Advertisement has taken over the 21st century and a lot of the time it's misleading or just false. For this post I'll be discussing some of the problems with Vitamin Water and this ad. While Vitamin Water does provide consumers with vitamins and minerals it's also jam packed with added sugars which not only are unhealthy but can cause major health problems if consumed in excess. One bottle of this "healthy" drink contains about 32 grams of sugar while a pepsi bottle contains 40 grams. Vitamins and minerals are considered to be essential nutrients - nutrients organisms need to survive, but these do not occur naturally in the drink. According to Melanie Warner in her work titled Pandoras Lunchbox she says "most of these "take-on-the-day" nutrients are synthetic versions added to the product." Getting these vitamins/minerals from whole foods is always going to be the healthier option.
This specific ad also claims that Vitamin Water can protect you from getting sick with the flu or a common cold, and this sparked outrage among consumers. The general consensus was that a flu shot can save somebody's life but Vitamin Water cannot. While some vitamins can strengthen your immune system, there is no evidence that Vitamin Water can prevent you from getting sick. As Michael Moss stated in The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food "people bought what they liked, and they liked what tasted good." I think Vitamin Water played into this phrase, people like to think they are eating healthy, but a lot of the time don't like the way healthy food tastes. However, when you introduce a drink that tastes good and disguise it as being healthy because it has some synthetic vitamins, people are going to buy it. I can only assume how the parents in Pressure Cooker from Sarah Bowen and Wei-ting Chen's From 'Junk Food' to 'Treats': How Poverty Shapes Family Food Choices might buy these for their kids because they want them to be able to have healthy diets, but little do they know this drink isn't so healthy after all. The best way to get vitamins and minerals is to have a well balanced diet and if you're in need of hydration, drink water!
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Reading Food and farming could stymie climate efforts, researchers say by Erik Stokstad was really enlightening. It talks about how in order to get a handle on the climate crisis we need to act now, and one of the biggest things we need to act on is the food systems. Research has shown that the food system alone can rapidly increase the warmth of the planet to dangerous temperatures which can have dangerous effects for us. Deforestation for farmland, fertilizer, and cows produce a lot of harmful gases that increase the temperature of the earth, but these can be fixed! According to my article they suggest "boosting crop yields more rapidly, which can reduce deforestation; shifting to diets with fewer animal products; and halving food waste." The problem is that we need to start now. We have to stop messing around and start taking climate change more seriously.
I knew that cows produced a lot of methane, which is not good for the atmosphere, and the logical way to reduce the methane production is to stop breeding and having so many cows for meat. Jonathan Safron Foer talked a little bit about environmentalism in the blurb from his book Eating Animals that we read, but I hope he brought up the point of climate change in his book. I think this is a really compelling point for what he's trying to do. Not only would not eating meat respect ethical morals but would also help the planet. In my article it also talked about how the population is going to rise in the future, which means more mouths to feed and presumably more people eating animal products, leading to a larger climate footprint. This relates to Charles C. Mann's article Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People? from The Atlantic when he talks about the affluence of people and how we are going to sustain them. I think these two issues go hand in hand, the population is going to rise, and we are going to have more mouths to feed, so how do we feed that many people without killing the planet? Honestly, I don't know if we've necessarily found the best way to do that, I mean currently we have thousands of people who are already going hungry with enough food to feed them. I have hope we can protect the planet and feed the population in the future, but we desperately need to get serious about it now. I learned a lot about the effects that the pandemic has had on food insecurity while reading Food Insecurity in The U.S. By The Numbers by Christianna Silva. Food insecurity is something that the United States had been dealing with for years but COVID-19 has made it significantly worse. It seems that food insecurity has gone up to 23% of households in 2020 which is more than double what it was before. This article also mentions how many people use the SNAP program, which reminded me of Patricia and her family from Pressure Cooker, whose only income is food stamps, Medicaid, and WIC vouchers.There is a stigma around people who use food stamps but it's more commonly used than you might realize and the pandemic has provided an increase in the use of them. So much so that the government passed acts to help the families being greatly affected by the virus to be able to put food on the table. However, this still doesn't handle the food security needs throughout America.
