we make vegetable oil for margarine creates trans fats, which are lethal. Pollan says over 100,000 heart-disease-related deaths are related to trans fat. Butter is healthier for you than margarine. Nutritionism undermines our instincts. Pollan’s mother instinctively knew this margarine stick was unhealthy long before the data came out to show this to be the case.

3. Nutrition divides the world into good and evil. There is a satanic nutrient we’re trying to drive away from the food supply. Today it’s the trans fat. Ten years ago it was the saturated fat. One hundred years ago, the evil nutrient was protein. Kellogg created breakfast cereal in place of protein. So there was a marketing angle. The good nutrient today is the Omega 3 fatty acid. Protein is coming back. Carbohydrates are coming out. Fiber has been “blessed” for the last 30 years.

4. The weirdest is that the whole point of eating is health, not pleasure or community or culture. This is a uniquely American idea. Other cultures eat for family, pleasure, community, socializing, ritual. Every food culture eats to express identity. But America reduces eating to “health” and “nutrition.” We have a single-minded obsession with health. We reduce the rich experience of eating to something so obsessive makes us UNHEALTHIER. This, according to Pollan, is the “American Paradox.” We are Orthorexics. We have an unhealthy obsession with eating. Pollan says he’d accept this nutritionism if it worked, but all the evidence shows that it does not. Nutritionism has had power over us since the 1970s. But the “science” is bad. It doesn’t work.

 

Part Two. Culture Teaches How to Eat, Not Nutritionism

 

1.  If we look at hunter-gatherer cultures, they give us food wisdom. We stay away from the “death cap,” toadstools, which are different from mushrooms. This is culture giving foods a name. Language teaches us.

2.  Cultures instinctively knew to combine rice and beans or corn and beans to make protein complete for proper assimilation.

3.  Tradition in food is the wisdom of the tribe.

4.  Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

5.  Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Pringles. Gogurt portable yogurt tubes. It has 20 chemicals listed as ingredients on the tube. Honey Nut cereal bar glazed over with synthetic milk so you don’t have to pour milk over it.

6.  Shop the parameter of the grocery store where the food has been least tampered with. Fresh produce, meat and dairy products. All the processed stuff is in the middle. Real food rots eventually so it’s near the walls and the loading docks and the cold boxes. But the processed stuff in the middle lasts forever. A Twinkie stays cuddly soft for 500 years. Mold won’t even attack a Twinkie. Mold knows what’s good for it.

7.  Don’t eat foods with more than 5 ingredients.

8.  High-fructose corn syrup is a marker of a highly processed food.

9.  Shop at the farmer’s market and get real food.

10.               It’s just not the content of our diet, but the manner or form of our eating. You eat less by eating, not feeding. You eat less when you have a life. Many cultures, like the French, encourage small portions. There’s a French taboo on snacking and eating in the car. In Okinawa they say hara hachi bu: eat until you’re 80% full.

11.               Americans are the fastest eaters on the planet and it takes 20 minutes for the brain cells in the gut to tell the brain you’re full.

12.               Eating socially slows us down but if we’re lonely solitary Americans we “feed” like animals.

13.               Don’t buy food at the gas station. Gas stations are processed corn stations, ethanol for your car and corn products inside the store.

14.               Take control from the corporations. Don’t let The Man prepare your food. He does a lousy job.

15.               We need to rediscover cooking. You can’t microwave farmer’s market food. Pollan says you don’t have to cook like a TV chef. It pays to learn how to cook dishes that you really like. Most Americans spend at least 2 hours a day on the Internet but we should “give back” some of this time to cooking. Meals are too important for “outsourcing.”

Part Three. The Top Ten Things I Learned from Studying the Vegetarian Debate and the Western Diet

 

I’ve read a lot of books about the food industry and nutrition,  partly for personal reasons and partly for teaching about the subject in my critical thinking class. I’ve read Michael Pollan,  Nina Planck, Gary Taubes, Lierre Keith, Matthew Scully, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Peter Singer, and others. Here are the top ten things I learned:

 

1.  Tribal societies that could be described as hunter-gatherer and ate meat were healthier and had more lean muscle mass that herbivorous tribal societies who ate a largely vegetarian diet. They were fatter and more disease-prone.

2.  While there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet, most people don’t respond well to a diet that consists largely of refined carbs.

3.  While many vegetarians and vegans promote their diet as optimum health, for some their diet is a disaster, resulting in overeating,  depression, and malnutrition.

4.  The practices of factory farming, treating livestock like commodities, is a moral abomination that results in unspeakable cruelty.

5.  The moral abomination of factory farming is in conflict human nutritional needs: The research from Weston A. Price, Gary Taubes, Michael Pollan, Nina Planck, Lierre Keith, and others shows a “Caveman Diet,” based on meats, vegetables, and occasional fruits and starches, promotes optimum health. Again, some people can thrive on vegan diets, but they seem to be the exception, not the rule.

