Science BM1: Food

​During the first half of this Science & Society class I have learned so much about food. In the beginning of the unit I remember learning about different food labels and terms. For example when we looked at what Mr. Best had for dinner one night and he ate a veggie burger, the labels listed on the box said that this product was all natural, no cholesterol, reduced sodium, low saturated fat, and has no trans fat. It was all about learning what these different terms meant. A different assignment that we did in the food unit was reading the organic food article. We learned more about organic food and how some of the articles can be seen as bias. Then we learned about the Food Inc., which really opened my eyes to everything. It showed how bad these conditions are for the animals and the people in the slaughterhouses were. I’ve learned so much about that movie such as how people could get arrested if they stole plant seeds and how they weren’t allowed to talk about what was going on cause they could go to jail. It was a very informative movie but also very sad to know what is actually going on in this food industry. Anther assignment we did in the unit opened my eyes to see which place was better to shop from. When we did the supermarket assignment I learned that the supermarket I go to has a lot of organic food for a cheap price then other places. A more recent thing that we learned about was the western diet reading that we did in class. We compared the western diet and having diabetes together. During the diabetes chapter we learned a lot of new terms and how they work. For example we learned that Type 1 (also called juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes) is caused by a lack of insulin and that Type 2 (also called adult-onset diabetes or non-insulin-dependent diabetes) occurs when the body does not respond or can't use its own insulin (insulin resistance). Something else I learned was that gestational diabetes is the result of some hormonal changes that occur in all women during pregnancy. Another thing I learned was that glucose is a sugar that provides energy to all of the cells in your body. The chemical formula is to this is C6H12O6. My role in the larger food system is to buy food; at least that’s what I believe. The biggest problem in the food system is the conditions all of our food is going through for example the slaughterhouses. The animals and people are being mistreated. I could go a bit healthier buy going to organic food markets. The impact of these decisions would be that now I know what happens to my food before I get it, it makes me not want to eat it anymore. I am willing to make changes but it doesn’t happen over night so it will probably take some time.