Comparing Reading Chapters Seven Through Nine Of Patel's Stuffed And Starved

Reading Summary/Discussion Questions #6 During the week, we were to read chapters seven through nine of Patel’s Stuffed & Starved. These three chapters had quite a bit of information in them and were a lot to take in. However, these chapters have been some of my favorite chapters so far. I feel that I have learned more about different aspects to food I never would have thought about before. For example, chapter seven talked about soy and Brazil itself, which I had never learned about before. Chapter eight went on to discuss supermarkets and had some interesting facts about Wal-Mart. Finally, chapter nine talks about how our food choices have evolved and how they have affected us. The first section to be reviewed is chapter seven. In

When the United States went into World War I, food prices rose by 19 percent. Grocers were under pressure to cut their prices because consumers were going to great lengths to find the cheapest prices. Clarence Saunders found the solution to this with his first self-serving store. The idea of this store was that consumers could do their own shopping, cutting down on staffing costs, and would be exposed to everything in the store. Really when you think about it this is genius. Whenever I go to the grocery store, I am always hunting for what I need and because of this, I am seeing a lot of the items in the store. The idea is that you will see something you did not plan on buying and buy it as well. I found it funny to think about when this began that some people did not understand the concept and there were instructors to teach them. Also, employees were no longer to help the customer get their groceries as they filed through a single maze. Today, things have changed to open aisles and employees available to answer questions. I had never really thought about the layout until Patel discussed the atmospherics in the grocery store. Everything from the lighting to the smell distracts us from the fact we are in a giant warehouse and allows us to part with our money. Patel even mentioned that the milk is often times at the back of the store because it is the most common thing bought and grocery stores want you to buy

As a consumer, we feel that when we go to the store, we have freedom to choose what we want to eat. However, that freedom is limited and we do not even realize it. Stores choose what to have in stock and we are persuaded to buy the things they have. Let us go back to where the food we see today started to evolve. Nicolas Appert invented a way to keep food fresh even as it was sent across the equator. The method involved placing food in a jar, boiling it and sticking a cork in it, and this later led to the invention of canning which we see today. The idea that food could be processed and packaged opened up a new door to what we could eat and where we could eat it. When I say where we could eat it, I also mean in front of the television. TV dinners began in the fifties, but it was not until the sixties that everyone had a television and they became popular. Along with television came advertisements. Advertisements began targeting children and more junk food was being promoted than healthy food. Children with diabetes has become more common and childhood obesity has increased drastically. If we are so big on ending obesity, why is it we still see so many McDonald’s commercials or other fast food commercials? Patel goes on later to talk about the amount of time spent cooking and eating and how it has fallen dramatically. Why cook when you can just go to McDonald’s and pick something up? My family does this,