Your assignment is to post two comments about your reading so far, and to respond to two other students’ comments.Your post must include parenthetical documentation and quotes from the text to back up your comments.Your responses should add to the discussion.Do no just say “I agree” or “I never thought of that.”You may indeed think these things, but you should add to that comment with your thoughts, and perhaps a question back to the original poster.
Here is a sample of what your post could look like.You do not have to write a post about the same subject that I wrote about here (in fact you shouldn’t); this is just an example.I want your observations, not mine.What I’d like you to do is copy the form.Make sure that you include quotes from the text and that you provide a page number so that your peers can look up the quote.I understand that you may have different copies of the texts, but a page number will get you close, especially if you include a chapter number.
Fast Food Nation example:
Chapter 5 – “Food Product Design”
I have always been wild about McDonald’s french fries, a singular guilty pleasure, so I was pleased to see that “James Beard loved McDonald’s fires” (119) also.He is one of the best chefs in the world, so if he loves them it must be okay.Except that it turns out we have all been duped.I always thought that they took some cut-up potatoes, threw them in oil, sprinkled on the salt and voila!Apparently there was never anything “natural” about them.First they fried them in “93 percent beef tallow.” (120)Beef tallow!?!If I were a vegetarian I think I’d be pretty upset.It’s not that they used meat fat, I’ve fried plenty of things in bacon grease, but that they never said that is what they were doing.
Then they quit doing that but needed to make them taste like meat, so they added “natural flavor” (120) to them which turns out to be not so natural.Both natural and artificial flavors are “ man-made additives that give most processed food most of its taste.” (120)What??This makes me so angry that corporations misuse the English language in this way.So, if I go to the grocery store and buy organic chicken or vegetables does that mean organic as in hasn’t been messed with by anyone?Or does it mean they’ve created organic compounds in a factory in New Jersay and injected them into the chicken?Can I trust anything that comes from a source outside of my backyard?
I also appreciate how the author built his argument starting with the history behind the fries, looking at the changes McDonald’s made and then widening the argument to other foods that we eat by looking at the additives that are in other foods (120-121)It helped me to understand just how widespread the problem really is.
