Humanities 9 -
Food Project Reflection
Our final project was very challenging and I enjoyed it and benefited greatly from it. We started our project by learning about the food industry and the truth behind food, how it is grown, distributed and marketed. Watching Supersize me was a turning point in how I viewed fast food and the dangers of it. At one point we debated the merits of organic versus no-nonorganic food. I supported organic food because organic farming is healthier for people and more beneficial to the environment. For my final presentation, I chose to address eating disorders and the influence of advertising and other media on these disorders. I came to believe that advertising and other media are catalysts for eating’s because they impact people’s self image and how they use food.
Before the food project I had very little understanding of where my food comes from and what it consists of. I was surprised at my lack of understanding going into this project. For example, I had no idea what GMOs were and that they even existed. I no longer take at face value what I am told about food and I find that I want to research what I am eating. Now I think more about what I eat and what I am putting into my body, particularly fast food. Largely, I have always had a healthy diet and eaten primarily organic food. But I also supplemented the healthy food with fast food. Despite my cravings, I try to limit the amount of fast food that I eat.
The most challenging aspect of this project was researching my topic and crafting a long paper around my research. I had never written a paper of this length before and I found organizing the paper to be quite difficult. I completed multiple outlines before I believed that my paper had a logical flow. Drafting topic sentences were also challenging. I had to rewrite my topic sentences a lot and rearrange my paragraphs to support my topic sentences.
While I was writing my research paper I learned that my writing process is pretty messy. The messiest part of the process is my ability to organize a long paper. I had difficulty establishing a logical flow of thought and had to outline and re-outline my paper a number of times. While I had most of my thoughts down on paper, I had to rearrange all the paragraphs to make the paper more organized. In the future, I will work harder on developing more detailed outlines, plan out my topic sentences and then craft my paragraphs around them. Most importantly, I learned to plan my paper in more detail before I begin writing.
To navigate one’s own personal omnivore’s dilemma you have to start by being more aware of what food choices you have and what you are eating. It is important to first look at the ingredients of the food to ensure you know what is in it. You need to be aware of where your food comes from and how it is grown to determine if it is organic or not. You also need to be able to identify which foods are healthy and which are not. For example, knowing what carbohydrates or protein are and how they affect your body is key to eating healthier. Once you understand the foods that are healthy you can choose to eat more of these. As well as cut out the ones that you find are not healthy.
Our final project was very challenging and I enjoyed it and benefited greatly from it. We started our project by learning about the food industry and the truth behind food, how it is grown, distributed and marketed. Watching Supersize me was a turning point in how I viewed fast food and the dangers of it. At one point we debated the merits of organic versus no-nonorganic food. I supported organic food because organic farming is healthier for people and more beneficial to the environment. For my final presentation, I chose to address eating disorders and the influence of advertising and other media on these disorders. I came to believe that advertising and other media are catalysts for eating’s because they impact people’s self image and how they use food.
Before the food project I had very little understanding of where my food comes from and what it consists of. I was surprised at my lack of understanding going into this project. For example, I had no idea what GMOs were and that they even existed. I no longer take at face value what I am told about food and I find that I want to research what I am eating. Now I think more about what I eat and what I am putting into my body, particularly fast food. Largely, I have always had a healthy diet and eaten primarily organic food. But I also supplemented the healthy food with fast food. Despite my cravings, I try to limit the amount of fast food that I eat.
The most challenging aspect of this project was researching my topic and crafting a long paper around my research. I had never written a paper of this length before and I found organizing the paper to be quite difficult. I completed multiple outlines before I believed that my paper had a logical flow. Drafting topic sentences were also challenging. I had to rewrite my topic sentences a lot and rearrange my paragraphs to support my topic sentences.
While I was writing my research paper I learned that my writing process is pretty messy. The messiest part of the process is my ability to organize a long paper. I had difficulty establishing a logical flow of thought and had to outline and re-outline my paper a number of times. While I had most of my thoughts down on paper, I had to rearrange all the paragraphs to make the paper more organized. In the future, I will work harder on developing more detailed outlines, plan out my topic sentences and then craft my paragraphs around them. Most importantly, I learned to plan my paper in more detail before I begin writing.