6.  Most of us cannot metabolize refined carbs in a healthy way. These carbs spike our insulin and act like a drug, making us more and more hungry, resulting in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. As I said to my brother-in-law last night as the Christmas dinner as he scooped his mound of scalloped potatoes with an oversized honey roll: “Right now, your brain is marinating in insulin and insulin is a drug.” He looked at me with a crazed smile, laughed in agreement, and continued to shovel his honey roll into his mound of starch.

7.  A vegetarian diet can make me fat. I found myself loading up on peanut butter and bagel sandwiches, rice and beans, hummus and pita bread, pasta, cheese pizza and other fattening foods.

8.  A modified vegetarian diet, absent the foods mentioned above, could result in weight loss if I eliminated refined carbs and added sardines, tuna, eggs, and yogurt to my vegetarian meals. But vegetarian or not, I cannot eat pie, bagels, pasta, bread, and pizza and expect to get my weight down. This is rather obvious and should have not required some dramatic 2009 pronouncement to face this fact. But in 2009 I learned the ninth important thing about me and food:

9.  I’m a slow learner and often times don’t want to face the obvious as I prefer to be conveniently ignorant.

10.               Unlatching your greedy mouth Mamma Carb, brought to you by the Food Industry, is going to be difficult for social reasons (you’re ostracized when you don’t eat what your tribe eats), economic reasons (it’s expensive to eat local, sustainable, organic, healthy foods), and emotional reasons (you feel helpless and crippled in your dependence on Mamma Carb).

 

Part Four. Journal Entry:

Write down the Top 5 Things you want to change in your eating habits since studying food for this class.  

Part Five. Your Essay Assignment

In your first 1.5 pages, define “Nutritionism” and evaluate its dangers and fallacies. Then in another 1.5 pages, define and evaluate the dangers and fallacies of  the Western Diet. In another page, define the idea of “food literacy.” Then in two pages, critique your eating habits in the context of Michael Pollan’s “manifesto” and what it means to be “food literate.” In your final page, describe a meal you make for yourself that you can defend based on the criteria prescribed in Pollan’s “Eater’s Manifesto.”

You will need a Works Cited page that cites Pollan, my blog, any recipes you may have to consult for your “defended meal,” and any other source material. Remember: Give your essay a catchy, salient, memorable title. 

 

Back in the World Lesson #2: “Say Yes”

 

Lying Down the Psychological Groundwork for Back in the World by Tobias Wolff

 

Part I What are the 10 Obstacles of Going “Back in the World”?

 

1.  Naïveté or innocence like the wife in “Say Yes” or Krystal in “Desert Breakdown”

2.  Egotistical blindness that results in a refusal of accountability, self-introspection and creates an inflamed sense of entitlement like Peter in “The Rich Brother.”

3.  Narcissism, which results in delusions of grandeur like Mark in “Desert Breakdown.”

4.  Misguided good intentions—perhaps the wife in “Say Yes” thought she could “reform” her husband.

5.  Misguided ambition—Leo in the “Missing Person” aspires to a “spiritual life” for which he has no aptitude.

6.  Unconscious fear—Leo withdrawals into the church because of his fear of women, heartbreak, intimacy and in a general sense a fear of the world. In many ways the story “The Missing Person” is about the power of corruption for transforming our lives for the better—if we react to corruption in a way that makes us stronger, not weaker. To borrow a clichéd quote from Nietzsche, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

7.  Wishful thinking—it’s human nature to want to believe that things aren’t as bad as we suspect they are. Perhaps this is the case of the wife in “Say Yes” and Krystal in “Desert Breakdown.”

8.   Oversimplistic view of the world that causes us to look at the surface without peeling the outer layer and seeing the complexities, contradictions, paradoxes, and enigmas that lie underneath.

9.  Having parents, a spouse, a boyfriend, a girlfriend or other enablers who bail us out every time we sink so that we develop a false sense of security and feel free to pursue our delusions with impunity like Mark in “Desert Breakdown.”

10.               Money can give us a false sense of security and invincibility so that we can assert our most destructive, grotesque aspects of our personality and think we can get away with it—like Peter in “The Rich Brother.” Also take a look at Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears.

 

 

Part II: “Back in the World” Moments:

 

Hopefully, all of us will have a “back in the world” moment, that defining instance in which we take our heads out of our proverbial butts and see reality for what it really is:

 

1.  You wake up one morning and realize your boyfriend or girlfriend is the devil and you can’t believe you spent all these months, maybe even years, jumping through hoops to stay in the relationship.

2.  You wake up one morning and realize you need to move out of your parents’ house.

3.  You realize that if you continue hanging out with your loser friends, you’ll never make it through college and you’ll end up like them, living paycheck to paycheck and hanging out doing nothing for the rest of your life.

4.  You realize you have crappy study habits and that if you don’t achieve more consistency in your homework, you’re going to be a failure or at best a mediocrity.

5.  You realize that a clique or social circle that you thought you were part of wants nothing to do with you.

6.  You realize that you have grotesque table manners and that you slurp and inhale your food in such a way that grosses everyone out.

