Class Review

                I found out I had to take a Writing course when it was time to sign up for my spring semester classes. I wasn’t excited about it at all. I thought to myself “Wow I hate writing. Do I really have to take this class? I hope there’s not too much writing.” I don’t know what I was thinking though because of course there would be a lot of writing. I mean it is a writing course.  I was almost positive I wasn’t going to enjoy the class at all. I pictured myself writing every night and writing papers for a very harsh grader who would give me grades I didn’t like, but that wasn’t the case at all. I ended up genuinely enjoying the class and learning a lot. However, I do have some complaints.

                The writing prompts we had to do every class weren’t very fun because I don’t enjoy writing all that much but they helped me out a lot.  At the beginning of the semester I might have wrote for a third of the allotted time and now I can write for the whole 10 or 15 minutes like we are supposed to. This made it easier for me to be able to write my weekly blogs. Each week they got easier and easier. Four hundred words seemed like a lot in the beginning but now it’s practically nothing. I wouldn’t change anything about the weekly blogs and in class writing prompts except for the topics. Some of the readings we had to read weren’t exactly interesting.

                The reading part of the course is what I didn’t like. Reading is important of course but I didn’t find myself reading hardly any of the material. I rarely listened to the podcasts unless the title sounded interesting and I never even opened the textbook that was necessary for the course. I think that some of the reading material should be changed for something more exciting, especially the readings that were long. I can’t speak for everyone though, I might just be lazy.

                Overall the class was a success. I learned so much during class and with the writing conferences. I believe my writing has improved since the beginning of the course which is what matters. The instructor was excellent. The only problem I had with the class was trying to get myself to do the work that was assigned out of class such as the readings but I guess that’s my problem and not necessarily a problem with the course.  

Would You Eat a Big Mac?

Fast food? How convenient. You pull up to the drive through or walk inside and tell the cashier what you would like to order and then your food is ready in less than five minutes. Sounds great especially when you’re working two jobs and don’t have time to go home and cook a meal. Happy meals even come with a drink and toy, perfect for parents who don’t feel like cooking that night. Whoever came up with this whole fast food idea must have been a genius, right? Fast food restaurants such like McDonalds attract customers because they are convenient, inexpensive, and the food is delicious. Sounds ideal but unfortunately this food isn’t found to be very healthy and I’m almost positive most people don’t know what they are putting in their bodies.

                Don Gotske was extremely successful in inventing a burger that everyone loved. This burger is sold in more than 100 countries worldwide and 560 million of these are sold each year in the United States alone (Friedman 1). This goes to show just how popular these “tasty” burgers are. Americans seem to love this burger with "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun". McDonald’s turned the ingredients of the Big Mac to create a catchy jingle used in their commercial back in 1975 as advertisement for this new burger. How could someone resist going down to McDonald’s to get one of these after watching this commercial? Many try this burger once and fall in love with the taste and then end up consuming these on a regular basis or at least what I’ve noticed with some of my friends. They seem to be hooked. I’m going to assume they have never looked at the nutrition facts.

                According the McDonald’s website the Big Mac has a whopping total of 540 calories in just one burger. Based on a 2,000 calorie diet, that would be more than one fourth of your recommended daily caloric intake. If one makes it a meal by adding French fries and a drink or eats two burgers in one sitting, that’s already more than half of the calories one should be eating in a day in just one meal. Then add on two more meals and probably two snacks that will be eaten in the same day and you will most likely go over on your calories which will cause weight gain if you do not burn as much calories as you take in ("Balancing Calories"). The calories from fat are two hundred and sixty.  My Food Guide Pyramid recommends that we keep our calories from fat down to 30% of our caloric intake which is roughly 660 calories each day. This means that you’d get more than one third of those in just one Big Mac which will make it tough to balance out the rest of the foods you will consume that day. The total fat is 29 grams which is 45% of your daily value.

