Just Eat It Analysis

Before enrolling in this class, I wouldn’t ever have imagined how interconnected food and culture was. Better yet, I wouldn’t have thought that I would find the concept interesting. My knowledge of food went as far as, I need it so I eat it. However, as the class went on and I was introduced to theories and ideas by people who had spent their lives researching this topic, I began to notice patterns in the way that I eat, or more specifically the way that my family eats. Much like everything else that we do, it varies from the typical American diet. For instance, in many of the films and documentaries viewed in and out of class, the topic of how much is wasted is often discussed. According to researchers, at least 40% of food in the U.S. is being wasted (Baldwin Just Eat It). One way of describing it is found in the documentary, Just Eat It. Dana Gunders, a food and agricultural scientist, states, “Imagine walking out of a grocery store with four bags of groceries, dropping one in the parking lot, and just not bothering to pick it up. That’s essentially what we’re doing.” (Baldwin Just Eat It). In my family, there is no such thing as wasted food. Somehow every bit of it is eaten or used.

In her mind, if we skipped the “dieting”, and just ate healthy we wouldn’t need to go to the doctors so often. It turns out, as always, mom was right, natural is in fact, better. In the documentary Forks Over Knives, it states that, natural may work better than chemically made pills or anti-biotics. Products made in the lab tend to be addictive and short term at best. Not mention the fact that these substances are completely foreign and hard for our bodies to stomach. The film quotes Thomas Edison, when he states that doctors of the future will be able to cure the human frame with only the fruit of the earth (Fulkerson Forks Over