Beef Hamburger example essay topic
In the Bio Analogies article it states that nearly two-thirds of residents of United States are overweight, and since 1991 the incidence of obesity has risen from 12 percent to more than 25 percent. This is due to the amount of junk food and burgers, we ate daily. To see if I am also one of these fast food consuming eaters, I composed a diary of what I eat daily and I discovered that within my weekly schedule, that's between school and work- I eat hamburgers at least three times a week. I ate these burgers not just from one place, I ate them from four different places. The first one I ate was at In-and-Out. The second one was at Fuddruckers.
The fourth day I had one in McDonalds and on the sixth day in which my friends and I went to Applebee's after work and I still had the nerve to order a hamburger even when there were other items on the menu. Hamburgers come from ground beef, which in reality if you consume a couple of hamburgers per month, it won't harm you, but it states in Consumer Reports. org, "Americans show their affection for ground beef and burgers by consuming approximately 30 pounds of ground beef per person per year. Ground beef's saturated fat can contribute to heart disease, and the bacteria it sometimes harbors can sicken or kill someone who eats beef that is not cooked thoroughly". With this information available to Americans daily, we still do consume the ground beef and even have the nerve to tell ourselves and our friends that we plan to cut back on it any day now.
This also proves that what we consume daily isn't only based on what our taste buds want us to eat, it's also based on what the media tells us to eat. I can prove this with the example of my own study of myself with the diary I conducted of what I eat. During the week I ate four hamburgers, in four different places. The first time I'll admit, I wanted to eat a beef hamburger, but the other three times were from me watching too much television, and the media sending signals to my brain that this food looks great and needs to be eaten before it's all gone and on top of all that it's cheap and fast.
I had to go to four different places until the media satisfied my desires for hamburgers. What surprised me the most is that at every place, I found a mishap in my hamburger. It was either to small, not cooked right, or cooked all the way, or it didn't have all the condiments I wanted on my burger; but I still kept eating the burger. That's not only me because at every place I went to go eat, there were at least two other guys with me who did the same thing- we all kept eating that addictive, heart disease promoting burger.
This leads to Ellen Shell's article called An Arm's Reach from Desire, which states, "Choice is what a free society is all about, and these marketers and advertisers offer all the choices we customers can handle. Or rather, the perception of choice". This proves that the media only makes us believe that we as Americans have a choice in what we eat and consume. That is true, but they don't give us pure choice, they only give us the perception of choice of how, where and when we want to eat our food. It is true that what I want to eat is truly up to me, even if the marketing industry has some play in it, but it's not true that I have the pure choice of deciding all other factors of my eating habits. For example, if I had pure choice in deciding how big I wanted my burger at In-and-Out, I would have ordered it huge, but I didn't.
They only advertised that I have the choice by showing me on commercials that I am able to choose what size burger I want in order to make it seem that I will leave happy, but when it got time right to it- I couldn't. Another example would be at McDonalds. They make you assume from their advertising that you can order anything on your burger, however when it got time right to it and I wanted some extra pickles on my burger they refused to add some. They only gave me the perception of choice.
Making me think I can order whatever and however I wanted my fattening burger, when in reality you only have the choice of deciding what you want to eat and by that I mean is it chicken, a burger, spaghetti, but all other factors is in their hands. The media also has the choice of getting someone sick or even killing someone. While someone was relaxing and watching television one night and saw a commercial for McDonalds and how juicy and huge their burgers look he or she decided to go have lunch there the next day. But the McDonalds he or she has just went to buys spoiled ground beef in which they make their burgers with or the ground beef they bought has bacteria sitting in it.
Then that person eats the hamburger, psychologically thinking he's happy while in reality he is about to become very sick. And it doesn't take much for the spoiled bacteria enriched ground beef to have a harmful effect: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, E coli bacteria kill an estimated 60 people nationwide every year and sickens 73,000. The most common symptom is severe, bloody diarrhea, but some people -- especially children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems -- are vulnerable to a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic-uremic syndrome. Just because one of these McDonalds is careless to the products that they buy and sell, they made a choice for this person that could either be a life-threatening situation, or become very susceptible to a wide variety of illnesses. Burgers are not the death tool that makes us sick, it's the media and fast food chains that do based on their ground beef that they buy and sell to us in the forms of hamburgers. In reality Hamburgers are a symbol in which the name and ground beef of the restaurant you " re eating at is packaged.
And that is what causes the diseases both psychologically and physically we face today in America.