Film Analysis: A Place At The Table

Based off Charles Webb’s 1963 novel by the same name, The Graduate is an American romantic comedy/drama released in the United States on December 21, 1967 starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross, and William Daniels. The film was directed by Mike Nichols, produced by Lawrence Turman and the screenplay written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham. The film was produced by Lawrence Turman/Mike Nichols productions starting in March of 1967. Mike Nichols has also directed other well known films such as Catch-22 (1970), Working Girl (1988), and more recently Closer (2004). The film was distributed by AVCO Embassy Pictures nationally and United Artists internationally. AVCO Embassy Pictures studio, founded by Joseph E. Levine, the films executive producer, also claims production/distribution for other hit films such as Godzilla, King of Monsters! (1956), The Fog (1980), and Prom Night (1980). The movie was well received due to its $104 million dollar box office opening tab. The score was produced by Dave Grusin and the songs written by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.

Americans today are no strangers to stretching every dollar earned in an attempt to live the American dream. Most people work long hours and eat on the fly with very little thought to what, or where, the food they have purchased came from. The reason food is so inexpensive has not been a concern to the average American, but the article written by Michael Pollan “The Food Movement Rising” attempts to convince the people that it is time to remove the blinders and take an accounting of the situation that America finds itself in. With obesity at epic proportions, and preventable diseases like

In Lisa Miller’s essay “Divided We eat,” she describes her usual morning breakfast that consists of fancy foods and claims that she is a food snob. She then goes into detail about what her neighbor's routine is like, and what Alexandra Ferguson’s morning routine is like. Food is typically a big issue for these families and the parents will usually spend hours thinking about how they will feed their families. Miller and Ferguson later discuss that some children don’t get enough eat, and some of these children are within five miles of them. Miller then tells us that seventeen percent of Americans are food insecure. The income gap has increased and now more Americans are becoming obese because of this.

The first two articles discuss the hunger-obesity paradox by using statistics, which quantifies the severity of increasing obesity rates. By doing so, the authors of the first articles identify the problem and conclude that the ineffectiveness of federal food assistance and overpriced foods lead to hunger, in which people then rely on cheaper and easier to access, calorie dense foods, and ultimately results in the increase of obesity rates among low-income populations. Since the first two articles only merely hint at the social justice issues of this academic discourse, the authors of the remaining three articles provide an in-depth discussion on the social injustices behind food deserts and re-introduce the necessary emotion and passion that hopefully moves readers to not let it become stagnant. In fact, their use of pathos intensifies the academic conversation by driving readers to understand the existing implications of the prevailing issue and of the possible implications if allowed to continue. In general, the different perspectives and contributions from all the authors, in regards to the hunger-obesity paradox, gives a small insight into the larger, more complex issue and how a comprehensive discourse is critical when attempting to arise to

Food, Inc. is a documentary film made by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser. In this documentary they took a look at the practices of food production in the United States. There are several things that I learned from this documentary that was horrifying to me. For this paper I will focus on the following three topics covered in the documentary: fast food to all food, the dollar menu, and hidden costs.

The basic survival needs of human beings include a small list of four things: food, water, clothing, and shelter. After watching an interview with Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc., I began to realize that the food humans are eating is actually decreasing are survivability. Within the excerpts from the movie and the dialogue amongst the interviewers, it was made apparent that the food industry has been able to completely deceive the consumers. Instead of choosing food for quality, individuals choose food by lowest price. As Kenner said in the video, “we have skewed our food system to the bad calories” (2:38). Instead of healthy home cooked meals, families are purchasing fast food for its convenience and low cost. However, the video made a very interesting stance in regards to this mentality. Although individuals are paying the lowest price for food in history, the cost of treating diseases caused by unhealthy eating has grown to be higher than ever before (8:04).

In Janet Poppendieck's “Want Amid Plenty: From Hunger To Inequality” she argues that America puts excessive focus upon hunger issues among the poor when there are many other important issues that go unnoticed. Poppendieck believes that it is time to find a way to shift the discourse from undernutrition to unfairness, from hunger to inequality. In today's society, there are many food banks, food drives, soup kitchens, etc. Food is extremely abundant in America, therefore Poppendieck's statement is proven true when she states that there is too much focus on hunger. Throughout this text, she strongly supports her claims about hunger, equality, and poverty in general.

