After watching Super Size Me, a documentary and personal account of the role fast food can play in overall health, lets just say I am probably not eating McDonald's for a very long time. This is a powerful, lighthearted documentary by Morgan Spurlock with a very serious message. It is basically a personal journey he goes through over the course of 30 days where he only eats McDonalds three times a day and shows the effects it has on him. Also, throughout the film different facts and current events are discussed about the food industry and the effects of it on the general population.
One thing I noticed after watching the documentary is that for the most part I knew pretty much everything he was talking about. I mean be honest, we all know fast food is not healthy for you, yet most of us still eat. Why is this? This situation reminds me of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," where the man who is led into the light chooses to go back into the cave to what he knows best. People know that fast food is not good for you, but it tastes so good and what are the odds it's going to kill you right? Well it will. Maybe not directly, but it can cause problems and those problems lead to more problems which cause death and body failure.
In this case we are going to say the American public are the people in the cave. At first all they know is that fast food is cheap, fast, and fills you up. It also offers a variety of options to satisfy a multiplicity of people. And plus advertisements are literally everywhere: tv, social media, billboards, every couple miles in any direction. One thing that stuck with me is near the end where a family could not recite the pledge of allegiance, but they could recite a Big Mac ad perfectly. I was taken completely aback by this. And this documentary is 13 years old, imagine how many times bigger the fast food companies' influence is.
The purpose of our public schooling systems is to educate. One thing we fail to educate is how to efficiently take care of yourself. Here lately there has been an emphasis on taking away physical education so there is more classroom time so test scores can increase. Who cares if you are 300 pounds if you can find the square root of 5,467,563 right? We do not have to decrease wellness education to increase book knowledge. In fact I believe they go together. We have to get rid of this systemic purposeful ignorance of what processed fast food does to us. America is the fattest country in the world. Being overweight is second only to smoking in deaths, but is closing the gap on even that. There has to come a time where we stop looking at shadows on the wall and start standing up and walking into the light.
I keep mentioning it on all my comments, but that's the thing about humans - we like a bubble of ignorance. We don't want to think about how many calories we take in, because if we don't see them, are they real? It seems screwed up that we'd be so willing to let our health decline for the pure satisfaction of eating a Big Mac. Yet, it seems watching Super Size Me helps with the ecstatic truth of things. Before the documentary, it's easy to say we're all aware of the problem with obesity and McDonald's calories, but do we really? Like you said, I'm a bit shocked the family could recite a Big Mac ad over the pledge? It's weird to me that we are so shoved in a bubble that we refuse to see what is right in front of us.
ReplyDeleteYet, here we are, still in that bubble. It's not just McDonald's contributing to things, it's ALL the fast food places. For something that was created for such simplistic ideas, it sure has altered the whole of reality. Documentaries like these shove us into a world of facts that we never knew before. Like you said, it's like walking out into the light, and trying to see the truth of the matter. Maybe one day Super Size Me will be a required film in the education system. That seems to be a fairly decent idea.
But the real question is, after watching it, how many people would actually take heed?
I really liked the way you related the Allegory of the Cave to America and our choice to eat and do things that we know are not healthy. One thing I think you must take into consideration though is that for some people, those cheap, fast meals are the only way they can afford for their family to eat every day. Unfortunately, with the economic status of some people in this country their only choice is that extremely cheap food and they don't have the choice to worry about how unhealthy it truly is. They know but if you had to choose between starving or eating McDonald's I'm sure you would do the eat just like I would.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with Brianna that your Allegory of the Cave connection to Super Size Me is spot on! Human beings like what we know and most of us in America have grown up with fast food our entire life. It's strange too that the majority of us have also grown up being taught that fast food is bad for us, yet we still continue to eat it. While, of course, we do not eat McDonald's everyday as Spurlock does in the documentary, we do eat it and other fast food periodically. Why do we do this? Because we always have and everyone else does. I think your connection to Allegory of the Cave shows the importance of thinking twice before doing something. Human beings are drawn to what we know but if we would even take a couple seconds to reflect on what happens in Super Size Me, we could see the importance of getting rid of fast food. Super Size Me displays the importance of not only knowing the "truth" but understanding the "truth" and being able to carry out the lessons learned form the "truth."
ReplyDeleteI really like how you compared this documentary to the Allegory of the Cave. I believe like you said that the American public is McIgnorant of the damage they are doing to their bodies. I also like how you talked about how public school systems are not educating students on how to eat healthy. In the documentary, we are shown how eating healthy positively affects one's behavior. We are also shown how poorly many students choose to eat. It's sad to think about. We all make bad-choices, but is especially sad to see young teenagers/children obese. Ultimately, I think that many people will continue to be McIgnorant and make bad-choices (like you say at the end of your post) , unless there is a serious change of emphasis on healthy eating habits and lifestyle choices in public education.
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