When people eat a bag of potato chips they do not usually look to see how many calories are in each bag. Potato chips come in a variety of flavors, including: barbecue, sour cream and onion, and salt and vinegar. According to Harvard University analysis the average person eats about 6 lbs of potato chips a year. The purpose of this experiment was to inform readers that were not already aware of how much grease are in the potato chips of their choice. There is a difference between reading the label, and physically seeing how much grease are in these chips. When a person sees the grease physically it might make them put the chips back on the shelf vs them reading the label. The hypothesis stated in this experiment was that the bag of Lays classic potato chips were going to contain the most grease. After eating lays potato chips according to some of the subjects, they seemed to have a grease residue left on their hands after eating the chips.…
Starting out with an example about how McDonald's new fries recipes cooked with vegetable oil yet still had the same taste as the old recipes using the oil with 93% beef tallow, Schlosser pointed out that additive flavor was the main component, which makes "most of the food American eat today tastes the…
Understanding basic principles of nutrition is essential for the food industry because it gives them the required knowledge to alter the processing of foods without actually making a significant change to the overall healthiness of the food. Pollan states, “For the industry, it’s obviously preferable to have a scientific rationale for further processing foods – whether by lowering the fat or carbs or by boosting omega-3s or fortifying them with antioxidants and probiotics – than to entertain seriously the proposition that processed foods of any kind are a big part of the problem.” Pollan is showing that the food industry will do whatever it takes to promote their products, rather than actually fixing the problem and creating a healthier menu. In other words, fast food companies can attempt to alter their products by lowering amounts of fat or carbohydrates rather than actually introducing new products that are better for the consumers. They simply make minor alterations to existing products expecting the consumer to assume the new product is better for them. Therefore, these food processing industries do not actually attempt to fix the real problem. This issue is becoming more and more prevalent all around us, and we as Americans need to be more cognitive of the foods we are consuming on a regular…
George Crum was the first African American/Native American to accidentally create the first batch of potato chips. The invention sort of has a silly story behind it. It all started 1853, when George Crum was working as a chef in a New York resort. A customer complained that George’s potato fries where too thick. George got pretty angry because of that complaint, so he fried up another batch. But this time, he made the potato slices really thick and over salted, frying them to a crisp. Unexpectedly, the annoying customer enjoyed the new style of that potato snack.…
Potatoes were first known to be grown in the South America, in the Andes Mountains, and are a crop that is essentially able to grow anywhere in various types of soil. According to a film, Botany of Desire, there are more than 5,000 varieties of potatoes, and 8,000 years ago, potatoes were domesticated, seeing as how some potatoes were at first poisonous, contaminated with aceloide (which made the potatoes green). These ancient potatoes were grown on high altitudes, and in virtually any soil, providing the Peruvians (Incas) with a culture of food that seemed to be endless. When the Spanish came and “destroyed” the Peruvian culture (where within the potatoes were cultivated) the potato remained untouched because Spanish explorers thought highly of the “new-found” crop and it made its way to Europe. In European countries, grain was a popular crop that was grown and the work demanded for quite a lot of laborers, which was a down fall because then there weren’t as many people to work in other fields of work, such as the newly invented factories. There were also famines, frequently, in their grain harvests, especially in Northern Europe, but, the newly exchanged potato allowed for an increased food production in Europe, in places that didn’t have the most grand soil or terrain, and also supported the Industrial Revolution in Europe because the potato allowed for fewer laborers in the fields (compared to the number of laborers grain and…
A couple of articles that will be used to back up the thesis will be coming from the Mercury Reader. To give a small bio on the author of this article, this is about Eric Schlosser. Eric Schlosser was born in Manhattan, New York in 1960; Schlosser went on to attend Princeton and Oxford University. Schlosser began his journalism career at the Atlantic Monthly where he is still a correspondent today. Schlosser’s “Food Product Design” is about the way different food companies use different types of ingredients to make their food taste better. Eric Schlosser also talks about how a person’s taste and smell preference is determined with in the first few years of his life. The last section of the article discusses how The Vegetarian Legal Action Network (TVLAN) demanded that the FDA put labels on foods the conation natural ingredients. .…
Americans how to raise and cultivate squash and maize, which allowed them to have food for…
In the book “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan, you will discover an abundance of information about what food is, what is considered food now, and how we are affected by this transformation of the western diet. The idea of how to eat well has been distorted many times by the industry and scientists throughout the United States. Essentially anything that has been man-made in a lab or factory is not something that your body should be ingesting. Pollan suggests that we are not being thoughtful about what we are eating and the consequences are becoming quite clear as we look at how our health has altered across the entire country.…
Cited: Schlosser, E. (2010). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: Why the Fries Taste Good (Excerpt). PBS. Retrieved June 18, 2014, from http://www.pbs.org/pov/foodinc/fastfoodnation_01.php…
Looking at the images on Page 100, These two pictures contribute to the debate on the question of African influences in American rice production because they exemplify how African workers produce rice a century later with the same tools. African slaves could teach English planters by showing them their traditional methods of rice…
In the beginning of his article, Mintz says that the field of anthropology is examining food in new ways, which has “re enlivened the study of any subject matter that can be treated by seeing the patterned relationships between substances and human groups as forms of communication” (91). In order to truly understand relationships between food and humans, he says, one must combine history and anthropology and study more ordinary foods (Mintz 91). Out of all three articles, “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness” was the only one that took such a novel idea for the time period and supported it with a variety of strong evidence and sound intelligent reasoning. The articles “Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food” and “More Than Just the ‘Big Piece of Chicken’” also tried to explain innovative concepts and emphasize new ideas, but their…
Howard, T. (1999, March). Local flavor. Brandweek, 40(9), 22-26. Retrieved October 22, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 39491074).…
Have you ever thought of where your produce comes from? If you have, then you’ve probably thought of the supermarket, or more logically, a farm. In a barnyard they have all these different kinds of animals; cattle, pigs, chickens, maybe even horses. The farmer always takes good care of his animals, but what about all the other stuff, like his crops? Crops are one of the most important things on a farm. They need to be tended and cared for, like the animals, but they also need to be harvested. Back then in the 1800s, it wasn’t as easy as it is now. Farmers had to harvest their crops by hand, and it took some back-breaking work to do it. They needed something or someone to help generate a tool to make collecting crops easier, and with his skill and determination, that’s exactly what Cyrus Hall McCormick did.…
In addition to figuring out all the corn involved in a typical families fast food meal, Pollan hypothesizes that places like McDonald’s have become a sort of comfort food. “There are 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget, thirteen of which are derived from corn” (pg. 120). There is corn sweetener in burgers, as if all the corn used to fatten the cow wasn’t enough. “Forty-five of sixty items on a McDonald’s menu contains high fructose corn syrup” (pg. 122).…
How many of us like eating vegetables? Not a lot right, but growing vegetables is still as difficult today as it was in the 1700’s. The invention of the seed drill was really one of the most useful inventions in that time because it helped make the farmers work easier. The seed drill was created by Jethro Tull to make the lives of the laborers easier and not waste the seeds of what could’ve been a surplus of food. The seed drill was a mechanical machine that would plant the seeds in rows rather than the method used prior where farmers would scatter them wastefully because they had to dig all the holes themselves.…