Citing examples from the book, what conclusions can be drawn about the safety of our food supply ba

The Format

The essay must be in MLA format. The draft and final must be typed and double-spaced with 1” margins and Times New Roman font.

The Basics

You will write a 1000-word essay. Provide a word count at the end of your draft and your final.

Your essay should have an interesting introduction with a clearly stated thesis and enough body paragraphs to support your thesis. Each body paragraph should have a topic sentence and enough supporting sentences to effectively make your point. Your conclusion should not merely restate your thesis and main points but should conclude effectively while leaving the reader with something to think about.

Do not use 1st person (I, me, we, our) or 2nd person (you, your).

The Sources

You are required to use one quote and one paraphrase from The American Way of Eating. Do not quote passages longer than three lines.

You must also use one quote or paraphrase from two of the sources I provided, or you may use one article and the documentary we watched in class. Do not do additional research.

 Provide a full source introduction the first time you use each source.

 Use the ICE method.

 Provide a signal phrase/author tag and parenthetical documentation for all quotes and paraphrases.

 A Works Cited page is required.

The Approach

• Read through the options and think about them carefully for a few minutes.

• Do a prewrite on all three options.

• Choose the one you have the most to say about.

• Decide on an organizational plan. (An informal outline might be helpful.)

• Draft your essay, and then work through the revising and editing considerations you’ve learned.

• Bring a complete draft to class for evaluation on the date listed on your course schedule.

The Topic
McMillan exposes discrepancies between food safety policies and practices in the fields, Walmart, and Applebee’s. Citing examples from the book, what conclusions can be drawn about the safety of our food supply based on the situations she describes, and what can be done to ensure proper food safety in the future? (This will be a two-part argumentative paper addressing causes and effects.)

Must be in MLA format

Must meet the minimum length requirement of 1,000 words

Must be a complete essay with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion

Must include a Works Cited page

Show evidence of organizing a college-level academic essay

Show evidence of presenting and supporting an argument

Show evidence of college-level composition skills

Show evidence of synthesizing sources, including quoting, paraphrasing, and citing according to MLA instructions

Show evidence of creating a properly formatted MLA Works Cited page

1st Source
Dueling Food Studies Confuse Consumers Robert Kiener

Butter is bad for you. Butter is good for you. Salt is harmful. Salt is healthy. Saturated fats are a no-no. Saturated fats are not so bad. It’s no wonder consumers are confused about nutrition and healthy eating.

A recent study showed that conflicting news stories about nutrition and health confound readers and make them likely to ignore the contradictory information as well as widely accepted nutritional advice, such as the importance of eating fruits and vegetables and exercising regularly, said the study’s author, Rebekah Nagler, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication in Minneapolis.

Analysts cite three causes for the problem: Reporters may be too quick to sensationalize a story, critics say, or simply get the facts wrong. Others say scientists might disagree about their conclusions, or vested interests on opposite sides of a debate may be skewing the results of studies without clearly revealing their conflicts of interest.

Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and a University of California professor of clinical pediatrics, criticizes the media. “Nutrition is a complex subject and requires knowledge and expertise that many journalists just don’t have,” he says. “We need more reporting based on solid science.”

Examples are not hard to find. A 2013 Australian study found that mice fed a high-fat diet and given a large dose of chlorogenic acid (a naturally occurring acid in coffee beans) and one of the primary plant compounds in coffee developed more fat than other mice. The mice, of course, had drunk no coffee, but the headlines said: “Drinking 5 cups of coffee will lead to obesity” and “Wrong amount of coffee could kill you.”

When The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a recent study examining the health effects of sodium, different publications emphasized different aspects of the findings. The Wall Street Journal headline stressed that using too little salt could be dangerous: “Low-salt diets may pose health risks, study finds.” Science Daily began its article on the same study with a different slant: “More than 1.6 million cardiovascular-related deaths per year can be attributed to sodium consumption above the World Health Organization’s recommendation of 2.0 g per day.”

The second problem involves conflicts of interest that plague many nutrition studies. “It’s important to find out if a person conducting a study was funded and who funded them,” says nutrition professor Marion Nestle of New York University. That’s the first thing she checks when evaluating a study, she says. (Many journals require authors to report any potential conflicts of interest when they publish their work.)

Even studies that appear to be “scientific” should be examined closely for bias, experts say. When researchers recently examined studies investigating a link between sugary sodas and obesity, they found that all the studies that had been supported by the beverage industry found no link. But 10 of the 12 studies with no conflict of interest found a link.

