Summary: Mindless Eating

*This reading is not due until after the spring break, but since it’s relevant to the food lab, I will put the summary on the blog early partly for reference of others and myself.

In this essay, the author mainly talks about the “mindless eating”, its effects in our everyday life, and its potential application in helping people to lose weight. In the first part of the essay, the author argues that mindless eating is universal in our everyday life. One example is that we eat large amount of pop corns in movie theaters even though the pop corns used in the experiments had very low quality. Another example is that when the same wine is labeled differently, people perceive it differently, and they eat less food when they perceive they are given the wine with worse quality. Such discussion leads to the conclusion that mindless eating is universal in our everyday life, and “we overeat because there are signals and cues around us that tell us to eat [rather than because we feel we are full]” (Wansink 15). This conclusion then leads to the second part of the essay which discusses the issue of losing weight. The author argues that many dieters who put conscious effort into losing weight fail because “1) our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against them; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them” (Wansink 25). In contrast, the author suggests that an unconscious way of losing weight is more effective. Just as people mindlessly gain weight by small amounts every day, they can do the same with losing weight. If they try to consume 100 calories rather than 1000 calories less every day, neither their body nor their brain would fight against their efforts, and they are more likely to succeed this way.

Questions to consider:
Since we read this essay before we participate in the lab, we are consciously aware of the mindlessness of eating. With such consciousness, would our lab results be biased?

Summary: Eating American

In this paper, the author discusses the typical American “cuisine”. The author first asserts that an American cuisine does not really exist. He then explains it in a historical approach: over the history since the US was founded, large amounts of immigrants came to the US, and the national population now consists people with a large variety of ethnic background. Such a variety of population resulted in a variety of regional cuisine, which reflects the different ethnic groups’ own traditional cuisine. Such regional cuisines are further combined in a way that reflects a universal theme in American eating habit: efficient, which means saving time. Therefore, the American cuisine is based on fast food, and a predominant way of eating is eating out, since it saves the time for cooking. The author thus argues that “I do not see how a cuisine can exist unless there is a community of people who eat it, cook it, have opinions about it, and engage in dialogue involving those opinions” (Mintz 29). Since the typical American eating is characterized by regionalization, fast food, and eating out, and more import, Americans do not take eating as important an event as people from other countries do, the author concludes that Americans do not have a cuisine.

Comments: I have a deep feeling about the point in the reading that the “regionalized cuisine”, when combined with the American fast food culture, changes dramatically and deviates largely from the original version. This is at least the case with American Chinese food. I can see some shadows of the real Chinese food in it, but they are mostly cooked in a way that is more time-efficient for both cookers and eaters such that I always miss the real Chinese food even though I can go to the Chinese restaurants here everyday.