Supersize Me

Brianne Beets
PE 100
10 am
"Supersize Me" extra credit

After watching the documentary "Supersize Me", by Morgan Spurlock, I learned a multitude of new
facts about how McDonald's and fast food in general are an enormous contributing factor to obesity in America.
In the film, creator Spurlock sets out to do an experiment on himself by consuming a McDonald's only diet for
thirty days. Along with this experiment, Spurlock also made rules that included he had to eat three square meals
a day, every thing he bought that was eatable had to be from McDonald's, including water, if the cashiers at
McDonald's asked him if he wanted to "Supersize" anything, he had to comply, and lastly Spurlock cut down his
otal daily walking steps to less than three-thousand steps per day.

As I watched Spurlock suffer through those thirty grueling days of eating nothing but McDonald's, at the end of
the experiment Spurlock ended up with a plethora of health abnormalities. Not only had his weight skyrocketed
from 185 pounds to approximately 206 pounds, but his cholesterol count went up about 80 points, he felt tired
and depressed when he wasn't eating, which meant that he had developed an addiction to McDonald's food, his
sex drive decreased, and he found himself experiencing chest pains and headaches frequently. Although Spurlock only continued this diet for thirty days, during the end of the film he concluded that although his diet was a bit extreme, there were many people out there who actually do eat McDonald's every day indefinitely!

After watching "Supersize Me" my already extreme disdain for fast food increased tenfold. This is an incredibly
nfluential and insightful documentary, and I believe that is should be viewed by as many people as possible.

"I, Too, Sing America"

When I try to read between the lines of Langston Hughes's, "I, Too, Sing America", I look for a double meaning in the words. The first word that I attempted to dissect occurs in the second line, where it reads, "I am the darker brother."
After I read the line the first time, I originally thought that darker literally meant dark, as in the color of the narrator's skin. But after thinking about the meaning a bit more deeply, I concluded that darker could also signify in this poem as perhaps being darker in spirit, emotions, or personality. Also when I think of the darker brother it brings to mind the good and the evil twin.
As in the good twin is shown to the world (the world symbolizing the "company" in the poem) while the evil twin is supposed to be concealed, meaning in the line, "They send me to eat in the kitchen." Although while the story of the good and evil twin is supposed to be two different people, the light and dark side of the poem represent two different sides of the same person.
In the second stanza where it reads, "Tomorrow, I'll be at the table when company comes"; sitting at the table represents not being shunned into the back where nobody can see the narrator, because the table is a symbol of finally being recognized by society.
Although the light and dark sides of the narrator are at first perceived to be an actual person, the very last line of the poem reads, "I, too, am America", meaning that the narrator does not actually represent a person at all, but the symbolism of America the country. Since the poem was written in 1925, at the height of the Harlem Renniassance, I took the poem to be a description of the primarily white based empowerment that was consumed by America, until the Renniassance took place, in which the "darker brother", or the black society of America was finally recognized as a potent figure.