Happy Meals are not happy

Dupuis puts more of his emphasis on the fact that history changes. When the economy was completely built on farmers, it was easy to eat natural foods. This is obvious because the people eating it without the use of pesticides and chemicals grew everything that was eaten. It is also true that the plants were not genetically changed for mass production. As history progressed, less people started to grow their own food and they begin to relay on other people to make their food. This began to change when people started to mass-produce food in factories and the meat packing business. The meat packing industry was one of the biggest problems with American Food which I felt like was left out of this essay. Upton Sinclair wrote a book about the meat packing industry and the best way it has been descripted was by him in his book;

"All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad tracks and huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there are not merely rivers of hot blood and carloads of moist flesh, and rendering-vats and soup cauldrons, glue-factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell-there are also tons of garbage festering in the sun, and the greasy laundry of the workers hung out to dry and dining rooms littered with food black with flies, and toilet rooms that are open sewers.”

 I feel like it is difficult for this to be left out because it effected the enomony and the food culture of America so much. They also bring up the fact of how the Northerners before the Civil War were so against slavery, however slaves harvested all of the food that they were eating. It is a lot like people who complain about how there is child labor, but they still buy the goods made by those children.

Looking at Pollan’s piece he talks more about how peoples choices and how they define “food” changes their diets. “That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket,” (Pollan) This shows how different things are now then they used to be because of the changing in the food culture. Pollan tries to describe the way people should eat by telling people not to eat that their great-great-great grandma would not eat. This is where the two articles tie in because they talk about how the best way to eat is to eat the things that were grown hundreds of years ago because this is what was the most natural and most healthy.