Commander in Chief

The other day we had a Socratic seminar on a paper, written by Michael Pollen, called Farmer in Chief. It was a letter to the president, or at the time, to the President-Elect. The main focus of the article was to address how the government needs to focus on getting food in America under control. It touches in on a lot of different issues from how easy it would be to attack the American people trough the mass production of all staple foods and how the way we farm and produce food is slowly killing the environment. It also gives suggestions on ways to fix the problem by using the sun to grow our plants rather than chemical fertilizers and to create more farms and then keep the produce closer to where it was grown.
During the Socratic seminar we focused a lot on junk food and how it negatively affects the people in America. We talked a lot about how junk food will cause a lot of health issues for younger kids like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. For the most part the class threw out ideas on how to help prevent these problems and get junk food regulated. The first idea thrown out was to ban junk food all together, which sparked somewhat of a controversy in the class. it came down to how the government would have to specify what junk food is, so they could ban it, and in doing that most food in America would become banned. We also decided that if we banned junk food the world economy would fail because it rakes in so much money for many different countries.
All in all, the Socratic seminar stayed on the subject of junk food and all of the health problems it brings. The main discussion focused more on why junk food is bad and why we should get rid of it rather than fixing the food system in America.