WRC 1013/1023: Freshman Composition: Exploring Critical Issues

"Fast food franchises are like San Francisco's old bathhouses--places where high-risk populations indulge in high-risk behavior."

"A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amylketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphrenyl 2 butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), α ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4 methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent."

"To satisfy stockholders, food companies must convince people to eat more of their products or to eat their products instead of those of competitors. They do so through advertising and public relations, of course, but also by working tirelessly to convince government of fi cials, nutrition professionals, and the media that their products promote health— or at least do no harm. Much of this work is a virtually invisible part of contemporary culture that attracts only occasional notice."

"No wonder everything's bigger in Texas."

"What should we have for dinner?"

"Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in maintaining the status quo of food production and consumption? How can I feed my family healthy foods affordably?"

"One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.

This goes along with two other observations that have led to the well-accepted idea that some large percentage of cancers are caused by our Western diets and lifestyles. This means they could actually be prevented if we could pinpoint exactly what the problem is and prevent or avoid that."

"The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive."

"An enormous amount of media space has been dedicated to promoting the notion that all processed food, and only processed food, is making us sickly and overweight. In this narrative, the food-industrial complex—particularly the fast-food industry—has turned all the powers of food-processing science loose on engineering its offerings to addict us to fat, sugar, and salt, causing or at least heavily contributing to the obesity crisis. The wares of these pimps and pushers, we are told, are to be universally shunned."

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to test relative measures of food swamps alongside food deserts as predictors of obesity rates across all United States (U.S.) counties, adjusting for reverse causality."

"I’ve had dozens of combination plates like this one over the years, but few have nailed each element of the plate with such finesse — a word, I know, not often associated with a cuisine too often considered cheap and inauthentic. But Tex-Mex is way more nuanced than a blanket stereotype, and eating at Garcia’s is one insightful, gratifying introduction to eating in San Antonio."

"Situated in an old converted house in San Antonio’s red-hot Pearl Brewery complex, it’d be easy enough to dismiss Tim and Alex Rattray’s first restaurant venture as hipster barbecue. Open since 2012, the Granary’s wood-paneled dining room is set with rustic picnic tables; a butcher’s diagram of a pig labeled in French watches over diners. The menu touts “responsibly sourced” meat, and there’s a craft brewery in the back overseen by a guy with a magnificent waxed mustache."

"Through a storied line of restaurants here and gone, chef Andrew Weissman has been writing new volumes of San Antonio's restaurant saga since the dawn of the new millennium. Weissman is the face and featured name at Signature, the La Cantera Resort & Spa's new restaurant, and it offers an anthology of his James Beard award-nominated work, woven in flourishes of poetry and ragged lines of prose for a real story that doesn't always have clean narrative arcs and happy endings. But the origin story is nice."

"Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations? Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?"