                The Big Mac contains ten grams of saturated fat which is 50% of your daily value and 1.5 grams of trans fat. Both saturated and trans fats are considered unhealthy fats ("Trans Fats on the Nutrition Facts Label" 1).  Trans fats are formed when hydrogen is added to some kind of vegetable oil to make it a more solid fat which is known as hydrogenation. This is done to increase shelf life and maintain texture and flavor of foods. Saturated fats mostly come from animals. The USDA recommends to keep trans fats and saturated fats as low as possible as they raise lipoprotein which is “bad cholesterol” that can increase your risk of heart disease (McGrane 1).

                Where as there are bad fats and too many calories in a Big Mac, there aren’t many nutrients. Sure you will get 25% of your Iron and Calcium which is great but you could be getting those in healthier ways. Foods rich in calcium are milk, cheese, yorgurt, and leafy greens and foods rich in iron are meats poultry, fish, and also leafy greens ("Calcium & Iron - Are You Getting Enough?").

                Not only are Big Macs not nutritious, when I was looking over the ingredient lists of the hamburger patties, the Big Mac “special sauce” and the bun I came across some interesting ingredients. Although McDonald’s says there burgers are just 100% pure USDA inspected beef with no fillers and no extenders, until just recently they were using ammonia based hydroxide to treat scrap meat known as boneless lean beef trimmings so that they could use it in there patties. These trimmings are the left overs after all the choice cuts of meat are taken. This meat is banned to be eaten by humans in the United Kingdom but in the United States it was allowed as long as it was treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria (Rosenbaum).  Not too long ago McDonald’s finally made the decision to stop using the ingredient known as “pink slime” which is great but what about all the weird ingredients listed in the bun and the “special sauce”?  The ingredient lists below are straight from the McDonald’s website.

Big Mac Sauce:

Soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (preservative),

spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate,

sodium benzoate (preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy

lecithin, turmeric (color), calcium disodium EDTA (protect flavor).

Big Mac Bun:

Enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sugar,

soybean oil and/or canola oil, contains 2% or less of the following: salt, calcium sulfate, calcium carbonate, wheat gluten, ammonium sulfate, ammonium chloride,

dough conditioners (may contain one or more of the following: sodium stearoyl lactylate, datem, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, mono- and diglycerides,

ethoxylated monoglycerides, monocalcium phosphate, enzymes, guar gum, calcium peroxide), calcium propionate and/or sodium propionate (preservatives), soy

lecithin, sesame seed.

                I’m sure you haven’t heard of quite a few of these ingredients or even pronounce them. That’s a good indicator that it probably should not be in there. Sure they stopped using ammonia in the meat but it’s still in the bun. This might explain why a burger from McDonalds that has been left out for over 12 years doesn’t look much different from when it was originally bought. It hasn’t broken down nor has it rotted as you would expect it to (Lee).  The image below is a photo from this experiment. The burger on the left is from 1996 and the photo was taken in 2008.

                Sodium benzoate is one of the ingredients I’ve never heared of before. It’s naturally found in some fruits and some sweet spices like cloves and cinnamon but the sodium benzoate that’s being used as a preservative is not natural. Instead it is chemically produced. This preservative is genotoxic and damages DNA (Zengin 763-69).

                I’m currently in a Dietetic Technician program and thought it would be a good idea to get my advisor, Nancy Johnson’s take on the Big Mac and fast food since she is a Registered Dietitian. I asked her if she ate McDonald’s. She told me she actually worked at McDonald’s in her teenage years so she ate her fair share back then but now not so much. She didn’t say she wouldn’t eat it but that she doesn’t. She told me a story of where her son came home one day telling her how he ate this burger that was so delicious, and it ended up being the Big Mac. He was in high school at the time and until then he had never eaten a Big Mac, and hardly knew what one was. There must be a reason why Nancy hadn’t introduced her kids to that type of food.

I wonder if these Big Mac lovers know what they are eating when they are mowing down that burger. I wonder if they even stop to think twice about buying a second one or adding fries and a milkshake to complete the meal. Have they even thought about looking at the nutrition facts or the ingredient label? Or have they and they just don’t care?

