Pieces from Jan24 revisions to Philosophy of Food

SW3: Neuro-gastronomy and Dietary Change

• Stage 1: Please write an 800 hundred word maximum answer to the following question by Wednesday, March 22st, 2023, 11:59pm.

• Topic: In this essay, imagine that you are giving advice to a friend who is trying to move to a healthier, plant-based diet. Assume that your friend's diet is unhealthy in the typical ways true of Americans. Your friend expresses great frustration in trying to change their diet. In light of this unit, what would you explain to them about how we are attached to our diets? What advice would you have for them about how to be more successful in changing their diet?

• Advice about collaboration: Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes, verbally. Collaboration is also a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs in the class. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way. You will lose points if you do not follow these instructions:

1. To assure anonymity, you must remove your name from the the "author name" that you may have provided when you set up your word processing application. For instructions on removing your name from an Word or Google document, [click here].
2. Format your answer in double spaced text, in a typical 12 point font, and using normal margins. Do not add spaces between paragraphs and indent the first line of each paragraph.
3. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student ID number in the file, but not in the filename. Save your file for this assignment with the name: Gastronomy.
4. To turn in your assignment, log into courses.alfino.org, click on the Gastronomy dropbox.
5. If you cannot meet a deadline, you must email me about your circumstances (unless you are having an emergency) before the deadline or you will lose points.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Wednesday, March 29, 2023 11:59pm.

• To determine the papers you need to peer review, open the file called "#Key.xls" in the shared folder. You will see a worksheet with saint names in alphabetically order, along with animal names. Find your saint name and review the next four (4) animals' work below your animal name. If you get to the bottom of the list before reaching 4 animals, go to the top of the list and continue.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. Submit the form once for each review.

• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go back to the key and review the next animal's paper, continuing until you get four reviews. Do not review more than four papers.

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, most of my scores probably be within 1-2 points of the peer scores, plus or minus.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [1]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. You must do the back evaluation to receive credit for the whole assignment. Failing to give back-evaluations unfairly affects other classmates.

• Back evaluations are due Saturday, April 15, 11:59pm.

Ogle, Maureen, In Meat We Trust, C2, "We Are Here To Make Money"

• Tells the story of the rise of the "dressed beef" supply chain, and the fortunes of Swift, an innovator.

• Opens with Summer 1882 building of Swift's warehouse at the tip of Manhattan. Backs up to tell the story of the rail monopolies practices of overcharging for shipping costs of live beef. (29) details.

• Bringing animals into the city live was becoming impractical, a health hazard, and unsightly (also happenening in Europe, French in the lead in developing the modern abattoir). Note: old slaughterhouses could handle from 1-12 animals a day. But there were hundreds of them in a city like NY.

• Boards of Health moving against small butchers. Early modern abattoir: Communipaw. Communipaw abattoir [2]. Could handle 2,000 animals a day.

• Courts battles as butchers argued that regulation of their busines was unconstitutional. The "Slaughterhouse Cases" at the Supreme Court.

• Another version of this fight in the Vanderbilt’s proposal to build a big slaughterhouse in central Manhattan. NIMBY issue with local residents. Vanderbilt gets his stockyard and abattoir at West 59th Street, NYC.

• Live shipped animal also suffered in transit, meat damaged, lost 200 pounds.

• 34-35: initial account of slaughter process. We’ll see more of this in ethics unit.

• 36: Legal fights over forced closure of private slaughterhouses. Supreme Court “slaughterhouse cases” affirmed authority of municipalities to regulate slaughter and create municipal slaughterhouses.

• 40: Before Swift, other entrepreneurs tried shipping dressed beef. Hammond. Refrigertor cars (with ice, not compressors) in use and developing.

• Swift's success: read at 41. (get images of Chicago stockyards). Era of "cheap beef"

• Stop here for today. Part two of this reading for Wednesday, March 29

• 46: Philip Armour story -- not a meat guy, but understood how to corner the market with futures contracts. Went to Chicago to build a pork processing plant. Enters the New York market along with Swift.

• 50: Interesting point about meat culture and American culture: read. Choice meats available to all classes.

• Meat Ideology -- 19th/early 20th century idea that meat protein is special and accounts for European hegemony. (add notes: Japan responds by developing "Kobe" meat culture.)

• Meat Bubble - profits of 33%, era of free range livestock production with very low costs, ending. 1870: one steer per 5 acres, 1880: one steer per 50-90 acres, due to overgrazing. 52. Bubble bursts.

• Margins on dressed beef were actually very low. Demanded high volume to be profitable. Byproducts were important.

• Beef Trust -- already a focus on the Railroad Trusts, Congress investigates collusion in pricing. 57ff. 1888.

• 1890: Sherman Antitrust Act.

