Response to Darius Feaster's blog about endorsements

I really like Darius' blog about Shaquillle ONeil and his endorsements of Nestle's Crunch bar. I agree with his view about the endorsement. Shaq is definitely a strong player, and I really like how Darius incorporated the quote from one of the nestle marketing managers. In my opinion, now-a-days the celebrity endorsements are starting to make more sense than they did in the past. And this endorsement is an example of just that. There are marketing managers who know realize that people aren't as easily swayed as the marketers once thought they were. We are smarter now and we know that just because the ad has celebrities, doesn't mean that they are an expert in that field. I did think that the fact that they made a bar 9.25 lbs might be stretching it a little. I'm not sure that even Shaw can put down a bar that size, but he is big! I think Nestle did a great job in choosing the right celebrity for their product. Shaq is definitely one of the biggest and the strongest, and if that is what Nestle wants to incorporate with the Crunch bar, then it was a perfect match!

self evaluation

While watching my demonstration speech I found a couple of areas that needed improvement. Since I did my speech outside it made it pretty difficult to hear what I was saying, so I guess next time I would try to find a better place that I could do my speech, preferably not in an area where there is a lot of wind. Another thing I noticed is that I rushed through my speech. This is something that happens me a lot when I get nervous, so I think practicing it a little more would be better as well. I also think that I didn’t have very good enthusiasm or tone changes. Naturally I think I am very monotone, so this is something that I definitely need to work on. Along with tone changing I also think that I need to work on my volume, granted it was outside I think I could’ve been much louder. I think the best part of my speech was the introduction. It outlined the speech well and gave the audience a good reason to listen to my speech. The body of my speech was alright, but the ending is where I struggled the most. I didn’t’ memorize it as well as I memorized the introduction and I left out some information that was vital, like the hook. I think my speech was visually interesting because we went outside… on a beautiful day! I am sure that I would choose to do this speech again, but I would try to involve the class more than I did. I didn’t realized until afterward that there is a beach volleyball court nearby, so I would probably take advantage of that next time. Next time I would practice a  lot more and try to include the class. Here is a link to my speech.

Blog Post # 2: Prepare a meal

For my meal I prepared a quesadilla. I chose this as my meal because it is very easy and can be made in the microwave, plus a friend of mine left early for spring break and gave me her cheese and tortillas! The meal was obviously very easy to prepare. I took one tortilla, loaded it with cheese on one side, then popped it in the microwave for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds I flipped it over and microwaved it again for another 30 seconds. Then I cut it up and split it with my roommate. She had some salsa in the fridge, so we topped it off with that! I think the meal was delicious, and my roomie would agree. She said I’m a good cook, ha! It was an easy clean up, I just washed the plate. That is why I love quesadillas; they are the easiest, yummiest meal to make. I think we tried to be as healthy as possible with this meal. We had multi-grain tortillas and low-fat cheese, but those are pretty processed foods that Pollen would not appreciate. I think that Pollen is right, but also wrong about the food innovation bringing processed foods. Sometimes processing the food is something that we need to do. Like with cheese, if we don’t process it a little it will go bad very quickly. Grocery stores would have to order less amounts of food at a time, but they would need to increase the shipments, and that would add a lot of environment harming gasses to the air. I do however think that there are some foods that we should not be processing so much. 

Real Food vs. Fake Food

When my parents went on the Atkin’s diet they replaced most of the food in our house with low-carb food. They even replaced spaghetti, which is mainly starch and carbohydrates in its real form, with a low-carb imposter. I’m not even sure what they could put in the spaghetti that would replace the carbohydrates. It makes me worry about what I was actually eating, considering it tasted like long strings of cardboard. To me it was nothing like the food I would consume in daily as a child. It was grainy, smelled like shoes, and felt like an anvil in my stomach. My parents argued that it had all of the same nutrients and even more fiber in it than the real stuff, but their arguments had no effects on my taste buds. After the first taste I knew for a fact I would never eat it again. There are many other fake foods in our pantry that disguise themselves as the “real deal” or sometimes even better, but this is by far the worst of them all. I am not a fan of my parents being on the Atkins diet, mainly because it is truly an unhealthy way to try to lose weight. But what I absolutely hate more than the fact that they are on the diet is the terrible foods that the diet brings with it. How on earth can spaghetti be low in carbohydrates? It is a complex carb in itself and full of starch! This just didn’t seem right to me, so then I looked at the box and realized that Pollen would not have approved. There were more ingredients than I could count, and most of them had names that seemed like they were in another language. It is disheartening to know that companies are passing off these chemically processed food as real food. I don't think I will ever eat that low-carb food my parents keep buying because it doesn't seem to actually have food in it.

Links

Here is a link about cheap healthy foods.


Here is a link about eating healthy, it had some interesting articles about problems in our society now.

Post:1 response to In Defense of Food

I agreed with Pollan’s reasoning and point of view about the Western diet now; it has gotten out of hand and is progressively getting more and more artificial and unhealthy. I was not too fond of the way he would talk about Justus von Liebig though. In his time Liebig was a very intelligent person who discovered the cause of scurvy and its treatment, Vitamin C. He purpose was not to “drive food into a corner and force it to yield its chemical secrets” (p. 21). He was merely trying to diagnose an illness and along with that diagnosis he discovered the amazing chemistry of food that no one had known about. If it hadn’t been for Liebig we may not know all that we know about food now and Pollan wouldn’t have the chance to even write this book. So, why does Pollan betray Liebig as if he is the enemy? The way that Pollan words his opinion in the book he sounds like Liebig was picking apart food and breaking it down to single nutrients, and betrays it as his fault that we are eating fake food, when that is not the case at all. Liebig could not have known that his discovery would open Pandora’s nutritional box and lead to poor diets in Americans. For all we know it could’ve gone the other direction and we could be eating much healthier food. I don’t think Pollan can just put all the blame on a man who discovered something more than 100 years ago who thought would benefit the world rather than expose it to risk. For me this was a pretty bad start to Pollan's book and my opinion of him quickly went from moderately agreeable to not even wanting to read the rest of it.

That said, I think Pollan had valid arguments about the food industry. The food industries try everything they can to produce a product that is cheaper to make and has a long shelf life. By doing this they are taking out all of the natural ingredients in the food that makes it healthy at all. Hydrogenation of margarine is one of these examples in the book that follows the rules of not being an “imitation” food because it contains all of the nutrients that are in butter. It turns out that the actual hydrogenation is much worse than the natural fats that are in regular butter.

I agree with Pollan’s view on the food industry now, but I don’t like his style or the way he backs up his arguments. Pollan tends to repeat a lot of what he says many times, and after mentioning that nutritionists aren’t as smart as they think they are, more than twenty times it tends to get a bit annoying. I like his ideas, but not his writing style.