7.  You realize you have poor personal hygiene and you realize that if you don’t clean your teeth and wash your armpits, no one is going to want to be around you.

8.   Your messy room and your dirty car reflect on something deeper inside your personality that points to chaos, lack of focus, and general disarray.

9.  All the time you spend on the Internet is a reflection of how you have failed to maintain real human relationships and how you use this fantasy Internet life to compensate for your emotional retardation.

10.               You realize a supposed friend or even family member has back-stabbed you all your life and there’s nothing left for you to do but break all ties with this individual.

11.               You realize that you and your wife can only buy so many toys and organically baked treats for your dog and that it’s time to have a real child.

12.               You realize that it’s you alone who’s responsible for your road rage and that if you don’t do something about your anger issues you’re going to kill someone or yourself.

13.               You realize that you alone are responsible for all your failures and that you can no longer afford to blame your parents for your dissatisfaction in life.

14.               You realize that you’re majoring in a college subject to please your parents and other family members but that deep inside you despise your major with every fiber of your being.

15.               You realize that you’re fiancé who is beloved by all your friends and family is someone whom deep down you’re just not really into or worse is someone whom you truly despise.

16.               You realize that you’re so emotionally needy that you spend your credit cards on garbage you don’t need and that if you continue with  this compulsive spending you’re going to spend the rest of your life getting pimped by the credit card companies.

17.               You realize that all the promising diets you spend so much time and money on give you a phony short-term weight-loss that always ends up with you gaining all your weight back and hundreds if not thousands of dollars poorer for your vain efforts.

18.               You realize that paying thirty dollars a month to be a member of 24 Hour Fitness or Balley’s or Gold’s Gym isn’t sufficient motivation to get you off your butt because you’re essentially a lazy person.

19.               You realize that paying a personal trainer sixty dollars a month isn’t sufficient to get you off your butt because no one but yourself will give you the motivation you need to be successful in life.

20.               You realize after going onAmerican Idol that you can’t sing. That’s pathetic. It took you the experience of going on American Idol and being laughed at by Simon Cowell and millions of others before you realized you couldn’t sing.

Part III: Journal Entry

Write about a personal "back in the world" experience.  

 

1C Quiz 4 for Spring Semester 2010: In Defense of Food

Write two 200-word paragraphs that contrast "real food" with "Nutritionism." 

1A Quiz 4 for Spring of 2010: Back in the World

In a 500-word paragraph, explain the meaning of Tobias Wolff's book title Back in the World. Be sure to use concrete examples. 

Lesson #1 for In Defense of Food: The Scourge of the Western Diet Is Nutritionism and Essay Options

 

 

One. Reading Questions: 

 

1. Contrary to the complicated edicts of nutritionism, what simple edict of eating should we follow? 1: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This has become a famous mantra. The problem is what constitutes “food.” Not so simple in this age of nutritionism. This evil force wants to make food complicated and then "help" us. 

2. Why should you avoid products that make health claims? 2. For 3 reasons: The claims are most likely false. The cost of any such food product is inflated. The product is more of a product than it is food.

3. On page 3, Pollan says there was an eating cultural shift that was to our detriment. What was this shift? Two big shifts: Mother was no longer the cook. She lost her authority to the scientists who have intruded upon our eating with nutritionism. The second shift, related to nutritionism, is the Big Lie of nutrition, which is that a low-fat diet is essential to a healthy heart and overall good health. Americans actually gained weight while incorporating this lie because in the absence of fat, they bulked up on sugar, processed starch, and carbohydrates, which convert into fat and triglycerides, which cause obesity and heart disease. Also see page 7. The low-fat trend was unhealthy.

4. What is driving such relentless change in our eating? See page 4. The 32-billion-dollar food marketing business constantly must mix things up, have new things, just like Apple has to launch a new iPhone or iMac every year or so. You must peddle new stuff, make the old stuff seem obsolete, so you create the need for new food science, most of which is bogus. These processed foods based on phony food science have a higher profit margin than real food like a potato or a banana.

5. How flawed has science been in influencing our diet? See pages 4-5. New studies keep coming out that contradict the previous studies. Fiber is better, but then it’s not. Low-fat is better, but then it’s not. All of these contradictions, confusions, and anxieties are linked to Nutritionism.

6. What is the Dark Age of Nutritionism? It’s a sick cocktail of the greedy food industry, fake nutrition science, and lousy, mainstream journalism. Let’s call this cocktail the Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity. Nutrients won out over foods. See page 26.

7. What is Pollan’s central aim? 7 To reclaim our health and happiness as eaters. And to do this we must extirpate ourselves from Nutritionism, which is both unwittingly and deliberately confusing and focus on real food again.

8. Pollan writes that a lot of food we eat is not food at all. Explain. We eat Pringles instead of potatoes. We eat banana chips instead of bananas. We eat processed soybean oil instead of butter.