In a 2013 paper “Myths, Presumptions, and Facts About Obesity” in The New England Journal of Medicine, the authors claimed, among other things, that there is no proof that “snacking contributes to weight gain and obesity.” Some nutritionists who questioned the article’s findings noted that the authors had received funding, grants or support from scores of food and beverage companies, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Kraft Foods, General Mills, PepsiCo, Red Bull and the World Sugar Research Organization. Their conflict-of-interest disclosures took up nearly half a page in the journal.

Others, such as Jayson Lusk, a professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University and author of The Food Police, say the public is often misled by “fear mongering” activists who paint a bleak picture of the nation’s food quality. “The data just doesn’t support the belief that everything is terrible, and it’s the worst it’s ever been,” he says.

Adding to the confusion, the food and beverage industries fund numerous nonprofit organizations whose purpose is to rebut food activists’ claims. For example, the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom, financed by food companies and restaurants, regularly attacks activists whose views it disagrees with. The group calls Nestle a “food fascist” and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (a Washington-based research group that examines nutrition, health and food safety issues) “the joyless eating club.”

Like many nutrition experts, Nestle advises consumers to closely check the conflict of interest notes in each scientific study for potential conflicts and bias. Others recommend respected nutrition sites, such as the Harvard School of Public Health’s “The Nutrition Source.”

— Robert Kiener

Kiener, Robert. “Food Policy Debates.” CQ Researcher, 3 Oct. 2014, pp. 817-40, library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/ cqresrre2014100320.

2nd source
The New Face of Hunger By Tracie McMillan National Geographic online August 2014

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/

On a gold-gray morning in Mitchell County, Iowa, Christina Dreier sends her son, Keagan, to school without breakfast. He is three years old, barrel-chested, and stubborn, and usually refuses to eat the free meal he qualifies for at preschool. Faced with a dwindling pantry, Dreier has decided to try some tough love: If she sends Keagan to school hungry, maybe he’ll eat the free breakfast, which will leave more food at home for lunch.

Dreier knows her gambit might backfire, and it does. Keagan ignores the school breakfast on offer and is so hungry by lunchtime that Dreier picks through the dregs of her freezer in hopes of filling him and his little sister up. She shakes the last seven chicken nuggets onto a battered baking sheet, adds the remnants of a bag of Tater Tots and a couple of hot dogs from the fridge, and slides it all into the oven. She’s gone through most of the food she got last week from a local food pantry; her own lunch will be the bits of potato left on the kids’ plates. “I eat lunch if there’s enough,” she says. “But the kids are the most important. They have to eat first.”

The fear of being unable to feed her children hangs over Dreier’s days. She and her husband, Jim, pit one bill against the next—the phone against the rent against the heat against the gas—trying always to set aside money to make up for what they can’t get from the food pantry or with their food stamps, issued by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Congressional cuts to SNAP last fall of five billion dollars pared her benefits from $205 to $172 a month.

On this particular afternoon Dreier is worried about the family van, which is on the brink of repossession. She and Jim need to open a new bank account so they can make automatic payments instead of scrambling to pay in cash. But that will happen only if Jim finishes work early. It’s peak harvest time, and he often works until eight at night, applying pesticides on commercial farms for $14 an hour. Running the errand would mean forgoing overtime pay that could go for groceries.

It’s the same every month, Dreier says. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. “We have to eat, you know,” she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. “We can’t starve.”

Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “This is not your grandmother’s hunger,” says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “Today more working people and their families are hungry because wages have declined.”

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. In 1980 there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country; today there are 50,000. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20.

To witness hunger in America today is to enter a twilight zone where refrigerators are so frequently bare of all but mustard and ketchup that it provokes no remark, inspires no embarrassment. Here dinners are cooked using macaroni-and-cheese mixes and other processed ingredients from food pantries, and fresh fruits and vegetables are eaten only in the first days after the SNAP payment arrives. Here you’ll meet hungry farmhands and retired schoolteachers, hungry families who are in the U.S. without papers and hungry families whose histories stretch back to theMayflower. Here pocketing food from work and skipping meals to make food stretch are so common that such practices barely register as a way of coping with hunger and are simply a way of life.

It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.” For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side effect of hunger itself.

