The Two Articles

“Research and Destroy”

“It is not so strange that a branch of graphic design has evolved that no longer hangs around waiting for an assignment, but instead takes action on its own accord.”

This statement really stood out to me while I was reading this article, because I feel like as students we very are dictated by assignments. While that does allow us to do some designing, are we really being as creative as we can potentially be? Probably not. I know for me personally I have felt this way throughout all of my art classes in college. The assignments always have a list of requirements, and a due date. Creativity is usually encouraged in these assignments, but I feel like it kind of holds me back. In this class I’ve been thinking a little differently; we can basically focus on whatever we want to as long as it involves food and system. And that in itself opens up the floor to a lot more possibilities, and although it is an assignment, I feel like I can actually do exactly what I want to with little limitation. Overall as designers, especially in college, we too often are restricted creatively and maybe we shouldn’t be hanging around for assignments. We should be designing just for the sheer fact of designing something, even if it’s stupid, at least you’ll know you are creating something without the restrictions of a class.

“Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Republic of Fat”

While I was reading this article again for the second time, all that kept going through my head was this documentary I watched very recently called Hungry For Change. In the documentary I’ve learned how reliant we are as a society for processed foods, and that our bodies aren’t meant to be eating food that isn’t natural. During the whole movie they talked about how our bodies only want to heal themselves, and when we’re putting toxins in our body on a daily basis it is hard for our bodies to keep up with that, and therefore we gain weight and become obese. There are things found in nature that have the ability to heal us from things like diabetes, and heart disease, and obesity, but we ignore it because there is so much food around us. What even more sad, is that even food we think is healthy for us probably isn’t. They went with this rule throughout the movie that anything that has an expiration date that is longer than a few weeks, probably isn’t good for you. One thing that really stood out in both the movie and the article can be summed up in this quote, “Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter-gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine.” Today our bodies are being tricked everyday to think that we need to feast for famine, so that’s why it’s so easy for us to pack on the pounds, and make it very difficult to lose them. If you look back to the days when we were hunter-gatherers, you can see that in terms of keeping our bodies healthy we’ve been declining more than ever before in history, and I think that’s really saying something about our modern day food system.