The Blame Game

Everyday, one in four Americans visits a fast food restaurant. Spurlock however, manages to eat enough food for three out of four those people in a month. He films the documentary of his binge, and names it Super Size Me. He makes a plan to eat only McDonald’s for a month to see how it will affect his health. Spurlock’s thirty-day binge to prove that McDonald’s is the source of America’s bad health is invalid, because he isn’t an average America.

In 2004, Spurlock films a documentary about the dangers of fast food with hopes of helping two girls prove a point to the courts that McDonald’s made them fat. He films majority of the documentary in New York, he eats McDonald’s three times a day for a whole month, which gains the name “McDiet”. With the McDiet, comes five rules that bring Spurlock to doing things that the “average” American does daily. He also has a set of rules that he has to live by for that month. He has to eat three meals a day, he only is only able to consume items from McDonald’s, he has to supersize his meals when asked, eat every item off the menu at least once, last but not least, he can only take 5000 steps a day. To him, the McDiet is the ultimate defense for the girls and his theories.

As they walk down the street, Mark Fenton says to Spurlock, “The average American only takes about 2000 - 3000 steps a day; if you want to feel like an average American limit yourself to about 5000 a day” (Super Size Me). In order to emulate the ordinary American, Spurlock constrains himself to walking only 5000 steps a day. Before this decision however, he is anything but the everyday American. He lives in New York, and average New Yorkers are accustomed to walking four to five miles a day. Nearly 210 million Ameri...

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...s unreasonable for him to place all of the blame on McDonald’s. It’s the consumer’s choice to pick where they eat, and Spurlock takes his personal choice away. If his methods are accurate, he attempts to show that people don’t have a choice in what they eat. There certainly are Americans that agree with Spurlock’s theory, and believe fast food is bad for everyone’s health, but they simply choose not to eat it. Spurlock’s method to justify his theory isn’t reasonable enough to prove to the judge that McDonald’s is the source of America’s bad health, and the two girls lose the case. Luckily for American’s and their health, still only one out of four people eats fast food a day.

Works Cited

Supersize Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Perf. Morgan Spurlock. Roadside Attractions, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Showtime Independent Films, 2004. Web