What You Eat Is Your Business Radley Balko Summary

Nutrition has become a popular debate within the last twenty years. Policy analyst Radley Balko explores how government intervention affects our diet. In Balko’s article “What You Eat Is Your Business”, Balko discusses why he dislikes the policies being passed that monitor the public's intake of unhealthy food. Balko chooses to pull attention away from the outcome these policies will have on health, and instead focus on the financial ramifications that follow major policy changes.
When writing this article, Balko targeted several audiences. The first and most significant group was those within the public who deem themselves healthy. Balko argues that it is unfair to make fit and healthy Americans pay for obese Americans to receive help. The other major target audience is Policymakers. Balko tries to challenge the perspective of Policymakers and get them to see nutrition from a
Balko’s article highlights a topic that still holds relevance today, however, the specifics of the article may no longer be applicable to current policy. People reading this article thirteen years on may use the article to reflect on past debates and opinions, but recognize the limited relevance factually.
In the fourth paragraph Balko writes “For decades now, America’s health care system has been migrating toward socialism”. The word “Socialism” can have a positive connotation to some and a negative connotation to others, but in the article Balko assumes the reader will read this word as negative. By doing this, Balko plays on the audience's emotions which allows him to replace evidence with opinion and still get a response from the reader. A second example of using emotion to reach the audience is when Balko uses “We’re” in paragraph five. “We’re” implies that the reader is included in Balko’s