 9. How have we become a culture that “eats” to a culture that “feeds”? 7. We’ve lost the joy of eating real food. In real food’s place, we eat processed food that is measured by some phony barometer of nutritional value, which is soon to be contradicted by the nutritionists. We eat and celebrate real food. We feed on nutritional components. Some people’s diet is a series of nutritional components, but as we shall see these isolated components do not interact with the body for optimum health.

10. How is eating “scientifically” a sham that degrades the human spirit and body? 8 We’ve become a nation of orthorexics, obsessed with the myth of food purity and extra strength nutrition through supplements and processed foods. Such obsessions, always worrying about nutrition, the author speculates (and I agree) retard our happiness and make us slaves to the Industrial Food Complex. One worry we should have is the Western Diet, full of cheap processed carbs and sugars, which kills.

11. Contrast the French paradox with the American paradox. 9. The French enjoy moderate portions of fat-rich food and don’t get fat. They don’t obsess over what they eat. In contrast, Americans obsess over their nutrition and binge and purge and eat in all sorts of extreme ways, including crash diets, and they are fatter and unhappier than the French.

Part Two. The Characteristics of Nutritionism

1. We switch from eating food to eating nutrients. This kills the joy of eating and we become feeders, not eaters.

 2. Nutritionism promoted the lipid hypothesis in 1977 and it made us follow the wrong path. The theory is that a diet high in saturated animal fat leads to heart disease. It became the unquestioned dogma (belief system) embraced by the American Heart Association. The theory is only partly right. This high animal-fat diet is dangerous when it’s part of the Western processed diet lacking in vegetables. But as Weston Price discovered, cultures who eat animals are very healthy, but their diet is Paleo or hunter oriented.

3. Nutritionism is not a science. It is an ideology that joylessly places nutrients ahead of food. It is, Pollan argues, a flawed and dangerous ideology.

4. Nutritionism offers a way of life through unexamined assumptions. (Reminds me of Mother Culture in the novel Ishmael). The ideology is to break food down into is parts or nutrients. The “priesthood” who can interpret these nutrients are the scientists and nutritionists. Nutritionism fanatically reduces eating to “promoting health” to the exclusion of pleasure and culture. In the context of the French paradox, nutritionism isn’t even good for you.

5. The Good/Bad Theory of Nutritionism: For every good nutrient is a bad one. As a result macronutrients are always at war. Protein vs. carbs, for example. Or refined carbs vs. fiber. Another huge flaw: Nutritionists focus too much on nutrients while forgetting how to judge the foods themselves. Baby formula and margarine are putrid examples of the failure of nutritionism.

6. Nutritionism is the official ideology of the Food and Drug Administration and the American Heart Association. Pathetic.

 7. Nutritionism is beholden to the various food industries. For example, politicians cannot focus on telling people to eat less meat, just less nutrients. Therefore, nutritionism if focused on nutrients, not food. See page 24.

8. Nutritionism embraced chemicals, not food. So the language of Nutritionism is chemical-based: polyunsaturated, beta-carotene, antioxidants, probiotics, etc. This emphasized processed food and food companies could “fortify” these chemicals into the processed food and charge us more money and make higher profits even though these processed foods make us LESS healthy because our bodies don’t interact with fortified processed foods and isolated chemicals. We interact healthily with whole food, real foods.

9. Nutritionists, blinded by their ideology, make the woeful and egregious mistake of reducing food into nutrients rather than looking at foods as a whole entity.

10. The joyless puritanical Nutritionists ignore and disdain the role of pleasure in eating. We digest and assimilate food better when we ENJOY it. Hello.

11. One salient example of the arrogance and failure of Nutritionism: their production of “baby formula,” which is an inferior substitute for breast milk. See page 32.

12. One of the most enduring, inferior products of Nutritionism: Margarine.

 13. Why did Americans grow fatter during the Era of Fake Low-Fat or Fake Nonfat Products? We overate our “whole-grain” Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms and other crap. 35-40.

14. What was the Coming Out Party for nutritionists? Oat bran, 1988. See 37. Now new studies show that all those oat bran claims were exaggerated and outright false.

 15. How were animals affected by nutritionism? See 37: leaner, often unhealthier versions.

16. How did the Atkins diet affect carb foods in terms of processing? 38

17. Why have pomegranates, avocadoes, and bananas, to name a few foods, been spared processing and tinkering by the nutritionists? 38, 39. You can’t stick a health claim on a piece of fruit like you can a tub of margarine or a box of cereal.

 

Part Three. Some Real Food You Should Include in Your Diet, Sometimes Called “Super Foods” (not a complete list):

1.  Salmon

2.  Blueberries

3.  Almonds

4.  Walnuts

5.  Lentils

6.  Beans

7.  Tomatoes

8.  Oranges

9.  Oats (steel cut)

10.               Broccoli

11.               Spinach

12.               Dark greens

13.               Pomegranate

14.               Hot peppers

15.               Yams

 

Essay 1 for 190 points

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan: Critiquing the Pathologies of Nutritionism

In a 1,000 word essay, develop a thesis that critiques nutritionism, exposing its fallacies and mythologies and revealing the way nutritionism deludes and cripples the average consumer. Use no fewer than 2 sources.