As the face of hunger has changed, so has its address. The town of Spring, Texas, is where ranchland meets Houston’s sprawl, a suburb of curving streets and shade trees and privacy fences. The suburbs are the home of the American dream, but they are also a place where poverty is on the rise. As urban housing has gotten more expensive, the working poor have been pushed out. Today hunger in the suburbs is growing faster than in cities, having more than doubled since 2007.

Yet in the suburbs America’s hungry don’t look the part either. They drive cars, which are a necessity, not a luxury, here. Cheap clothes and toys can be found at yard sales and thrift shops, making a middle-class appearance affordable. Consumer electronics can be bought on installment plans, so the hungry rarely lack phones or televisions. Of all the suburbs in the country, northwest Houston is one of the best places to see how people live on what might be called a minimum-wage diet: It has one of the highest percentages of households receiving SNAP assistance where at least one family member holds down a job. The Jefferson sisters, Meme and Kai, live here in a four-bedroom, two-car-garage, two-bath home with Kai’s boyfriend, Frank, and an extended family that includes their invalid mother, their five sons, a daughter-in-law, and five grandchildren. The house has a rickety desktop computer in the living room and a television in most rooms, but only two actual beds; nearly everyone sleeps on mattresses or piles of blankets spread out on the floor.

Though all three adults work full-time, their income is not enough to keep the family consistently fed without assistance. The root problem is the lack of jobs that pay wages a family can live on, so food assistance has become the government’s—and society’s—way to supplement low wages. The Jeffersons receive $125 in food stamps each month, and a charity brings in meals for their bedridden matriarch.

Like most of the new American hungry, the Jeffersons face not a total absence of food but the gnawing fear that the next meal can’t be counted on. When Meme shows me the family’s food supply, the refrigerator holds takeout boxes and beverages but little fresh food. Two cupboards are stocked with a smattering of canned beans and sauces. A pair of freezers in the garage each contain a single layer of food, enough to fill bellies for just a few days. Meme says she took the children aside a few months earlier to tell them they were eating too much and wasting food besides. “I told them if they keep wasting, we have to go live on the corner, beg for money, or something.”

Jacqueline Christian is another Houston mother who has a full-time job, drives a comfortable sedan, and wears flattering clothes. Her older son, 15-year-old Ja’Zarrian, sports bright orange Air Jordans. There’s little clue to the family’s hardship until you learn that their clothes come mostly from discount stores, that Ja’Zarrian mowed lawns for a summer to get the sneakers, that they’re living in a homeless shelter, and that despite receiving $325 in monthly food stamps, Christian worries about not having enough food “about half of the year.”

Christian works as a home health aide, earning $7.75 an hour at a job that requires her to crisscross Houston’s sprawl to see her clients. Her schedule, as much as her wages, influences what she eats. To save time she often relies on premade food from grocery stores. “You can’t go all the way home and cook,” she says.

On a day that includes running a dozen errands and charming her payday loan officer into giving her an extra day, Christian picks up Ja’Zarrian and her seven-year-old, Jerimiah, after school. As the sun drops in the sky, Jerimiah begins complaining that he’s hungry. The neon glow of a Hartz Chicken Buffet appears up the road, and he starts in: Can’t we just get some gizzards, please?

Christian pulls into the drive-through and orders a combo of fried gizzards and okra for $8.11. It takes three declined credit cards and an emergency loan from her mother, who lives nearby, before she can pay for it. When the food finally arrives, filling the car with the smell of hot grease, there’s a collective sense of relief. On the drive back to the shelter the boys eat until the gizzards are gone, and then drift off to sleep.

Christian says she knows she can’t afford to eat out and that fast food isn’t a healthy meal. But she’d felt too stressed—by time, by Jerimiah’s insistence, by how little money she has—not to give in. “Maybe I can’t justify that to someone who wasn’t here to see, you know?” she says. “But I couldn’t let them down and not get the food.”

Of course it is possible to eat well cheaply in America, but it takes resources and know-how that many low-income Americans don’t have. Kyera Reams of Osage, Iowa, puts an incredible amount of energy into feeding her family of six a healthy diet, with the help of staples from food banks and $650 in monthly SNAP benefits. A stay-at-home mom with a high school education, Reams has taught herself how to can fresh produce and forage for wild ginger and cranberries. When she learned that SNAP benefits could be used to buy vegetable plants, she dug two gardens in her yard. She has learned about wild mushrooms so she can safely pick ones that aren’t poisonous and has lobbied the local library to stock field guides to edible wild plants.

