Attitudes to clean eating
Part 2 of your assignment asks you to write a short analytical essay about “Food As A Religio…
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Sender and receiver
The sender of the text is Adam Melonas, a chef and CEO and founder of Chew. Chew is a lab-company that tries to find ways to package food so that it remains nutritious and tasty. As a chef and member of the food industry, Adam Melonas has credibility as a sender who talks about food.
The receiver of the text is the audience at the Ted Talk but also viewers on YouTube who have access to the video and understand English. Because the topic of the talk is food, everyone in the world is a potential receiver. However, the references to diets and expensive foodstuffs suggest that the receivers are intended to be those living in first-world countries, where people can afford to be picky about what they eat.
The talk also targets specific consumer groups—those concerned with what they eat—including those who follow a specific dietary regime: “How many people are or were vegetarian? Paleo? Gluten-free? Raw? Veggie Quarian, whatever that means? And my own personal favorite as a chef, vegans.” (ll. 31-32)
The sender’s intention
The sender’s intention is to make people aware of the differences between healthy food and junk food, and of how they are being tricked by marketing strategies, which turn food into a religion. The sender is also trying to make his audience understand that food’s purpose is to nourish:
“I’m here to tell you it’s not some magical form of junk. Junk is junk. Food is food. It makes it even more simple…
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Attitudes to clean eating
When it comes to the key point of your essay, the attitude to clean eating presented in “Food As A Religion”, you should first note that the sender never directly mentions the concept of clean eating (which refers to eating minimally processed foods).
However, his overall argumentation suggests that he supports the idea of eating healthy, unprocessed foods. This is first suggested by him describing the pleasure of eating an apple: “You could say the moment you bite into an amazing apple it’s an explosion of texture and flavor” (ll. 4-5)
As his speech progresses, we see that the sender is against giving children processed food, and suggests potato chips are junk food no matter how organic they are: “She pulled out Cheetos and a bottle of soda (...) Now, although I would never feed this or dream to feed this to my own children…” (ll. 23-26);
Or, look, the potatoes they come from a small town outside of Kansas and the sea salt is harvested by hand by virgins in the Greek islands. And the olive oil is squeezed…
