Nutrition: A Community Discussion Guide
Published in
2 min readJan 2, 2017
Are you interested in provoking a substantive discussion on nutrition with friends, family, neighbors, classmates or roommates? Layer the below format on top of your next group gathering and assume the role of moderator to instigate a lively and enriching conversation.
- Invite friends (3, 5 or 7) to join you for a discussion on nutrition.
- In your invitation, ask that they read this article (The Food Gap Is Widening: The Atlantic) and arrive at your gathering with an answer this question:“Is access to healthy, affordable food a basic human right?”
- At your gathering, start by splitting your guests into pairs and ask them to, one at a time, convince the other of their answer to the question. (5 minutes)
- Bring everyone together and ask each pair to explain their collective answer. (5 minutes per pair)
- As a group, discuss / debate the varying positions
- Provoke additional conversation with the following five questions:
- “Should the government regulate unhealthy foods as strictly as they regulate unhealthy substances (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, drugs)?”
- “Should physicians be as well-educated in nutritional science as they are in pharmaceutical science?”
- “Should addictions to unhealthy foods be treated as seriously as addictions to unhealthy substances?”
- “Should America become a country of vegetarians and vegans?”
- “Should we care that our industrial agriculture system generates many significant environmental costs (e.g. damage to fisheries, surface and groundwater pollution, increased health risks borne by agricultural workers, farmers, and rural communities exposed to pesticides and antibiotic resistant bacteria)?”