Thesis is analytical or argumentative in emphasis and often has mapping components, the causes, effects, distinguishing characteristics (in analysis) or reasons (in argumentation) that map out your essay's body paragraphs.

Example of argumentative thesis showing reasons: You should not eat fructose or high-fructose corn syrup because it can not be metabolized in the liver, it spikes your insulin, it creates metabolic syndrome, it stimulates obesity, and it causes diabetes. 

Example of an analytical thesis showing causes: The dramatic rise in obesity since the 1970s can be attributed to cheap, ubiquitous corn syrup, low-fat diets which encourage high sugar consumption, the replacement of real food with processed food, and sedentary lifestyles.

Example of an analytical thesis showing causes: Americans eat less real food and more processed food because of learned helplessness which makes us get "punk fed" by the convenience food industry, addiction to high content of sugar, fat, and salt, ignorance of the difference between real and processed food, and brainwashing to the tenets of Nutritionism.

Example of analytical thesis showing effects: The typical American high-sugar, high-fructose diet results in metabolic syndrome, diabetes, increased appetite, and erratic energy levels.

Example of analytical thesis showing distinguishing characteristics: The Chronic Fast Food Eater is someone who is addicted to fat, salt, and sugar; someone who is over-reliant on convenience; someone who suffers from learned helplessness and therefore cannot make his own healthy meals; and someone who is egregiously ignorant of the crucial differences between real food and processed food byproducts.

Thesis Structure Examples for Essay 1

Nutritionism is a _________comprised of ___________, _________,____________, and _____________. 

 

Nutritionism is a 

fraud

an industrial sham

contrived web of lies

insidious marketing invention

dishonest business model

evil lie

pretentious business fraud

 

Putting all the parts together into a thesis showing distinguishing characteristics:

Nutritionism is a pretentious business fraud comprised of the promotion of nutrients and chemicals over whole foods; the promotion of the false gospel of the low-fat diet; the promotion itself as a science when in reality it is a pseudo-science and an ideology based on false assumptions; the promotion of elevating itself with specialized, scientific-sounding language that only the Nutritionist Priesthood can understand; and the promotion of itself as a champion of the people when in reality Nutritionists champion the food industry's interests.

Introducing Your Essay: Get Your Reader's Attention

You could profile someone you know (yourself?) who is a slave to Nutritionism or fast food or food byproducts and describe the person's problems that result from their ignorance.

You could show the influence Michael Pollan's idea of Nutritionism has had on our culture.

You could show the origins of the term Nutritionism.

You could begin by showing how Pollan uses examples of Nutritionism during his lectures.

You could begin with a general discussion of learned helplessness and its connection to being unable to change and transition to a specific discussion about how people are helpless to the cruel god of Nutritionism.

You could begin, as this article does, by showing the conflict between Nutritionism and common sense.

 

 

Related articles

In Defense of Food Book Review

A Pollanite Pushes Back: Why Junk Food Could Be Better, But Would Still Be Junk

Diet choices for a healthy Gen Y

You are what you eat...What's eating you?

Food- Our Most Powerful Medicine

Nutritionism In America Is A Crock Of Bull

 

Stanford Experiment Overview: For a Comparison to The Chocolate War

Wikipedia has a good overview of the Stanford Experiment with various links. 

Class Notes for "The Enormous Radio" and "Goodbye, My Brother"

Lesson #6: The Enormous Radio (33): Edited and Expanded

Part One. Reading Questions.

1.  What suggests marital ennui in the story and how does this ennui pique Irene’s interest in the radio’s banter? See page 35 bottom. And see page 37. Irene becomes addicted to the banter, the chatter, the private lives of others to distract herself from boredom, a common occurrence of getting into a marital rut. She's looking for something to break the monotony and the radio fills the role. Some people join Weight Watchers; others get a make-over; others fly to Tahiti; some have an affair; some get obsessed with a celebrity. You name it. 

2.  How is the radio banter in a way a precursor to reality TV? What unsavory appeal does reality TV and the radio banter have? Voyeurism as a distraction from personal emptiness, boredom, and frustration. This voyeurism speaks to the public appetite for scandal such as the “Tiger Woods case.” Reality TV, Twitter, facebook and other social media sites give us the opportunity to rake over the smallest detail of everyone's personal lives while we distract ourselves from our own life, which may very well be a train wreck, yet we don't even know it because we're on facebook 24/7 scrutinizing the private lives of others. 

3.  How does Irene’s newfound addiction affect her relationships? See page 38. She’s haunted by knowing the inner lives of others. This distracts her. She does not connect with people the way she used to. The radio gives her a sense of omniscience, which makes her elevated, superior. This puffed-up pride speaks to her growing isolation from others. Obsessing over others’ foibles deludes us into thinking we’re pristine and sinless. As a result, we cultivate pride and become more distant from others. During Irene’s radio addiction, she becomes a haughty buzzkill like Lawrence in the story “Goodbye, My Brother.” She doesn't face her own demons; rather she looks with disdain at others with a sense of self-superiority. 

