Exploring Your Refrigerator: The Truth Behind What You Eat

By Arielle Silvan                 

Exploring Your Refrigerator: The Truth Behind What You Eat

Have you ever wanted to know the secrets behind what you eat? Why those fries taste so good? How that burger was made? Or the secret ingredient behind what makes your snacks and drinks pink?  Chew On This by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson teaches you everything you want and don’t want to know about fast food. This book teaches you about the social, historic, business, health and ethics behind your fast food meals. After reading this book I guarantee you won't look at fast food the same way.

The book was divided up into many different parts: the history and inventors of fast food, the employees jobs and safety, the health issues, the factories, the labs and more. At the end of the book there were resources and ways to take action. This book was educational and interesting. Chew On This dives right into the world of fast food and makes you question what you are eating. I learned a lot and couldn't put the book down! I was very surprised by the things I learned and found out. For example, did you know Americans now spend more money on fast food than movies, books, magazines, newspapers and recorded music combined! Or that some schools encourage the unhealthy eating of fast food. In fact, one out of every five public schools in the United States now serves brand name fast food. I was somewhat disgusted, but then inspired to make a change after reading this book.

Chew On This was similar to another book I previously read, The Omnivores Dilemma. Both books were about the same thing: food science.  The Omnivores Dilemma was more about an individual person's story where it was all tied together, while in Chew On This each chapter was about something different. The message in Chew On This wasn't that all fast food is bad! The author isn't a vegetarian, the book mentions responsible fast food restaurants and no ideas were pushed on you. Although I think that the writer's message in Chew On This was to educate and inform, the writers did it in a very interesting and fun way!  

Links:

Let's Move (First Lady Michelle Obama's fight to set children on a path to a healthy future)

Finding Sustainable Food Near You

                                                          Cover of Book (Chew on This)

Factory Farming Described in Chew on This

The Book of Blood Summary

The book that I choose to read for science was called the book of blood by H P new quest. The book, as its title may tell, is about blood, it's functions, previous conceptions and misconceptions about blood, and the myths associated with blood. From reading this book, I learned a lot of things that I didn't know about before concerning blood, like the fact that the human circulatory system can stretch around the world about two and a half times. Or the fact that blood letting was a pretty common practice in the days before blood and its functions were actually well known. Actually, the book talks a lot about blood letting, and how people used to think that it was a solution for everything, until it killed George Washington. President Washington caught an extremely bad cold, and some doctors tried to practice bloodletting on him, and it eventually killed him. After that, people did not trust the practice of bloodletting and they used other practices to cure their ailments. Aside from the pure factual elements of the book, H P Newquest also explores the myths associated with blood. For example, during the Black Death of the Middle Ages, when basically one-third of Europe died from the bubonic plague. The plague was so contagious that there were mass graves dug because no one could keep up with the burying of the bodies. 

 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Blackdeath2.gif

 Bodies were just thrown into the graves; they were opened and reopened. And when a grave digger would come back to add a new body to the pile, the bandages that the cadaver would be wrapped in would be covered in blood at the mouth because of the swelling of  the bodies, and the grave diggers would think that the bodies were actually vampires that rose out of their graves to drink blood at night. The book describes how this might be the origination of myths about vampires came to be.  The Book of Blood also describes animals that drink blood, and animals, like horseshoe crabs, which have blood that is useful to us. It was a very good book, which was both informative and fun at the same time. I would give this book 5 stars if I had to!