Kessler, The End of Overeating, Chs 1-7 pp. 3-45

[Kessler's basic argument:

• Explaining overweight and obesity:

• Highly palatable foods (high in SFS, little chewing, slurpable...) can overwhelm our homeostatic system, which would otherwise maintain consumption levels that sustain normal weight.
• This leads to overconsumption.
• The Food industry understands this and uses food science to created and market highly palatable foods.
• C: This provides a good explanation for overweight and obesity in the US.

]

• Some comments about approaching "unhealthy eating patterns" (expand list), some baseline data, and Kessler's basic theory.

C1

• obesity trend of the 1980s. by late 80s 1/3 of pop bt. 20 and 74 overweight. (2017: 42.4% obese (note: not just overweight). J

• Historic comparisons: 1960-2000, average weight of women in their 20s goes from 128 to 157. Also other deciles. Data also revealed that some people were gaining a lot more than the average. In other words, the distribution was changing. Overweight people became disproportionately overweight. More outliers.

C2

• obesity is the result of eating too much food. Confusing to separate metabolism, etc. People underreport consumption. Studies to support claims. P.8 [Note some criticisms here: microbiome effects. Others argue that metabolic changes do occur to make significant weight reduction difficult.]

• Homeostasis: tendency of body systems to maintain bodily states within a particular range of variation. Communication occurs throughout the body to this end. But homeostasis can’t explain weight gain. Homeostasic system can be overwhelmed by the “reward system”. Anticipations of reward motivate exertion.

• Some animal studies show direct stimulation of reward seeking behavior. Stimulate the far-lateral hypothalamus” and animals overeat. Even to cross electrified floor. [Note basic explanation here.]

• Can some kinds of food stimulate us to keep eating?

C3

• Palatability - def. a food with an agreeable taste, but in food science - a food that motivates more consumption.

• Palatable foods engage sugar, salt, and fat, but also sensory cues. Research (13) on combined effects of sugar and fat (Drewnowski). Underlies many palatable features of food. Combinations of fat and sugar chosen over other mixes. Can make food hyperpalatable. Example of "hyper-palatability" in industry and as a research concept in food science.

• 15: Research (rat study) showing that consumption of SFS optimized foods increases further consumption. Both obesity prone and obesity resistant rats over ate high SF foods.

• Sclafani research. Neat fruit-loop lab detail. Just chillin' with his rats.: feeding rats a supermarket sample of palatable food makes them obese.

• Some palatability research not in the reading:

• Can the Palatability of Healthy, Satiety-Promoting Foods Increase with Repeated Exposure during Weight Loss?

C4

• Food industry experts corroborate Kessler’s point about SFS foods and overeating. It’s their strategy.

• ”Layering” SFS: examples of foods that layer S F and S. (Gordy's lemon chicken, much like p. 20 "Chicken Pot Stickers"). List: White Chocolate Mocha Frapp, Bloomin’ Onions, Salads with high SFS dressings (“fat with a little lettuce”). [Remember, restaurants don’t have to provide nutritional information.]

C5

• Critical of “set point theory” more interested in version he calls “settling point” theory. A kind of equilibrium between appetite (which both a drive to eat and capacity to be satisfied and expenditure - physical work and body that burns calories effectively. Constant access to highly palatable foods drives up settling point. (Kind of acknowledges that there is wide variation in the hold (capture) of high SFS foods.

• p. 25: Discussion with other people who find weight control challenging. note descriptions. Sight of favorite SFS foods causes salivation and tingling sensations. Important qualification: Food cravings are not unique to overweight people.

C6

• More theory: Reinforcing foods

• Rewarding foods are reinforcing. Reinforcing measured by willingness to work for substance and whether other stimuli can become associated with it. (Shepard’s account helps show how this works.)

• SFS Foods can be an effective reward even in the absence of hunger. Animal studies to show this. Research: rats will press levers to get SFS foods. A lot. P. 30. Confirms the idea that combinations of fat and sugar increase willingness to work for reward. Approaches reward structure of cocaine.

• “Conditioned place paradigm”. — tendency to prefer the location in which a reward was experienced. Party food at sport viewing events, for example. Rat study involving more and less preferred spaces. High SFS foods can override location preference.

• Other influences: portion, concentration of rewarding ingredients, variety.

C7

• Neural account of high SFS / palatable foods. Neuron encodes when it fires more often from a stimuli. Complex patterns can be encoded from food experience.

• Taste is predominant. “Orosensory self-stimulation”. Opioid circuitry stimulated by food. P. 37: mechanisms of the reward system. Imp of nucleus accumbens - a neural structure that governs reward.

• Claims there is a mutually reinforcing effect between highly palatable foods and opioid circuits. Explains how emotional eating can reduce the pain associated with stress and depression.

• Some evidence (Wooley p. 38) that highly palatable foods interfere with or override taste specific satiety tendency to get sated by a single taste. SFS combinations can override taste specific satiety. Stimulation of the opioid circuits in animals overrode boredom with single taste.