4.  What evidences Irene’s lugubrious addiction to voyeurism? See page 39. She’s sad, but she’s addicted to the sadness, the drama, she receives from listening to private conversations. On the outside she laments the sadness, the upheaval, and the abuse she learns about others, but on the inside she finds pleasure in the drama: After all, people's private lives have become a soap opera for her entertainment. 

5.  How does the radio chatter open up the wound of Irene’s despair? See page 40. She sees in their despair a mirror of her own and she needs to quiet her despair as it was before by getting rid of the radio. In other words, the dark world afforded by the radio is a projection of her own misery. 

6.  In what ways does the radio become a religious instrument for Irene? How does this instrument fail her? It brings her no grace or forgiveness for her sins, only guilt and damnation. See page 41 as a litany of her sins are recited by Jim, her husband. She doesn't redeem herself of her sins or confront them or do anything to salvage the mistakes of her past. Instead, she intoxicates herself with the melodrama of other people's egregious misguided decisions. 

 

Part Two. The radio is analogous to the voyeuristic impulse behind reality TV and celebrity scandal. What is the appeal of this voyeuristic impulse?

1.  We like to see stories unfold about others because watching the deformities, grotesqueries, and disgraces of others makes us believe we’re normal. For example, I'm an overeater, easily consuming 1,000 calories a day that I don't need. Yet I am obsessed with the HomeTown Buffet customers who eat 10,000 calories over their dietary budget. I'm a pig times one, but they are all pigs times 1,000 so I can feel normal compared to these slop feeders. 

2.  Watching the sins of others distracts us from our own sins. We're all sinners, but we'd rather ignore our own as we throw eggs and slop at Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods is no different than any man. All men in fact are like kids in the candy store wanting to eat more than they can chew. Give a man wealth and power and all hell breaks loose. Yet we treat Tiger Woods like a freak and an "addict."

3.  Sadly, part of human nature is schadenfreude, the pleasure of watching others’ failures. We are by nature competitive, always jockeying for an advantage and watching people fall from a high stature makes us feel relieved. We say, "Thank God that wasn't me." Jay Leno for decades has been admired as an effective comedian and a likable public personality but the perception that he stole his job back from Conan O'Brien has made him a fallen figure, rendering many people with a large dose of schadenfreude. The case with goody two shoes Tiger Woods. 

4.  Shared community experience of shaming the outcast makes the community feel stronger. We call this shaming a name: scapegoating. There are all these "Real House Wife" shows rendering people as selfish back-stabbers, fame-mongers, charlatans, ego pig-feeders, etc. By shaming these characters (who are no doubt playing to the camera for our delectation) we shame them and feel morally superior. 

5.  Voyeurism, such as access to the Tiger Woods scandal, allows us to knock down our celebrity gods and exact revenge and resentment against those we envy. We hate people being happier than us. We hate people who have special privileges like cutting to the front of a line at a fancy restaurant. We hate athletes who get arrested and then take celebrity photos with the police like Ben Roethlisberger. Let us cut them down to their rightful place in the universe so we can sleep better at night. 

Part Three. Essay Option

In a page, write about yourself or someone you know who got addicted to a reality show or celebrity scandal. In your thesis, explain the psychological causes of this addiction by comparing these causes to the motivations behind Irene's obsession with the mysterious radio.  

Lesson #5: “Goodbye, My Brother” (3)

One. Reading Questions

1.  According to the narrator, what value is of utmost importance? 3

2.  What evidences Lawrence’s anal-retentive personality? Attaining superficial perfection to mask the lack of connection, which leads to more disconnection. Asserting an authoritarian, censorious disposition on others. Modern American word for this type of person: buzzkill.

3.  What’s eating away at Lawrence? He’s worshipped the false god of ambition and has nothing to show for it except trifles. He must prove that he is superior to others to hide his wasted life. And this assertion is exhausting and draining to him and others. To assert his “superiority,” he is animated by the need to issue grievances of all kinds. This sucks the life out of everyone. See page 11.

4.  What are the rotten fruits of Lawrence’s personality? Soulless, emasculated, frightened children, not raised with an appetite for life. See page 8 and top of page 10.

5.  What evidences that Lawrence is a philistine? He cannot define himself on human relationships, since his are woeful or nonexistent. He must define himself by the things he buys and owns. That is a philistine.

6.  Why is the sea such a predominant figure throughout the story? The sea represents the opposite of Lawrence’s pinch-faced joylessness: The sea represents life and the giving and bearing of life. The sea is a celebration of life. The sea is also a place where we shed our anxieties and sorrows and connect with nature. See page 10. The sea is a celebration, shouting “hurrah” on page 18. But for Lawrence, the sea shouts “vale,” which means farewell. Then on page 19, the brother whacks Lawrence with a sea root, a club from the sea.

7.  How is the acrimony (bitter antagonism) between Anna the cook and Lawrence significant to the story’s theme? See pages 10 and 11.