To navigate one’s own personal omnivore’s dilemma you have to start by being more aware of what food choices you have and what you are eating. It is important to first look at the ingredients of the food to ensure you know what is in it. You need to be aware of where your food comes from and how it is grown to determine if it is organic or not. You also need to be able to identify which foods are healthy and which are not. For example, knowing what carbohydrates or protein are and how they affect your body is key to eating healthier. Once you understand the foods that are healthy you can choose to eat more of these. As well as cut out the ones that you find are not healthy.
Food Project Essay The commercial begins. Half naked girls fall from the sky, each inhumanly skinny with Barbie like facial features. You soon realize that these girls are actually winged angels walking through a small Italian village. Italian men are objectifying the angels, staring at them and making various comments. One older Italian man gazing at them exclaims “mama mía!” Then you finally see what brought them to earth, an attractive young man bearing a resemblance to a “Ken” doll. All of the angels rip off their halos and smash them on the ground to become human to pursue this man. At the end of the commercial you find out this occurred because the man uses Axe body spray. “Even angels will fall” for those wearing Axe. The more insidious message is that beautiful angels/women are attracted to very handsome men. Sadly, none of the attractive people in the commercial are “real” as we know them. They represent an ideal body type and leave the audience with the message that one can only be attractive if one looks like this. Unfortunately, advertising has become distorted and creates an illusion of what people look like. This illusion has become deadly as advertising’s portrayal of ideal body types distorts many young people’s self-image often becoming a catalyst for eating disorders. With eating disorders becoming a major health concern, we need to recognize advertising’s role in fueling this mental illness and hold the media more responsible for how people are portrayed. Eating disorders are a major health problem largely, but not just limited to women they affect men as well. Anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating are the three most common eating disorders. When one is anorexic, he/she is obsessed with losing weight, which leads to self-starvation, and refusal to eat. Bulimia is when one self-induced vomits after meals generally to ensure that food ingested doesn’t result in any weight gain. Uncontrolled ingestion of a large amount of food with lack of control over it is referred to as binge eating. Binge eating is generally associated with periods of extreme dieting or attempts at weight loss. Up to 24 million people of all ages have eating disorders in the U.S. alone and over two-thirds of these are girls and women. Eating disorders are on the rise and have been for decades. According to Chris York, “hospital admissions for eating disorders rose by 16% from last year alone” with the biggest increase for girls ages 10 to 15. The sad fact is that only 1 in 10 people suffering from eating disorders ever received treatment and a significant percent of these people will ultimately die from their disorder. Eating disorders are lifelong illnesses and very hard to treat. They have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness at around 20%. This is a daunting statistic and it is amazing that insecurities can actually kill someone. |
It is important to first understand what eating disorders are. Eating disorders are abnormal eating habits that can threaten ones health or even one’s life. The common element to the most prevalent eating disorders is that the people afflicted usually struggle with self-esteem issues and believe that they need to lose weight to be more attractive and lead a satisfying life. They see themselves in a distorted manner and are disconnected from how they actually look. While they are often ever shrinking in size, they never realize that they have become dangerously thin.
Even though genetic, physiological, biological, and social factors all play a role in creating eating disorders, advertising and other media are believed to be the largest and most powerful factor. The media shapes what are the desired images and these images shape our self-perceptions. It is these perceptions, our self-image that when impaired often leads to eating disorders. Susan Ringwood of the eating disorder charity Beat stated, “The media is a powerful influence and we know how vulnerable some people at risk of eating disorders can be to its visual images in particular.” Researchers find that eating disorders can be “transmitted like a virus” through media portrayals. The sad fact is that advertising and other media often distort how women and men look giving rise to unrealistic expectations about body image.
