Our investigations into the history of diet have been about what we are deliberately putting into our bodies. But what about stuff we’re putting into our bodies unknowingly? How can science study minute affects of certain chemicals in our bodies over long periods of time given the complexity and variety of everyone’s diets? BIG POINTS for this week.
Rather than plowing ahead, I think it will be most useful to step back and focus for a minute on some big picture ideas that I want you to take away from last week’s readings. For today there is NO READING, but instead a 20-min lecture. IT IS NOT A REVIEW but some thoughts about how I hope the set of readings will be useful moving forward.
Instead of a lecture quiz, everyone will do a lecture reflection. For today (meaning complete it by Wednesday to stay on schedule), write a standard reflection about your thoughts on the BIG POINTS lecture. What was interesting? What was confusing? How did you see the readings differently? Where do you disagree (and WHY)?
This is the original assignment for Monday, totally unchanged, just slid into the Wednesday slot.
We’re reading Lutts just for a bit of background about Carson and to understand her profound significance. It’s rare that one can trace or attribute a significant cultural change to a single person, but if it’s even possible, the most likely case is Rachel Carson as responsible for modern environmentalism. And it’s not about the environment for its own sake (also important!) but because it so dramatically affects our health.
As some of the best writing we’ll read in this course, it’s worth paying extra attention to how and why Carson’s language and rhetoric were so effective. Copy down the top 5 sentences from Carson that resonate with you, and a provide a sentence or two to explain why they were impactful for you. Collectively, your selected passages and explanations should make it clear what about the article you find most interesting and persuasive. If you pick rather trivial sentences, I’m going to assume you just didn’t read it.
This was the original assignment for Wednesday that I decided was less important than stepping back for a second (via the Big Points lecture). Now a standard response on this chapter can be submitted for EXTRA CREDIT, if you’re interested.
I’ve tried to encourage you to pay a lot of attention to RHETORIC in this course–the way(s) an author tries to persuade you of a particular point. This chapter gives us a kind of history of rhetoric in terms of the countercuisine and the industry response to it. In earlier chapters (that we’re not reading), Belasco defines countercuisine as a protest against industrialized agriculture and as part of the general counterculture movement from the 1960s. They characterized modern (for them) food as unnatural, dangerous, and poisonous (see Rachel Carson). This chapter describes the language and metaphors that were employed to describe food, as well as their power to influence how people think about food.
ORIGINAL PROMPT: Some of you have asked for more free-form reflection prompts, so this is one of those. There’s a LOT going on in this short chapter. What are the 4 or 5 most interesting ideas you came across? For each one, explain WHY you found them interesting.
Not really a weekly reflection, but a focus on just Friday’s reading. What are the 4 or 5 most interesting ideas you came across in terms of understanding GMO safety? How can these chapters help us think and talk about it more productively? How do the questions of safety posed here relate to the Carson reading for Wednesday?