One man's spring break is another man's...

As my primary audience knows, a rough draft of my research must be submitted in the form of a paper a week from today.  In an attempt to get ahead, I am writing additional annotative bibliographies that will be due later in the semester, as I have found two books about obesity and its contributing factors.  They prove to be both interesting and relevant.
An additional idea I had for my paper was to apply Lester's analysis chapter to some work of my own.  I propose to compare package images of the food versus what they actually look like prepared by me.  I believe that this approach will heavily improve my argument that sometimes food photography can be completely misleading.
Looking at my accrued research thus far, it is quite varied in content, with several perspectives, which will be helpful in supporting my work as well.
Lastly, I recently submitted a research proposal that was well-received except that I lacked a certain thesis framework, to which I will respond in this post.  My current thesis is as follows:
"Manufacturers are contributing to obesity through the way that they market their products to consumers, using deceitful images of the product and other supporting images."
Hopefully that will clear up what this paper is specifically about because my purpose clearly follows from it, which is to make consumers aware of the messages they perceive from food marketing and to steer them away from unhealthy foods.

Trudging Along

I am currently looking at material that is indirectly related to my topic.  The article I annotated this week is about a group of researchers investigating the effectiveness of looking at color photographs of food to calculate weight intake.  While this is not technically the core of my topic, which is more about food packaging, I managed to find some nuggets of information that will definitely be good points to make in a paper.  The most important is that the obese people in the study generally underestimated the weight that they consumed in a particular portion.  This is relevant because the obesity issue in our country today is fueled by people not being able to tell how much they are consuming by merely looking at it.  Of course, in the study, the weight of the photographed food was pre-calculated so that they could tell how far off the predicted weight intake was from the actual.
In the future, I am interested in finding other media sources than the online databases.  I did expand my horizons this week by looking at a different database, but finding a book or two would be extremely helpful to me.

Preliminary Research

    Thus far, I have been conducting research regarding food packing images and the way that these images influence Americans to overeat, contributing to the nation's obesity.  I have yet to be able to find direct research on the topic, but I have found several topics with directly relate to the topic.  My annotated bibliographies to date relate to the Visual Analysis chapter in Lester's book, as well as an article about furthering nutrition label sanctions and another about misleading photography of food.  I have yet to feel like there is a lack of resources or research, and I intend to look deeper into food photography and also mascots used to represent food.

    I did look for a book about the correlation between human appetite and vision, but the psychology book that I checked out did not present relevant material.  I will continue to search for an article or journal regarding this subject matter.

A Word on Tone

As Dr. O'Conner discussed in class, we are to project a persona towards our audience (namely, him), and in my first ever blog post, I wish to begin creating that image.  I intend for this blog to be of a similar writing style to almost everything else that I write: it will be void of grammatical errors if at all possible and written in a professional tone that carries a clear enthusiasm for the subject matter, and the occasional humorous interjection, should I be inclined to do so.  I hope that whoever reads this will enjoy the things to come!