Blog Week 12

I think that Morgan Spurlock qualifies as a culture jammer because he is doing something against the norm and trying to get a message out about something he is clearly passionate about. Everyone knows or everyone should know that eating a steady diet of McDonalds or any fast food for that matter is unhealthy. Morgan Spurlock has taken this idea and saw what it did after a month of eating nothing but McDonalds and the results were pretty close to what everyone expected. It caused him to gain weight, did damage to his liver and gave him mood swings that had never occurred before. McDonalds is now synonymous with western culture and has spanned the globe with restaurants in almost every country around the world. Morgan Spurlock exposed the truth about what eating a steady diet of McDonalds food can do to a person and for that I think he qualifies as a culture jammer.
Because there is always two sides to an argument I’ve often wondered if someone was ever going to do another McDonalds documentary but instead of supersizing the meals, eat a balanced diet and get a reasonable amount of exercise. In Spurlock’s documentary his lifestyle was very sedentary and it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone ate McDonalds everyday but mixed it with a little bit of exercise. My thoughts have finally been answered by Tom Naughton who recently did just that. While I have not seen the new documentary I imagine it greatly contradicts the message that Spurlock’s documentary was trying to convey. In my belief it would be possible to maintain a reasonably healthy body weight by eating fast food on a daily basis with exercise.