Food Documentary Critique

Objective

This assignment encourages you to bring what we’ve learned in class in critiquing and analyzing a food documentary of your choice. There are roughly a zillion; it’s easy to find plenty via standard streaming outlets like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, PBS, etc. It can be more focused on diet, food production, food history, food industry, or whatever, but FOOD must be the main concern of the documentary.

Basics

• 800–1000 words (about the same as your longer analysis assignments)
• 1.5 - 2 line spacing
• 11pt Times New Roman
• Free of typos and basic grammatical errors
• Smooth, focused writing

Use the course!

You have to show that you’re using course material to analyze your documentary. If you just ask an AI tool to do this for you, it will be way too vague and you won’t really get any extra credit. You CAN use AI to help you, but YOU need to make sure it’s showing you can use the course to analyze the documentary.

Questions to address

• Summarize what you think the moral or take home message is? This include both whatever the film says is the purpose AND other important points that you think it makes
• Who is the intended audience? What do they know? What do they need to know but don’t?
• How does the film try to persuade you? What kind of evidence does it provide?
• How is it effective? What doubts do you have?
• Does it make you think about food any differently?

Analyze! Don’t summarize

• You are being evaluated on the quality/depth of your ANALYSIS! While a brief description and summary of the film is necessary, it should serve as an introduction to your analysis, which will comprise almost all of your essay.