                As you can see there are plenty of reasons to avoid eating Big Mac’s and all fast food in general. There are many healthier options, like simply making burgers at home. I found a recipe for a burger that had only 259 calories and 7 grams of total fat, and 3.5 grams of saturated fat ("Epicurious"). This is a lot healthier and only takes twelve minutes which is probably less than the time it would take you to drive to McDonalds and back. Don’t get me wrong everything is supposedly okay in moderation, but I still think I’ll stay away from Big Macs and tell my friends to do the same.

Works Cited 

Friedman, Emily. "Happy Birthday Big Mac." ABC NEWS . 24 AUG 2007: 1. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3521002&page=1

United States. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Balancing Calories. Atlanta: , 2011. Print. <http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/calories/index.html>.

. "Discontinued Use of Select Lean Beef Trimmings (SLBT)." McDonald's. N.p., 2010-2012. Web. 10 Apr 2012.<http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/mcdonalds_statements_and_alerts/Discontinued_Use_of_Select_Lean_Beef_Trimmings.html>.

. "McDonald's USA Nutrition Facts for Popular Menu Items." McDonald's. N.p., Dec 2010. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/ingredientslist.pdf>.

. ". "McDonald's USA Nutrition Facts for Popular Menu Items." McDonald's. N.p., Dec 2010. Web. 10 Apr 2012. . ." McDonald's. N.p., Jan 2007. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutritionexchange/ingredientslist.pdf>. 

                                                                                                                                                                              

United States. Department of Agriculture. Trans Fats on the Nutrition Facts Label. Washington: , Web. <http://www.fns.usda.gov/fdd/facts/nutrition/TransFatFactSheet.pdf>.

McGrane, Mary. United States. Department of Agriculture. Dietary Saturated Fat and Cardiovascular Health: A Review of the Evidence. 2011. Web. <http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/NutritionInsights/Insight44.pdf>.

. "MedicineNet.com." Calcium & Iron - Are You Getting Enough?. N.p., 21 Dec 2001. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=19323>.

Rosenbaum, Matthew. "ABC News Blogs." McDonald’s Announces End to ‘Pink Slime’ in Burgers. N.p., 01 Feb 2012. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/02/01/mcdonalds-announces-end-to-pink-slime-in-burgers/>. 

Lee, Robyn. "12-Year Old McDonald's Hamburger, Still Looking Good." Serious Eats. N.p., 25 Sep 2008. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/09/12-year-old-mcdonalds-hamburger-still-looking-good.html>.

. Epicurious. N.p., Sep 2003. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Healthy-Homemade-Cheeseburgers-230146>.

Zengin, N. "The evaluation of the genotoxicity of two food preservatives: Sodium benzoate and potassium benzoate." Food and Chemical Toxicology. 49.4 (2001): 763-69. Web. 24 Apr. 2012. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691510006988>.

Recycling

               In high school I joined the ecology club and learned a lot about the environment and how to do the things we can to help take care of it. I learned about how to eliminate “vampire power” which is electricity being used when an appliance is plugged in but not being used. I learned about composting, energy saving light bulbs, saving gas, and most importantly recycling. I was taught how easy it is to recycle and how important it was for us to do this. From being in ecology club I’ve become a firm believer in recycling or reusing as much as possible. This being said, watching all the Electric cars being crushed instead of recycled, in the film “Who Killed the Electric Car” made me very upset because I didn’t understand it.

                From watching the movie I learned all about the electric car known as the Ev1 car. It seemed ideal for the environment and if I could I would most definitely drive one myself. They showed people who were leasing these cars, and everyone one of them said they loved it. Not one of them has a bad thing to say. They were fast, convenient, and great for the environment so why they decided to stop selling them and retract all of them doesn’t seem to make sense. What were they going to do with them?

                A General Motors spokesperson is on film saying that all the cars would be recycled which made me feel a tad better about the whole ordeal but they didn’t stick to their word. It was discovered that that all of these cars were being crushed and then shredded instead of the parts being reused or recycled. In the movie, a man even brought us to the junkyard and showed us just exactly how these new cars in mere perfect condition were being shamelessly shredded into a pile of useless metal. Why though? Why wouldn’t they do what they said they were going to and make use out of these cars by recycling them if they couldn’t be driven? I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.

