Eating Habits

The sheer amount of homework I have is disappointing.   I have a midterm the day I return to Berkeley.   What I find most unbelievable is that, while the professor offered to move the midterm to the Wednesday after we came back, he claimed that a couple people objected to such a move (preferring Monday), and that their opinions had precedence since that was the way things were originally planned.   Thus, I am really finding it hard to grasp how some people like having the midterm then, and that means I have to study over spring break.   Sadly, trying to keep up with my academics over break has not been going well so far.   I suppose that overall it is an improvement considering I have accomplished more than I would have on average over a two-day period in the past two months.   Yet, I am already lagging behind in terms of what I planned to do.   For one thing, The Paradox of Plenty isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be about.   I expected it to lambast fast food and provide me with a lot to base my paper on, but so far it has been about the eating habits of Americans in and around The Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression, WWII, and the Baby Boom years.   It did talk about how large corporations were able to have a big influence on government and how they successfully manipulated the masses into being “hooked” onto their products and thus gain large profits.   Most surprising was that this era in American history wasn’t presented in as positive a light as Michael Pollan presented it in Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan seems to credit Earl Butz in the 1970s for our disastrous eating habits today), yet Paradox of Plenty showed that, even in the 1930s, large corporations were homogenizing the American diet, and even the prominent FDR often had to give in to the corporations’ interests.   I suppose the book so far has foreshadowed the rise of fast food by showing the social fabric of America at that time as being “perfect” for fast food as it favored large corporations, showed...