Statistics tell the story of the devastating impact of advertising and the distortion of people in the media. The body type portrayed in advertising as the “ideal” is possessed by only 5% of American females. This suggests that the vast majority, almost all women, could never attain this “ideal”. Nonetheless, this “ideal” has wide ranging influence. Almost 70% of girls in 5th to 12th grade reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of a perfect body. Almost half (47%) of the girls in 5th to 12th grade reported wanting to lose weight because of magazine pictures. Over 80% of all 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. Most horrifying is that 42% of 1ST to 3RD graders want to be thinner (York).
Advertisements do not portray reality and they lead to a distorted sense of what people, both men and women, should look like. Many advertisements are crafted very carefully to promote products or ideas and to get a certain message across. Advertisers use skinny people in “junk” food commercials, which lead the viewers to believe that they can eat this food, and maintain a healthy body. Advertisers in their attempt to sell product also try to convince the audience that they have a problem that can only be solved by the advertiser’s product. In doing so, they often convince the viewer that there is something wrong with them.
The fashion industry is perhaps most responsible for contributing to the proliferation of dubious imagery that can lead to eating disorders. Advertisers also portray skinny people even people who are anorexic to be models of beauty. “Thin models set a standard of what is desirable and prestigious and that is likely to have a powerful influence on social norms”, said Dr. Anne E Becker, professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. The Council of Fashion Designers re-released its health guidelines in 2011 and called for increased awareness of eating disorder symptoms and recommended a ban on models younger than 16 walking in fashion shows. Yet, it is not clear that this has been implemented. The fashion industry seems to turn a blind eye to the models with eating and other disorders. It is reported that 98% of all models are thinner than the average American woman. Recently, a Swedish modeling agency was even accused of recruiting outside of an eating disorders clinic.
Photographs in advertisements and in other media are also altered often to an extent that is humanly impossible. Photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertising are routinely retouched digitally. It has been claimed that “100% of fashion and celebrity photographs are altered”. Not only are wrinkles and blemishes corrected, but also Photoshop is used to shed 10 to 20 pounds from the images of people. Imagine in a given year, a child is exposed to more than 40,000 advertisements (Kazdin), which makes advertising a pervasive influence on how people think about themselves from an early age, even when what they see isn’t real.
If the media represented more diverse body shapes, people’s self-images would change and we could realistically expect a decline in eating disorders The Royal College of Psychiatrists criticizes the media by saying “using underweight models and airbrushing pictures to make models appear physically perfect makes people have unreachable expectations for themselves and others.” If only the media used only normal size people, and didn’t use modern day technology to make models look unrealistically perfect we could help promote a healthier self image among children and adults There would be a very large decrease in people who are insecure about themselves and who have eating disorders, and people who are insecure about them selves in general.
There has and still are some people trying to change the way advertising and the media work. About a year ago, a fourteen-year-old petitioned Seventeen Magazine to do one non-Photoshopped spread a month. Seventeen Magazine took it into consideration but quickly denied her request. Feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway have asked that digitally altered photos be labeled and their requests were also denied. Even the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that asked advertisers to “discourage altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.” Unfortunately, the desire to sell products through advertising regardless of the effects that it has on people seems to win out and none of these proposals have been taken seriously.
The sad fact of eating disorders is that sufferers don’t see the ruse that advertising is creating. They completely buy into the image that is presented and only see their own shortcomings. Most people who suffer from eating disorders don’t even recognize it as a problem. As Cole Kazdin, an anorexic and bulimic patient commented, “Many of my friends, who have since surprised me in revealing their own experiences with eating disorders, did not get help by choice. Their moment of clarity was collapse, hospitalization, a heart attack.” It is distressing that some people let eating disorders affect their health to the extreme for an ideal that isn’t even realistic.