                It seems ironic that one of the main purposes of the invention of this car was that it would be significantly better for the environment than the normal gas powered car but in turn it ended up being worse for the environment. These cars are now just more waste piled on top of the over-abundance of waste we already had.

Blahh.

After a very long ten hour day at school, I went back to my dorm to see what I could do for homework.  I realized what day it was so I sat down in my rocking computer chair at my laptop to write my weekly blog for English class, as I normally do on Wednesday nights but I ran into a problem. This time I didn’t already know what I was going to write about. I didn’t have a plan of attack already set in place like I normally would. What was I going to do? What in the world was I supposed to write about?

The weekly blog can be written about anything inspired from the material we go over in class or the reading or podcast that were assigned for that specific week. This seems to be plenty of material to be able to come up with a topic for a mere four hundred word blog. At least that’s what you would think but what happens when you miss class on Monday so you only have the material from Wednesday for class that didn’t inspire me to write , a thirteen page reading you haven’t read yet or an hour long podcast that you haven’t listened to yet.

I guess the logical thing to do was to listen to the podcast since I wasn’t feeling the whole reading thing. Sure, it’s an hour long but all I had to do was to listen. So as I was listening to the podcast on how a bank was run I decided with about ten minutes left that it was without a doubt boring and also did not inspire me to write so I went to bed.

Thursday morning during my cooking class all the girls from English class were saying that they were in the same situation I was. They had no idea what to write their blogs on so they couldn’t exactly help me either. I was screwed.

After class I decided to make a second attempt on writing my blog but I was still stuck so I decided to go on facebook instead. I had some notifications, one being “Sarah Cherim tagged you in a post” so I read it. “Girls, to answer your question: I emailed Filip and asked him if we were allowed to free-write on our blogs if we didn't know what to write about or were uninspired by the reading/podcast and he said: "Why not write about being uninspired by the material in the reading and podcast?" Hope that helps! Emily Harring, Taylor Nichols-xavier, Brittany Couturier, Emily Garland.” So that’s basically what I did.

Mike Daisey vs. Apple

Mike Daisey had a podcast on “This American Life” as well as a play that told a story about his trip to China. He posed as a businessman so that he could get inside the company when what he really wanted to do was get information on the companies working conditions. This play is a critique of the 

            Apple company and what they put their employees through. Come to find out most of the story was not true but rather a bunch of made up stories to make the company seem horrible. Very little of what Daisey said is actually true. This leads to the podcast “The Retraction” which tells of all the lies Daisey put in his story. I’m glad they retracted the original podcast and took the time to explain what happened. It is important for everyone to know the truth.

This story is very public and in fact was the podcast on This American Life that that attracted the most listeners. The listener’s were not aware that what they were listening to was not true. Upon listening to the podcast you’re head is filled with horrible visions of guards with guns at the doors, under aged workers, people being overworked and a man who got his hand mangled by one of these machines and not get any medical attention. It makes think very poorly of China and this company. This then affects the company’s image and could potentially affect their business, over lies. This is not fair at all.

I understand that Daisey is not a journalist but he made everyone think that his story was true which makes it not right. If Daisey were to label his work as fiction there wouldn’t be anything wrong with it. The parts he made up were to give his work drama and make it more interesting. It was to attract the readers’ attention which is what you do in writing. For example, Daisey said that he spoke with a man who got his hand mangled by a machine that made Ipads yet the man had never used an Ipad or seen one turned on ever in his life. Daisey makes the point that he’s never even used and Ipad yet this device made him lose his hand. It brings emotion to the story and overall just makes it better, but when the reader thinks this is true it makes them dislike the Apple company as I said before it is not fair to them.

I think that the story would have been fine if Daisey would have labeled his work. Instead, he chose to lie about the trip, and continues to lie even after the truth has come out. It's almost like someone starting a rumor about you causing you to lose all of your friends. It’s just not okay in any way to basically ruin this company’s or China’s reputation over a story that isn’t true.