“We wouldn’t eat healthy at all if we lived off the food-bank food,” Reams says. Many foods commonly donated to—or bought by—food pantries are high in salt, sugar, and fat. She estimates her family could live for three months on the nutritious foods she’s saved up. The Reamses have food security, in other words, because Kyera makes procuring food her full-time job, along with caring for her husband, whose disability payments provide their only income.

But most of the working poor don’t have the time or know-how required to eat well on little. Often working multiple jobs and night shifts, they tend to eat on the run. Healthful food can be hard to find in so-called food deserts—communities with few or no full-service groceries. Jackie Christian didn’t resort to feeding her sons fried gizzards because it was affordable but because it was easy. Given the dramatic increase in cheap fast foods and processed foods, when the hungry have money to eat, they often go for what’s convenient, just as better-off families do.

It’s a cruel irony that people in rural Iowa can be malnourished amid forests of cornstalks running to the horizon. Iowa dirt is some of the richest in the nation, even bringing out the poet in agronomists, who describe it as “black gold.” In 2007 Iowa’s fields produced roughly one-sixth of all corn and soybeans grown in the U.S., churning out billions of bushels.

These are the very crops that end up on Christina Dreier’s kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweetened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. They’re also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In 2012 it spent roughly $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. The government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In 2011 it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure “specialty crops”—the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.

Those priorities are reflected at the grocery store, where the price of fresh food has risen steadily while the cost of sugary treats like soda has dropped. Since the early 1980s the real cost of fruits and vegetables has increased by 24 percent. Meanwhile the cost of nonalcoholic beverages—primarily sodas, most sweetened with corn syrup—has dropped by 27 percent.

“We’ve created a system that’s geared toward keeping overall food prices low but does little to support healthy, high-quality food,” says global food expert Raj Patel. “The problem can’t be fixed by merely telling people to eat their fruits and vegetables, because at heart this is a problem about wages, about poverty.”

When Christina Dreier’s cupboards start to get bare, she tries to persuade her kids to skip snack time. “But sometimes they eat saltine crackers, because we get that from the food bank,” she said, sighing. “It ain’t healthy for them, but I’m not going to tell them they can’t eat if they’re hungry.”

The Dreiers have not given up on trying to eat well. Like the Reamses, they’ve sown patches of vegetables and a stretch of sweet corn in the large green yard carved out of the cornfields behind their house. But when the garden is done for the year, Christina fights a battle every time she goes to the supermarket or the food bank. In both places healthy foods are nearly out of reach. When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples. “They love fruit,” she says with obvious pride. But most of her food dollars go to the meat, eggs, and milk that the food bank doesn’t provide; with noodles and sauce from the food pantry, a spaghetti dinner costs her only the $3.88 required to buy hamburger for the sauce.

What she has, Christina says, is a kitchen with nearly enough food most of the time. It’s just those dicey moments, after a new bill arrives or she needs gas to drive the kids to town, that make it hard. “We’re not starved around here,” she says one morning as she mixes up powdered milk for her daughter. “But some days, we do go a little hungry.”

3rd source
The US Food Safety Process Is Broken

Foodborne Outbreaks Edited by Amy Francis Greenhaven Press 2016 Opposing Viewpoints in Context

Jason M. Breslow is the digital editor for the PBS series Frontline.

There are too many gaps in the food safety oversight process because the task of keeping the US food supply safe is divided between too many agencies. Although forty-eight million people become ill from foodborne illnesses annually, food companies are left on their own to develop individual risk assessment plans to reduce food contamination. In most cases, these plans are woefully inadequate, and even those plants cited for safety violations can continue to operate with little consequence.

Each year in the United States, a staggering 48 million people become sick with a foodborne illness. Roughly 128,000 end up in the hospital, and 3,000 die. Many of those illnesses can be traced back to the meat we eat. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22 percent of food-related illnesses and 29 percent of deaths are attributable to meat and poultry.

On Tuesday [April 28, 2015], a new report from the Consumer Federation of America put a share of the blame on what it described as “ongoing challenges” with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s [USDA] primary food safety program.

A Failure to Develop Effective Food Safety Plans

In the U.S., meat and poultry that is sold to consumers comes with a USDA seal that reads, “inspected and passed.” But as the study points out, government inspectors are not inspecting every single piece of meat that winds up in the grocery store.