We need to figure out how to stop this terrible disease from spreading, and ultimately prevent it from happening. We need to determine how to enlist the media to represent people more realistically and celebrate their true selves. Interestingly, the brand Dove has made great strides in portraying so-called “real women” with all of their blemishes and weight issues. This brand alleges that its ads are not altered. Surprisingly, the Dove brand is owned by the Unilever Corporation that also owns the Axe brand, a notorious user of unrealistic images of people. Unfortunately, Unilever only seems to embrace reality in the media when it believes it will help sell the product but not across the board for all its products. With growing attention to how people are portrayed in advertising and other media and its impact on eating disorders there is hope that things will change. But it’s up to you and me to make the difference. All of us decide how we want to experience the media and advertisements.
The solution is not very simple, but the actions and things we can do to try to change this are. Each and every one of us can become more aware of and choose to filter what advertisers represent and what is reality. Whenever you see an advertisement that makes you feel insecure or makes you feel bad about yourself, try writing a letter to the advertisers, magazine editors, etc. Maybe if enough of us do this those responsible will finally get the message, and realize what how ugly they’re making society. Just maybe it will open their eyes to the diseases they are spreading and creating. You could also keep a list of companies who constantly send negative body messages and boycott their products. Also, encourage advertisers who send a positive message. Encourage them by writing letters about how inspiring their empowering advertisements are. We need to push advertisers and others who are negligent in the media to take responsibility and police themselves.`
Advertising and the media are obviously responsible for how many people view themselves and also a catalyst for eating disorders. Because of the broad impact and deadly nature of eating disorders we need to focus on changing this dynamic. I hope that one day in the near future we can all see ourselves more realistically and embrace what we see, hopefully decreasing the number of human being who suffers from eating disorders. The mortality rate for eating disorders should be 0%, and NO ONE should ever feel the need to deliberately starve him or herself ever.
Even though genetic, physiological, biological, and social factors all play a role in creating eating disorders, advertising and other media are believed to be the largest and most powerful factor. The media shapes what are the desired images and these images shape our self-perceptions. It is these perceptions, our self-image that when impaired often leads to eating disorders. Susan Ringwood of the eating disorder charity Beat stated, “The media is a powerful influence and we know how vulnerable some people at risk of eating disorders can be to its visual images in particular.” Researchers find that eating disorders can be “transmitted like a virus” through media portrayals. The sad fact is that advertising and other media often distort how women and men look giving rise to unrealistic expectations about body image.
Statistics tell the story of the devastating impact of advertising and the distortion of people in the media. The body type portrayed in advertising as the “ideal” is possessed by only 5% of American females. This suggests that the vast majority, almost all women, could never attain this “ideal”. Nonetheless, this “ideal” has wide ranging influence. Almost 70% of girls in 5th to 12th grade reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of a perfect body. Almost half (47%) of the girls in 5th to 12th grade reported wanting to lose weight because of magazine pictures. Over 80% of all 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. Most horrifying is that 42% of 1ST to 3RD graders want to be thinner (York).
Advertisements do not portray reality and they lead to a distorted sense of what people, both men and women, should look like. Many advertisements are crafted very carefully to promote products or ideas and to get a certain message across. Advertisers use skinny people in “junk” food commercials, which lead the viewers to believe that they can eat this food, and maintain a healthy body. Advertisers in their attempt to sell product also try to convince the audience that they have a problem that can only be solved by the advertiser’s product. In doing so, they often convince the viewer that there is something wrong with them.
The fashion industry is perhaps most responsible for contributing to the proliferation of dubious imagery that can lead to eating disorders. Advertisers also portray skinny people even people who are anorexic to be models of beauty. “Thin models set a standard of what is desirable and prestigious and that is likely to have a powerful influence on social norms”, said Dr. Anne E Becker, professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. The Council of Fashion Designers re-released its health guidelines in 2011 and called for increased awareness of eating disorder symptoms and recommended a ban on models younger than 16 walking in fashion shows. Yet, it is not clear that this has been implemented. The fashion industry seems to turn a blind eye to the models with eating and other disorders. It is reported that 98% of all models are thinner than the average American woman. Recently, a Swedish modeling agency was even accused of recruiting outside of an eating disorders clinic.