8.  What nourishes Lawrence on page 12. Shaming others. Looking with disapproval or a censorious expression as if to say, “You should be ashamed.” What a buzzkill.

9.  Why does the narrator describe his brother Lawrence as “misanthropic” on page 16? A misanthrope hates the human race because he hates himself. Unable to love himself, he must hate others.

10.               How is the vacation paradise restored after Lawrence leaves? Strawberry jam smell, Diana and Helen swimming in the sea. They are naked but not ashamed, like Adam and Eve before the Fall.

 

Part Two. Essay Option

Write a profile of someone you know who reminds you of Lawrence. This person is a buzzkill and has the power to ruin a good mood just by merely walking into a room. For your thesis compare the distinguishing characteristics of this buzzkill with Lawrence. 

Lexicon for "Goodbye, My Brother"

1. anal-retentive personality

2. supercilious pose

3. philistine

4. acrimony (bitter antagonism)

5. censorious

6. misanthrope

7. buzzkill

Lexicon for "The Enormous Radio"

1. ennui

2. banter, chatter

3. voyeurism

4. foibles

5. schadenfreude

Lesson #5 for The Chocolate War: Revised and Expanded

 

 

Part One. Spiritual Death in the Novel

The Chocolate War is about the different types of deaths we face when we compromise our individual conscience for power, conformity, and corruption, as Jerry does throughout the novel. One type of death Jerry suffers is the death of the identity of himself that he values:

 

1.  His image of self as being courageous is gone for he realizes he is a coward who is manipulated by Archie to fight, not out of courage, but by pressure to defend his “manhood” and by revenge.

2.  His image as a compassionate man is gone as he sees he can be calloused and apathetic, a slave to the barbarian tribal code, as he participates in the final fight.

3.  His image as a moral man is gone during the fight when he sees his dead mother casting an admonishing gaze upon him, showing that he has betrayed her, by betraying the values she taught him.

4.  His image as being loyal to his mother is gone as he realizes pride and self-preservation triumphs over all other interests.

 

Thus the novel is dealing with the death of the self, in a spiritual or psychological sense, much more than it is dealing with physical death.

 

Part Three: Today’s Essay Variation:

Jerry is a complex character. He is neither simply heroic, worthy of our sympathy and admiration nor simply a “failure,” worthy of our scorn and contempt. Argue that Jerry’s moral complexities defy simple analysis with a thesis that might look like this:

Jerry is a sympathetic character full of moral contradictions that include ______________________, __________________, __________________, and _______________________________.

 

Some moral complexities of Jerry:

One. He sees the futility and mediocrity of his father’s spineless, complacent existence but fails to see that his father deals with his wife’s death by withdrawing.

Two. Jerry is wise to see the folly of becoming complacent to a life of conforming mediocrity like his father, but then he conforms to violence and the “man code” by participating in the fight at the end of the novel.

Three. Jerry is bold to defy the chocolate sale, Brother Leon and the Vigils, but one could argue that it’s not his free will that is doing the defiance, merely the depression from losing his mother. Less depressed, would he conform like everyone else?

Four. Jerry sees the malignancy that roils beneath Trinity High and the Vigils but he capitulates to the psychological warfare of Archie.

 

Part Four. Archie Is a Satanic Figure

 

One. Like Satan, Archie is full of pride and has blind faith that his superior intellect gives him the upper hand with others.

 

Two. Like Satan, Archie has contempt for the human race ("We're all bastards," he says in the novel). Having contempt means you believe every person has a price and that every person enjoys watching the humiliation and failure of others. This is called schadenfreude.

Three. Like Satan, Archie lives in eternal exile, apart from the human race. Archie is insufferably lonely and disconnected from others he attempts to compensate for his misery by exercising power.

Four. Like Satan, Archie is so proudful that he'd rather rule in hell that serve in heaven. That is to say, he prefers to live in his lonely world and marinate in his self-centered existence.

Five. Like Satan, Archie is the master of rationalization and manipulation. He can pull BS out of his you know what to trick others and suck them into his schemes.

Six. Like Satan, Archie easily rejects moral absolutes and moral values because he rationalizes that he is superior to others and thus lives beyond the moral sphere. Morality doesn't apply to him. What does? Moral relativism. You make up whatever morality you want depending on the circumstances.

 

Part Five.  The Difference Between a General and a Specific Thesis. It's the Difference Between a Failed and Successful Essay. 

 

A general thesis is too broad, too blah, and has a limp lackluster quality. 

A specific thesis is razor-sharp in its focus, fiery, and sometimes argumentative.

 

Examples of a General Thesis

 

The Chocolate War is a deterministic novel.

Determinism imbues the novel's characters.

 

The characters cannot escape determinism and are doomed to a life without free will. 

 

More Specific Thesis Statements Addressing Determinism

 

The Chocolate War affords us a dark vision of the world, one stripped of free will and taken over by determinism. This unforgiving determinism is the result of _________, __________, ___________, and ___________. 

