Ask AI the deceptively simple question that we started with: What is a healthy diet? Then use the course to explain why the answer is not timeless, neutral, or obvious.
AI will probably give you advice that sounds familiar: eat a balanced diet, get fruits and vegetables, choose whole grains, limit sugar, avoid too much saturated fat, drink water, maybe talk to a professional. That answer may be useful! But it is also historical. It reflects assumptions about bodies, evidence, responsibility, expertise, science, culture, morality, and common sense.
Your job is to make the obvious strange. Use SPECIFIC examples from the course to evaluate the advice with historical perspective. This assignment is meant to show whether you can use the history of diet and health to analyze modern dietary advice, explain how expertise is created, and notice what gets left out.
This assignment comes near the end of the course because it asks you to bring the whole course to bear on a very ordinary modern question. By this point, we have seen dietary advice as ancient regimen, moral discipline, social reform, scientific measurement, body politics, public health guidance, and common sense. Now you get to use that history to analyze a familiar answer from the present.
The purpose is not to make you cynical about all diet advice. It is to help you see that even practical advice has a history. You are practicing historical contextualization, analysis of expertise, attention to rhetoric, and the ability to notice what a confident answer makes visible or invisible.
Think of your follow-up prompts as part of the analysis. A strong prompt uses the course to pressure-test the AI answer: What would Mudry help you notice? What would Biltekoff ask about morality? What would the federal guidelines make visible? What would earlier sources remind us not to assume?
Start with these:
What is a healthy diet? Give me practical advice for an ordinary adult.
Why is this diet healthy? What evidence, assumptions, or expert knowledge supports this advice?
Then create at least three follow-up prompts of your own. These should not just ask for more details. They should use course themes to push the AI answer in historically interesting directions.
For example, you might ask about common sense, morality, calories, moderation, quantification, official dietary guidelines, personal responsibility, body size, expertise, uncertainty, culture, or what kinds of people and eating practices are treated as normal.
Your follow-up prompts are part of the assignment. Try to design prompts that reveal something you could not see in the first answer.
Some possible models:
What assumptions are you making about health, bodies, responsibility, culture, science, and food?
What parts of your answer reflect modern American assumptions rather than universal truths?
How does your advice use numbers, measurement, moderation, or risk?
What moral ideas are implied in this advice, even if you are not using moral language directly?
What kinds of foods, people, traditions, bodies, or economic realities are left out of this advice?
You do not need to use these exact prompts. Better prompts will connect more directly to ideas and readings from the course.
You do not need to answer every question below, but your essay should clearly use the course to analyze the AI answer.
You do not need to cover every course theme. It is better to make a few specific, well-supported connections than to mention everything vaguely.
Write a short analysis that includes:
You can include short quotations from AI, but do not paste the whole conversation. The important thing is your analysis.
Strong essays use the AI answer as evidence, not as the final authority. They make a clear historical argument, use several specific course examples, and explain how those examples help reveal assumptions about expertise, bodies, evidence, morality, culture, or common sense.
The best versions will also show that your own follow-up prompts mattered: they should help you discover something more interesting than the first generic answer.
This assignment appears in Canvas as a letter grade. In general, it is graded as A, B, or C.