When asked about the hunger problems in America one would imagine a homeless person asking and begging for food in the streets. However, what we fail to understand is that hunger is closer to us than what we think. A fellow co-worker or perhaps even the next door neighbor may be an example of someone who suffers from food insecurity. Food insecurity is when a person does not know when or where the next meal will come from. Food insecurity is most likely to develop in food deserts, a place where there is little to no fruits, vegetables and whole healthy foods. The documentary, A Place At The Table, is attempting to shed light on the argument that many Americans suffer from food insecurity because of low income and as result those individuals face various complications.

In the article “The Insanity of Our Food Policy” (2013), the author Joseph claims that the food policy of U.S. has long been with illogic, because of Congress attempts to pass a long-stalled extension of the farm bill, would cut back the pitiful support from U.S. citizens who in the lowest level of the people and use this money to continue subsidize a small number of wealthy American farmers. Furthermore, Joseph states that small numbers of Americans have grown extremely wealthy, and they get disproportionate size political power. In addition, the author points out American farmers are the most efficient in the world, but there are still millions of Americans suffer from hunger. At the end of the article, Joseph emphasizes Republicans’ food

For centuries, the United States has been seen as a food and food-product paradise; with a constant bombardment of daily specials, “two-for-one” deals, and never ending combo options oozing from every corner of the food-scape. For many Americans, over indulgence is a frequent occurrence-studies show more than 50% of adults say they eat out at least once a week (“58% Eat at A Restaurant”, 2013). Even in this scene of gluttony, the poverty stricken and systematically oppressed find themselves in food deserts across The States; that’s more than 45 million Americans without access to healthy, reasonably priced foodstuffs. Of this group of 45 million, the African American community holds the seat for the highest poverty rate among various racial and ethnic groups at an astounding 26.2% in 2014 (DeNavas-Walt, 2015).

Film- Precious Knowledge Precious Knowledge is a documentary that takes place in Tucson, Arizona and focuses on how the Unified School district wants to completely ban the Mexican American Studies Program. In the film there were many scenes with examples of rhetorical appeal. I believe that the way the film was set up since the beginning had an impactful and direct emotional appeal on the audience. For instance, in the first scenes of the film we have the opportunity to get to know the main characters in a more intimate level.

“A Place At The Table” Response The movie “A Place At The Table” was a very impactful movie and changed the way I viewed the hunger crisis that has infected the United States. This movie showed multiple different perspectives and the effects it not only has on the families affected but on the country as a whole. While watching this movie, I began to think about many different things.

We know today that what we eat has a huge impact on our health. In the film we learned that obesity has its roots in another battle, poverty. People were so used to eating whatever they could get their hands on. They were not used to having to think about what went inside of them. When food became more plentiful the mindset was still to eat as much as

Christina deeply cares for kids, to the point where she will only eat if there is enough food for her to consume. Christina says, “I eat lunch if there’s enough, but the kids are the most important. They have to eat first” (The New Face of Hunger). To go deeper into this family’s life, Jim, the husband of Christina, often works until eight at night, applying pesticides on commercial farms for $14 an hour. To continue, after reading simply the first part of this article, it is clear that both Christina and Jim want only the best for their kids. What one does not know, unless one has watched the video provided by “The New Face of Hunger”, is that the Dreier family, particularly Christina, are a bit over weight. Now, I asked myself, if one is low on food, how is one overweight? To follow up, this is where the “healthy resources” stated in the introduction come in to play. For many, “the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side effect of hunger itself” (The New Face of Hunger). In other words, due to the fact that the food supply is severely limited to Americans, the healthy food supply is even more minuscule, making the limited (unhealthy) food cause long term damage to the

(White, pg.3) The calorie-rich fast food is cheaper than a lot of the supermarket food especially to the lower classes which would come to rely on the availability of these fast food chains for cheap and efficient calorie rich food to feed themselves sacrificing their health to just be able to eat overall. With this in mind, this shows that the lower class people are often trapped in an environment which forces them to eat unhealthy due to the cost of nutrient-rich foods and due to the placement of chain supermarkets as compared to the placement of convenience stores and fast food chains in their respective environments. Not only are these lower class stuck when it comes to income, they are stuck with the only things available and that is fast food and convenience stores which rarely have vegetables and