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has more than 7,000 inspectors in meat and poultry plants across the U.S., but through an inspection program known as the Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, or PR/HACCP, companies are asked to identify for themselves points along the production chain that might leave food open to contamination. The program was originally pioneered for the relatively small amounts of food that NASA astronauts would take with them to space; meat and poultry producers later adopted it on a mass scale.

[The] gap in federal standards … was on display in a nationwide outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella that sickened 634 people across 29 states—38 percent of whom were hospitalized.

The trouble, according to the report, “is that too often plants fail to adequately design their HACCP plans,” leaving the U.S. exposed to an estimated $7 billion per year in illness-related costs.

For example, the HACCP system until recently did not require plants to treat salmonella as a “hazard likely to occur” and does not currently designate specific strains of E. coli as a hazard. (E. coli 0157:H7, an illness-causing strain, does have to be accounted for.) And in cases when plants choose not to identify particular pathogens as a hazards, they are not obligated to address them.

This gap in federal standards, the report argues, was on display in a nationwide outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella that sickened 634 people across 29 states—38 percent of whom were hospitalized. The outbreak was eventually linked to the California-based poultry producer Foster Farms, which had not designated salmonella as a hazard that is reasonably likely to occur—even though an investigation by the FSIS later found that nearly a quarter of poultry samples tested positive for it.

HACCP plans are submitted to the FSIS for review, but the agency is not required to approve the plans, so plants are largely free to determine what is and is not a hazard. Nonetheless, the FSIS “has repeatedly refused to consider” recommendations to approve such plans, the study notes, “saying that approval of HACCP plans goes against the ‘philosophy of HACCP.'”

Another area of concern, according to the report, is that food-processing plants are frequently cited for recurring safety violations with little if any consequence. From 2008 to 2011, for example, the FSIS issued 44,128 noncompliance records to 616 plants participating in a swine inspection pilot program. However, only 28 plants were ever suspended, despite an inspector’s general report that found “some plants repeated violations as egregious as fecal matter on previously cleaned carcasses.” Moreover, the inspector general found that a fifth of noncompliance reports at the 20 most cited plants were for repeat violations.

“USDA needs to provide better assurance that plants are reducing contamination of meat and poultry products and that the agency is effectively enforcing its regulations,” said Chris Waldrop, the report’s author and director of the Consumer Federation’s Food Policy Institute. “Enforceable standards would allow the agency to take decisive action when a problem is first identified rather than after an outbreak has already occurred.”

In a statement to FRONTLINE, FSIS spokesman Adam Tarr said that the agency “is continually taking steps to improve the effectiveness of HACCP, including recently requiring all poultry slaughter plants to consider salmonella to be a hazard likely to occur in their HACCP plans.”

The risks in the inspection process are not going away, and regulators are unlikely to act more aggressively to close problematic plants. Strengthened efforts on the part of the agency, Tarr added, resulted in nearly 33,000 fewer cases of salmonella from USDA-regulated products in 2014, and approximately 41,000 fewer illnesses from three major pathogens—salmonella, E. Coli 0157:H7 and listeria monocytogenes—in products regulated by FSIS.

“Overall, Americans eat 285 billion servings of meat and poultry per year and 99.99 percent of them are consumed safely,” said Mark Dopp, senior vice president of regulatory affairs and general counsel for the North American Meat Institute, in a statement to FRONTLINE. The Consumer Federation report, he said, failed to highlight “many significant food safety improvements,” including “a 93 percent reduction of E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef since 2000, significant reductions in salmonella across a majority of meat and poultry products and a greater than 80 percent reduction in listeria monocytogenes in ready-eat-meat products.”

Nevertheless, lawmakers in Congress have introduced calls for more oversight of the nation’s food safety. One bill, introduced jointly from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-III.) would establish a single food safety agency to consolidate the oversight that is currently shared by 15 separate government offices, including the FSIS. But passage in the face of industry pushback and turf battles among sparring agencies is far from certain.

In the meantime, said Waldrop, the risks in the inspection process are not going away, and regulators are unlikely to act more aggressively to close problematic plants. “It takes a pretty substantial problem,” said Waldrop. “They can make those threats and the plants tend to respond but it’s never really a decisive action.”

Write a full-length, academic essay according to the instructions given

Use a variety of sources (provided) to support thesis

Write a Works Cited page using MLA format for page layout and entries

Read instructional materials and follow directions