Purpose:

The purpose of this assignment is for you to critically examine what food is, especially in today’s world, and how we make decisions about what we eat.

Skills and Knowledge:

Upon successful completion of this assignment, you will be able to:

Examine the background, marketing, and ingredients of a processed food item.

Evaluate the veracity and quality of a variety of resources.

Reflect upon what food is (and is not) and how you go about making your food choices.

Demonstrate professional critical thinking and writing.

Task:

For this assignment, you are asked to select a processed food item that has at least 5 ingredients. At least one of the ingredients must have been a living organism prior to processing and at least one other of the ingredients must be a food additive (a substance designed to protect or improve the flavor, texture, and/or appearance of the end product).

You need to conduct research on the product itself as well as the company that produces the product. You will then need to select two ingredients: one that was a living organism prior to processing and the other a food additive. You will then conduct research on the evolutionary history and current production of the living organism and about the development and use of the food additive.

For this research, you can use all available sources, including blogs and Wikipedia, but you need to try to verify the truthfulness of all the material that you present in this assignment (that is, if the information is available in just one place, are you sure it is true?). You do need to cite at least two academic sources (defined as peer-reviewed journal articles or books/book chapters published by an academic press (e.g. Oxford University Press). Note that many government documents, particularly government websites, are not considered academic sources. These citations should occur in Parts 1-3 of the template. Please refer to this Guide to Evaluating Resources from Cornell College for how to determine an academic (scholarly) source. You must cite all of your sources in the text and list the full citation information at the end of the template.

After researching and writing up your findings, you need to reflect upon the variety and types of sources that you used to complete this assignment. In order to conduct this evaluation, please refer to the Evaluation Criteria for Internet Resources chart in the Guide to Evaluating Resources from Cornell College.

Reflect upon how completing this assignment and your coursework thus far has helped you think of how we define food and how you make decisions about what you will eat. You need to cite at least one course source (reading, lecture, or video) in this reflection.

Use the required template to write up your research results and your reflection.