Photographs in advertisements and in other media are also altered often to an extent that is humanly impossible. Photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertising are routinely retouched digitally. It has been claimed that “100% of fashion and celebrity photographs are altered”. Not only are wrinkles and blemishes corrected, but also Photoshop is used to shed 10 to 20 pounds from the images of people. Imagine in a given year, a child is exposed to more than 40,000 advertisements (Kazdin), which makes advertising a pervasive influence on how people think about themselves from an early age, even when what they see isn’t real.
If the media represented more diverse body shapes, people’s self-images would change and we could realistically expect a decline in eating disorders The Royal College of Psychiatrists criticizes the media by saying “using underweight models and airbrushing pictures to make models appear physically perfect makes people have unreachable expectations for themselves and others.” If only the media used only normal size people, and didn’t use modern day technology to make models look unrealistically perfect we could help promote a healthier self image among children and adults There would be a very large decrease in people who are insecure about themselves and who have eating disorders, and people who are insecure about them selves in general.
There has and still are some people trying to change the way advertising and the media work. About a year ago, a fourteen-year-old petitioned Seventeen Magazine to do one non-Photoshopped spread a month. Seventeen Magazine took it into consideration but quickly denied her request. Feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway have asked that digitally altered photos be labeled and their requests were also denied. Even the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that asked advertisers to “discourage altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.” Unfortunately, the desire to sell products through advertising regardless of the effects that it has on people seems to win out and none of these proposals have been taken seriously.
The sad fact of eating disorders is that sufferers don’t see the ruse that advertising is creating. They completely buy into the image that is presented and only see their own shortcomings. Most people who suffer from eating disorders don’t even recognize it as a problem. As Cole Kazdin, an anorexic and bulimic patient commented, “Many of my friends, who have since surprised me in revealing their own experiences with eating disorders, did not get help by choice. Their moment of clarity was collapse, hospitalization, a heart attack.” It is distressing that some people let eating disorders affect their health to the extreme for an ideal that isn’t even realistic.
We need to figure out how to stop this terrible disease from spreading, and ultimately prevent it from happening. We need to determine how to enlist the media to represent people more realistically and celebrate their true selves. Interestingly, the brand Dove has made great strides in portraying so-called “real women” with all of their blemishes and weight issues. This brand alleges that its ads are not altered. Surprisingly, the Dove brand is owned by the Unilever Corporation that also owns the Axe brand, a notorious user of unrealistic images of people. Unfortunately, Unilever only seems to embrace reality in the media when it believes it will help sell the product but not across the board for all its products. With growing attention to how people are portrayed in advertising and other media and its impact on eating disorders there is hope that things will change. But it’s up to you and me to make the difference. All of us decide how we want to experience the media and advertisements.
The solution is not very simple, but the actions and things we can do to try to change this are. Each and every one of us can become more aware of and choose to filter what advertisers represent and what is reality. Whenever you see an advertisement that makes you feel insecure or makes you feel bad about yourself, try writing a letter to the advertisers, magazine editors, etc. Maybe if enough of us do this those responsible will finally get the message, and realize what how ugly they’re making society. Just maybe it will open their eyes to the diseases they are spreading and creating. You could also keep a list of companies who constantly send negative body messages and boycott their products. Also, encourage advertisers who send a positive message. Encourage them by writing letters about how inspiring their empowering advertisements are. We need to push advertisers and others who are negligent in the media to take responsibility and police themselves.`
Advertising and the media are obviously responsible for how many people view themselves and also a catalyst for eating disorders. Because of the broad impact and deadly nature of eating disorders we need to focus on changing this dynamic. I hope that one day in the near future we can all see ourselves more realistically and embrace what we see, hopefully decreasing the number of human being who suffers from eating disorders. The mortality rate for eating disorders should be 0%, and NO ONE should ever feel the need to deliberately starve him or herself ever.
Macbeth production !
