Fast Food

Diana Guzman
EAP English
Mrs. Nelson, Per. 2
May 1, 2011
The Opportunity to Learn, Is food Dangers? Most parents shop and cook for their children .As children grow older, they gain more responsibility and parents relinquish some control. Some parents think that their children are old enough that they forget to teach their children the importance of eating healthy and cooking. Some say that they are too busy and work too much to teach their children how to cook. Tom Small states that parents work and are too busy to teach their children how to cook and shop for food. He suggests that middle and high schools should give required courses to learn the essential skills for maintaining health along with how to shop and cook. Students in high school and middle school should have the opportunity to learn how to cook and learn healthy skills in schools. However, these courses should not be mandatory but elective. Small 's generalize in his statement. He says "parents are too busy to teach their children" and "parents work, so they are no longer the ones responsible," he is assuming that all parents have a job and that they are all too busy. This might be true for some parents but not all. Some parents don’t have jobs, either because they can’t work or they are too lazy to work. In Small 's statement he also assumes that all children have parents and that is not entirely true. Some children are in foster homes and have grown up without parents. They have learned to take care of them self’s and didn’t have the chance to know how it feels for someone to take care of them. There should be courses in middle and high school for students who want to learn healthy skills and how to cook. It is important for student to learn the healthy echoes in this state and how they can prevent from having health problems like diabetes. Because most people don 't know if what they are eating is healthy, or not, there has been many problems. With the health classes children could understand the part we play in agricultural. "They think of themselves as consumers," Wendell Berry states in his essay The Pleasures of Eating. What we don 't understand is that we are passive consumers. When the children are taking this courses in middle and high school they should be shown how important it is to learn about the food they eat. Some parent themselves don 't know were the food they are feeding their children come from. They might know that it comes from a farm but "most of them do not know what farms, of what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge of skills are involved in farming" (Berry 1). The uninformative knowledge some parents have about food is the same that is passed down to their children. With these classes student that want to know about the health of food have the opportunity to. Although schools should offer course for students that want to learn how to be healthy and cook, parents shouldn 't be taken away the fool responsibility of teaching their child. Bringing these courses to the student might give some parents laziness. The school has a lot of responsibility for the student and has taken it away for the parents. Most student spend most of their time in school and one of the only responsibility that the parents have left is going to be taken over by these courses. This is one of the reasons why it should be offered as an optional class. Students that are healthy shouldn 't be penalized by giving them another requirement class for graduating. Although there is a few, there are children that have parents that have taught them how to eat and be healthy. Even though these children are healthy most still don 't know what really affect the food. They don 't know that corn is one of the unhealthiest products when it had been handled by science. Corn has become one of the biggest crops grown in the United States. It is important for student to know about corn because it is found in almost all the products and food we eat. They need to understand how corn has become harmful. Michael Pollan, in When a Crop Becomes King , states that "there 's also preliminary research suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is metabolized differently then other sugars, making it potentially more harmful" (Pollan 2). Even some of the healthy children don 't know what high-fructose corn syrup is and how it affects use. This is one of the concerns that should be talk about, not only to children but also adults. The food productions like meet industries have changed so much in so little time that is has been hard for people to be updated in what is happening with our food. Over the year it has become to so bad that we don 't care of where our food comes from and industries are making sure that we are blinded about it. Because of this it the health in the United States had dropped down tremendously. It is necessary for student from middle and high schools to have informative classes that give them a look behind the walls of the food production.

Works Cited
Pollan, Michael. "When a Crop Becomes King." The New Yorks times, 19 July 2002.
Berry, Wendell. "The Pleasure of Eating."

Cited: Pollan, Michael. "When a Crop Becomes King." The New Yorks times, 19 July 2002. Berry, Wendell. "The Pleasure of Eating."