Food has been in discourses for decades, but the discussions have reached a new precedent in the last 5 years. Eating healthy is the dominant discourse right now, and has been for as long as I can remember. There have always been TV shows showing the different types of food that you can eat to lose weight or to maintain a good cholesterol level. I have never seen a show that tells people to eat more so they can be unhealthy. Surprisingly enough, even though the major discourse has been to make people eat healthy food, the rates of obesity have increased astonishingly over the past five years. The average percentage of people with obesity per state in the year 2004, was 20-24 (link). That number drastically increased to 25%-29% in 2009 (link). As to why I think this is, I do not think that this is because people do not listen. It is mostly because of the economy. Fast food restaurants are cheaper and quicker, so why should people spend more money and time on healthy food?
People aren’t usually taken seriously if they don’t posses the qualities that qualifies a person as an “expert”. You have to have a college degree, because other wise, you are just dumb. Yet surprisingly there many people such as Dhirubhai Ambani, who was a High School dropout but now is a billionaire businessman. So if a college degree doesn’t really make smarter, then why aren’t dropouts taken seriously? Is it because
“PhD” looks better in the captions then “Personal Experience”? Is that why maybe the movie Super Size Me wasn’t a big success? Morgan Spurlock, the writer and the actor in the movie, tries to understand the influence of the fast food industry by exploring the consequences of a diet consisting of only McDonald’s food for one month. He nearly died making the movie and was awarded with 5 Oscars for “unveiling the lies that the fast food restaurants tell us”, yet because of some bizarre reason, the fast food industry kept on booming and made Spurlock’s movie as useless as any other movie.
The main stream media is the dominant power in the discourse. They have been trying to “influence” peoples’ lives for as look as it has existed. Their main purpose is not to tell people about the things that can affect the public’s lives, as was the original plan, but to tell people how to live their lives. There isn’t a single person in the United States that doesn’t know the health risks of eating in fast food restaurants or eating junk foods. Everyone here, thanks to the media, are very well informed about everything that’s going on around them. “Everyone knows that you shouldn’t eat junk food and you should exercise, but the environment makes it so difficult that fewer people can do these things, and then you have a public health catastrophe.” (Brownell) Brownell has a doctorate in psychology, is among a number of leading researchers who are proposing large-scale changes to food pricing, advertising and availability. She is the obvious “expert” in healthy eating and people would listen to her. According to Brownell, people cannot start living a healthier life style unless their environment changes. She is obviously referring to the fact that the streets of most of the major states in US are littered with fast food restaurants. Since fast food is a trillion dollar industry, it is highly unlikely that fast food restaurant owners will just shut down because they want their nation to be healthier. Only other solution; move to a place with no fast food restaurants. There isn’t a single state or single county even in the US that doesn’t have a fast food restaurant. So is the “expert” suggesting that the only way we can live better is by leaving the country?
