Peer Response: Erik Houck's Blog

I did my last peer review on Erik’s post 5 on on making a meal and that being a cranberry walnut salad. Erik talks about how he knew that he wanted to make something that would be better than what he could get in the school cafeteria’s but he wanted it to be relatively cheap, easy to make, and easy to clean up. With this he and his friend came up the idea to make a cranberry walnut salad, which could be made easily and cleaned up easily.

He goes on to discuss Pollan’s claims about what people are choosing to eat more in this day and age. He talks about how most people choose to eat things because they have health claims and not choose to eat just a well rounded diet. He also talks about how one of Pollan’s major points in this section is that genetically altered foods are really bad for you. But, Erik found an article that showed that in some cases genetically altered foods, such as one that end up being reduced in calories or fat, could be better for you and can help reduce heart disease when these food are eaten rather than when in their original form.

I think that Erik’s post about making a meal was really well formulated and everything made sense. It was clear, concise, easy to understand, and easy to follow. I don’t see much that Erik needs to improve on because this post was organized and presented so well.

Post 3: "Real" Food vs. "Fake" Food

Something that I have eaten in both it’s real and “fake” form is pizza. The real pizza was made entirely from scratch and “fake” food was a store bought brand. When comparing the real and fake food the real version is much better. They look, taste, and smell different.

The store bought pizza looked like it was really processed and you could tell that it was not home made, and it didn’t smell that good either. But, the real version looked really fresh because it had vegetables on it, and the store bought pizza could not have fresh vegetables or ingredients in them. The real pizza smelled much better too. They also had very different tastes and just by taste alone it would be easy to tell the difference. The real pizza tastes much much fresher.

The fake version does not provide many nutrients for your body and is not really healthy at all to be eating. It claims that the cheese is fresh, but I don’t think that, that is really possible if the pizza had been processed. I started eating the “fake” version of pizza mainly because of convenience. To make a pizza from scratch is time consuming and much more expensive that it’s “fake” alternative. To make the fake version all you have to do is un-wrap it and put it in the oven.

I would really love to switch back to eating real homemade pizza but I don’t know when that could actually happen, because (especially in college) school work is extremely time consuming and would leave little time to make an entire pizza from scratch.

An article I found discusses all of the bad things that can happen through eating too many processed foods, both the ideas in this article and Pollan’s ideas align in the idea that they believe that fresh, un-processed foods are the best for you.

Peer Response: Danaan Mirr's Blog

I really enjoyed reading Danaan's post and analysis of a celebrity endorsement. In her analysis Danaan talked about Rap Snacks where are flavored chips and popcorn that are endorsed by different rap artists. The artists shown on the different bags are saying little slogans like, “Stay in School.”, or “Think Responsibly.” Danaan goes on to respond to this saying that because it seems like those celebrities are saying those things directly to the consumers they are more likely to actually listen to what the celebrity is saying and stay in school. I agree with Danaan when she says that because celebrities are saying these things that the consumer is more likely to do what the celebrity is telling them to do, which is a good thing and good marketing scheme because the marketers are tapping into the younger markets.

I really liked and agreed with Danann when she was talking about how this endorsement is actually likely and good promotion. The rappers and celebrities on the bags of chips probably actually could eat the chips, unlike when Olympic athletes endorse McDonald’s because they probably do not eat McDonald’s.

I really like the link that Danaan chose to use in her blog that goes to the article about the use of celebrity endorsement in marketing. This made it easy to understand where she was getting her ideas from and explained easily the principles behind the use of celebrity endorsements. I think that the celebrities who are endorsing Rap Snacks are doing a good thing because it is helping their careers by getting their names out to the public, but they are also using their celebrity to try to influence young people to do good things, such as stay in school and off drugs.