My article also talked about food deserts. Something I found very interesting is that often times food is sold at higher prices in food deserts. This makes me wonder if that's the reason that the families in From "Junk Food' to "Treats" use a lot of coupons and go to multiple stores to get better deals. I can understand why the food would be sold at a higher price, especially if that's the only place you can get something around that area but that doesn't help the problem. I can only assume that this goes hand in hand with the cost of junk food being 'lower' and that's why people buy it. Which is also a leading cause of obesity in these communities without grocery stores. Especially if milk is 5% higher in price than at other groceries stores as mentioned in my article. Overall, this was very eye-opening. I wasn't expecting this topic to be so interesting but I found that I wanted to look into it more and do some more research. In Most People Waste More Food Than They think – Here’s How to Fix It by Rachel Jackson, I learned about all the ways people are likely to waste food and it was really eye opening. As the title suggests there are a lot of ways food is wasted, including buying too many groceries, not eating leftovers, and only trusting “best by” dates. I also learned that food waste really affects climate change and according to Project Drawdown, reducing food waste is the third most impactful action to mitigating climate change! But why is it so hard to reduce food waste in the first place? For many people this is hard to do because they don’t want to admit that they’re apart of the problem, or they don’t want to feel like they aren’t providing for their family. In An Economic History of Leftovers by The Atlantic, it talks about how once people started to become more food secure, they started wasting more food because they could afford to do so. Before this time many people saved their food because they couldn't afford more or didn't know when they'd be able to get more. Before refrigeration, people used all their leftovers because there was no sure way to store food, and once refrigeration became popular and you could keep food fresh, leftovers boomed. However, slowly as people became more food secure, more food was wasted and leftovers became taboo. Surprisingly there are simple ways to reduce your food waste. First eat what you buy or buy what you eat. You don’t need to buy everything at once, that’s only going to lead it to sit in your kitchen being unused and eventually going bad. Buy what you need at the time of your shopping so that you can use it right away. Next prioritize eating leftovers, whether it's just heating them up or making new dishes with them. Use up everything in your kitchen as much as possible. Another tip is to not read too much into “best by” dates, I’m guilty of this. My mom would always get mad at me for not wanting to drink milk that was ‘off’ because the date said so. Lots of food are good long after their expiration date. Reducing food waste also helps you save money, by reducing the amount of food you buy the less money you spend in the long run. These tips could even be useful for places where there are ‘food deserts’ as described by Tracie McMillan in her book The American Way of Eating. These food deserts are areas without many groceries’ stores. In theory if you were to purchase the food that you needed and could make that last for a while you wouldn’t need to travel so far as often to go grocery shopping. There are tons of other ways to reduce food you just have to step out of your comfort zone. Food waste is a big topic and I’ve learned so much about it through this article. There are tons of simple ways you can reduce your food waste and I heavily encourage you to look more into to help save our planet. Reading Farm Labor Shortage Nothing New, Getting Worse, Farmers Say by Lauren Rosenblatt was really eye-opening, The article was about the massive labor shortage going on in the farming industry, especially with Covid-19. Basically during the pandemic when demand for goods skyrocketed, farmers became essential workers but finding workers became harder. These farms can't compete with other jobs who are offering higher salaries, signing bonuses, and certain benefits because they don't have the opportunity to be able to put more money towards those types of things. For example in the article they talked about how they're not going to sell a gallon of milk for $20 after it already had a pre-established price, and how you can't really build into prices of those kinds of things.They've tried to hire high schoolers as well but a lot of them just didn't show up or had too many things going on that it didn't end up working out. This reminded me of The Biggest Little Farm because we talked about how the workers probably pay the farm owners to work there. That its more like a learning experience than a job and they're there to gain first hand experience on farming rather than a paycheck. I found this very interesting, but I feel like in the case of essential workers during a pandemic where most people work remotely or have a $15-an-hour job, this wouldn't be as helpful.
They also talked a lot about the H-2A program, which is the federal program that allows workers a seasonal visa to come work agricultural jobs. These are really important in my opinion because not only do they offer jobs to foreign workers but they also help out the farms because they're getting workers that probably have more experience than your average high school kid. However the H-2A program seemed like a difficult task to accomplish. Most farmers need workers all year round not just seasonally. The farmers also have to have certain things available to the workers once they get to the farm like a trash can with a lid. That is warranted because they need to be comfortable there but the program is often really expensive, in the article it mentions how "a farmer in Butler County estimates he spends about $5,500 on things such as transportation fees and lawyers." In the past there had been a lot of talk about making things more stricter in this program but luckily the Farm Workforce Modernization Act was passed. This modified minimum wage and work hours for workers, and made the program available for work that is not temporary or seasonal. This only makes me wonder if Chris Newman was on to something in his article Small Family Farms Aren't the Answer with farms working more harmoniously than by themselves. Maybe if farms worked together to hire people and share workers, this could help the farms and allow the employee to get a vast amount of different experiences. However I guess the first part would be to figure out how to get people working on the farms in the first place. |
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