Macbeth Reflection
After reading Macbeth, our project was to develop and perform a shadow puppet show of a portion of the play. My role as an art director entailed co-directing the art team to create the puppets and the sets for the performance. Part of my challenge was to develop collaboration between my team to establish a common vision of what we were trying to achieve. In the end, we delivered working puppets and creative sets for the performance.
The project was enjoyable but challenging in trying to incorporate everyone’s ideas and keeping the team moving forward. I enjoyed the storyline of the play enormously and was surprised by how much I liked making puppets. My best moment during the project was when I thought my team decided to adopt my artistic viewpoint. This inspired me to try harder to be more creative with the puppets.
In the final week of the project, it became stressful and frustrating and I worried that it wouldn’t be as good as we had hoped. Part of the difficulty came from trying to collaborate with the directors. The art directors had a very different view of how the play should be performed than the directors. My vision was that Macbeth should appear normal at first and then deteriorate throughout the play because he was weighed down by guilt. I was frustrated and disappointed when the directors scratched that idea. I had to persevere and deliver the type of puppets that the directors wanted despite my conviction that my vision of the play was right and my frustration that I couldn’t convince them to follow my lead.
Probably, the most important thing that I learned is that when I am very confident about my ideas, I can be stubborn when challenged to change them. One of the lessons that I learned in collaborating with people is that the ones who are most stubborn are the ones that end up getting their way. Interestingly, they may not actually have the best ideas. I figured out that if everyone is not on board with my ideas that I am not a very good leader. I tend to shut out people who do not agree with my ideas as opposed to incorporating their vision or winning them over to my beliefs.
As I reflect on this study of Shakespeare, I find his works timeless because his themes are so universal that almost anyone can relate to or be interested in them. For example, in Macbeth, we can all relate to the issues of a good man becoming a bad person in order to fulfill his desires. We can also relate to the guilt that affects him after his crimes. We also celebrate Shakespeare plays today because they can be set in any time or place. I am very grateful that we still celebrate Shakespeare and I was surprised about how much I enjoyed it. When we started this module, I didn’t really think that I would like it. I only hope that I can be in Westminster Abbey when they open Shakespeare’s grave.
The project was enjoyable but challenging in trying to incorporate everyone’s ideas and keeping the team moving forward. I enjoyed the storyline of the play enormously and was surprised by how much I liked making puppets. My best moment during the project was when I thought my team decided to adopt my artistic viewpoint. This inspired me to try harder to be more creative with the puppets.
In the final week of the project, it became stressful and frustrating and I worried that it wouldn’t be as good as we had hoped. Part of the difficulty came from trying to collaborate with the directors. The art directors had a very different view of how the play should be performed than the directors. My vision was that Macbeth should appear normal at first and then deteriorate throughout the play because he was weighed down by guilt. I was frustrated and disappointed when the directors scratched that idea. I had to persevere and deliver the type of puppets that the directors wanted despite my conviction that my vision of the play was right and my frustration that I couldn’t convince them to follow my lead.
Probably, the most important thing that I learned is that when I am very confident about my ideas, I can be stubborn when challenged to change them. One of the lessons that I learned in collaborating with people is that the ones who are most stubborn are the ones that end up getting their way. Interestingly, they may not actually have the best ideas. I figured out that if everyone is not on board with my ideas that I am not a very good leader. I tend to shut out people who do not agree with my ideas as opposed to incorporating their vision or winning them over to my beliefs.
As I reflect on this study of Shakespeare, I find his works timeless because his themes are so universal that almost anyone can relate to or be interested in them. For example, in Macbeth, we can all relate to the issues of a good man becoming a bad person in order to fulfill his desires. We can also relate to the guilt that affects him after his crimes. We also celebrate Shakespeare plays today because they can be set in any time or place. I am very grateful that we still celebrate Shakespeare and I was surprised about how much I enjoyed it. When we started this module, I didn’t really think that I would like it. I only hope that I can be in Westminster Abbey when they open Shakespeare’s grave.
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