Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me

Any person with a sensible ethos knows that with great power comes great responsibility. Similarly, the same must be said about a person’s freedom to choose what they eat. Overarchingly, that great power to choose one’s own food comes with health and bodily responsibilities. In his documentary, “Supersize Me,” director Morgan Spurlock uses his narrative of a month long, specialized diet in order to illustrate this point. To be specific, Spurlock is discussing the trending fast food diet in this nation, and the perilous effects it is having on the health of everyone in the nation. Predominantly speaking, Spurlock highlights that obesity, hypertension, and other health concerns are becoming common occurrences thanks to corporate marketing to

In general, children have always been understood to be the key to influencing the future. In spite of the fact that this is usually a positive thing, the food industry has taken this into dangerously, selfish territories; undoubtedly, this explains the continued upward trend in childhood obesity. In her own words, Dr. Margo Wootan, an expert in sociology, critiques how “by the time kids are able to speak, most of them can already say McDonald’s,” (Spurlock). In the course of an experiment by Spurlock, he interviewed children to find out if this was true. In the interview, children were presented with pictures of famous people and then fictional fast food spokespeople. Out of all the options, many children were quick to recognize almost all the fast food spokespeople. In addition, at the time that

Adjusted for inflation, that is the same as $2 billion in 2017.

In another in-film experiment, Spurlock scours each of the McDonald’s restaurants in New York City for the nutritional information about their food. In a stunning turn of events, 50% of those locations had a single wall poster with nutritional information, roughly 20% had pamphlets with nutritional information, and less than 10% had both. Even though these statistics are circumstantial, they nevertheless illustrate how vast consumer ignorance is and how little McDonald’s is concerned about it in their pursuit of business.

The lobby group Grocery Manufacturers of America is keeping a pressure on congress to keep legislation on favorable grounds for the products they are using. While lobby groups themselves are not inherently bad, in this case, it is likely preventing a serious government investigation into what the food industry could do better for the public. While there is nothing illegal about these actions, the health crisis that they are enabling as a reaction sure seems