 

General Thesis Examples

 

A world of determinism can never rise above the despair of nihilism. 

 

Nihilism is the novel's major mood and produces the novel's major theme. 

 

The novel's characters cannot escape nihilism. 

 

Improved Thesis Statement Addressing Nihilism

 

The novel's nihilism comes from Cormier's pessimistic view of human nature, which can be characterized by __________, ____________, __________, and _______________. 

 

General Thesis Examples

Archie is Satan.

Archie's supercilious air makes him a satanic figure.

Archie has a devilish way about him. 

Archie's devilish manner makes him repulsive. 

 

More Specific Thesis That Addresses Archie's Satanic Aspects

While not devil's equal, we can see that Archie's psychology has many qualities in common with that Fallen Angel Lucifer. The most striking similarities include __________, __________, ______________, and _____________. 

 

Part Six. Putting All the Essay Topics on One Post

Essay Topic One.

Tribalism, Symbiosis, Obedience to Authority, Conformity, Determinism, and Individual Conscience in The Chocolate War 

In page one, analyze the forces in the novel that would compel us to call it a “dark vision of the human condition.” Some people might call this dark vision the condition of nihilism.

Then in the second page, start your thesis paragraph in which you connect the themes to the dangers of obedience as it relates to power, authority, and symbiosis. Because this is your multiple-source research paper, you will need to connect the novel’s themes to themes outside the text. You may, for example, look at the theme of obedience in the context of Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments or the abuse of power in the Stanford Experiment.

A thesis might look like this: The Chocolate War shows the demands of tribalism, which compromises our humanity by ________________________, _____________________________, _________________________, and _______________________________.

In your final page, you will write about how you or someone you know had a conflict between individual conscience and conformity during a “peer pressure” situation that revealed the “tiger’s claw of tribalism.” You conclusion will tie in your personal account with your novel analysis.

Your body paragraphs will correspond to the components you use to fill in the above blanks. Your conclusion will be one sentence, a brief, dramatic restatement of your thesis. Your final page, your Works Cited page, will show the sources you used from The Chocolate War, from my blog, from interviews, or from other helpful sources you find. Your Works Cited page and manuscript must conform to MLA format. Be sure to make your own catchy, creative title.

Essay Topic Two

One Way of Approaching the Essay Assignment (If I Were Writing It)

In my first page, I would write about a time I compromised my humanity by conforming to some unwritten law, like the time I fought Ron Reynolds because he had said something in PE that had insulted me. I wasn’t really mad, but punched him to “defend my honor,” then felt guilty afterwards.

In my second page, I’d argue that The Chocolate War is about the dehumanization that occurs from power, conformity, and blind obedience. In my body paragraphs I’d show how Jerry, Goober, Brother Leon, and Archie compromised their humanity through blind obedience and the worship of power. In the process, I’d compare these characters to the awful truths learned in the Milgram and Stanford Experiments.

 

Essay Topic Three

Essay Variation Based on Determinism:

Analyze the lack of free will in Jerry, Archie, Brother Leon, Obie, and Goober as it evident in the novel.

Suggested Structure: In your first page, explain the difference between free will and determinism using appropriate example. Then in your thesis argue that free will is lacking in the novel’s characters who are beholden to psychological (irrational passions) and external determinism. The deterministic forces from which they have no free will are the lust for power, pride, corruption, revenge, the impulse to disdain the powerless, the pressure to conform, and the pressure to be obedient.

 

Essay Topic Four.

The Chocolate War is about the different types of deaths we face when we compromise our individual conscience for power, conformity, and corruption, as several characters do throughout the novel.

Essay Topic Five.

Jerry is a complex character. He is neither simply heroic, worthy of our sympathy and admiration nor simply a “failure,” worthy of our scorn and contempt. Argue that Jerry’s moral complexities defy simple analysis with a thesis that might look like this:

Jerry is a sympathetic character full of moral contradictions that include ______________________, __________________, __________________, and _______________________________.

Essay Topic Six.

Analyze the psychological warfare that Archie uses throughout the novel. Here are some things to consider: Why is he effective at manipulating others? How does he use psychology over brute force to assert his power? What nihilistic assumptions does he make about human nature in order to exploit others?

Essay Topic Seven.

Compare and contrast the evil evident in Archie and Brother Leon throughout the novel. Which character is more evil and why?

 

Essay Topic Eight:

This essay was generated from two students who didn't "connect" with the other essay options:

Compare Archie and Brother Leon's character flaws. Consider the following: cowardice, sadism, nihilism, and intellectual pride (leading to blindness). 

 

 

 

Part Five. Journal Entry

Of the several topics, which one interests you the most and why. 

 

Part Six. Research Paper Sources for your Works Cited Page

Adolescent Literature

Alienation in The Chocolate War

Bryan-Chocolate War

The book's nihilism offends a school, which wants a petition to ban it!

The Chocolate War: Still Tasting Good

Why The Chocolate War Was Banned

LSU Faculty

Chocolate War Resource Guide