Super Size Me: Fast Food, Media, and Food Movements
This paper offers a critical review of Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary Super Size Me, in which Spurlock eats only McDonald's food for thirty days to expose the health dangers of fast food consumption. The review situates the film within the framework of global food movements as described by Gimenez and Shattuck (2011), arguing that the documentary most closely aligns with the reformist food movement model. The paper evaluates the film's strengths—its entertainment value, persuasive power, and promotion of media literacy—as well as its limitations, including its narrow focus on American fast food culture and its avoidance of deeper structural critiques of agro-business and food sovereignty.
- Introduction: Overview of Spurlock's McDonald's-only eating experiment
- Super Size Me and American Food Awareness: Film's role in media and food culture discourse
- Global Food Movements: A Framework: Radical, progressive, and reformist food movement types
- Where Super Size Me Fits: The Reformist Model: Documentary classified as reformist food movement artifact
- Conclusion: Rating and lasting relevance of the film
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The review grounds its evaluation of a popular documentary in a peer-reviewed academic framework (Gimenez & Shattuck, 2011), elevating it beyond simple opinion into structured analysis.
- It honestly identifies both the film's strengths and its limitations, demonstrating balanced critical thinking rather than uncritical praise or dismissal.
- The paper maintains a clear argumentative thread: classifying Super Size Me as a reformist food movement artifact and judging it by that standard.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies classification as an analytical tool. By mapping the documentary onto Gimenez and Shattuck's typology of radical, progressive, and reformist food movements, the writer produces a structured critique rather than a purely impressionistic response. This technique—applying an external theoretical framework to a primary text—is a standard move in social science and cultural studies writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a descriptive summary of the documentary and an immediate evaluative claim about its cultural significance. It then broadens the lens by introducing the Gimenez and Shattuck (2011) framework on global food movements. The middle section uses that framework to classify and assess the film. The conclusion acknowledges the documentary's lasting relevance while issuing a numerical rating backed by stated criteria. This funnel structure—from specific film to broad theory and back—is appropriate for a short critical review.
Introduction
In Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock undergoes one of the most masochistic eating experiments imaginable, consuming only McDonald's food for thirty days. He tracks his mental and physical health throughout the experiment to reveal the drastic ill effects of regular fast food consumption. Both his girlfriend and his doctors are appalled at the rapid changes taking place in Spurlock—not just to his body, but to his emotional and sex life as well. The film is engaging, persuasive, and often intentionally nauseating. It critiques American culture while decrying the fast food industry's marketing tactics, and the filmmaker clearly wants viewers to feel disgust and revulsion at fast food in general.
Super Size Me and American Food Awareness
Super Size Me reflects a growing awareness among Americans about the harmful nature of a diet filled with processed foods, and particularly fast foods like McDonald's. The film is one of many that illustrate the power of the media to promote positive change, counteracting and subverting the way media has traditionally been used as a tool to manipulate consumers. As Gimenez and Shattuck (2011) point out, food "movements" are political, inspiring deeper change than simply one person's daily diet. From the organic food movement to permaculture, veganism, and raw food culture, food movements that go even beyond those discussed by Gimenez and Shattuck (2011) or Super Size Me raise awareness about the entire food chain, eating habits, personal choice, animal rights, social justice, socio-economic class concerns, race, and gender. Super Size Me focuses on only a small fragment of global food movements: the fundamental need to raise awareness and encourage media literacy about fast food.
Global Food Movements: A Framework
Gimenez and Shattuck (2011) describe several related but distinct trends in food movements worldwide. One is the radical food movement, which "seeks deep, structural changes to food and agriculture" (Gimenez & Shattuck, 2011, p. 128). The radical movement has gained some traction in developing nations, and its discourse centers on issues related to entitlement and rights over food sovereignty. The progressive trend has evolved primarily in Northern and Western countries and focuses on "food justice" issues. The food reformist movement works within existing capitalist structures to demonstrate that food security can provide "less socially and environmentally damaging alternatives into existing market structures" (Gimenez & Shattuck, 2011, p. 121).
Conclusion
The film deserves a 7 or 8 out of 10 on a rating scale because of its entertainment and argumentative value.
References
Gimenez, E. H., & Shattuck, A. (2011). Food crises, food regimes and food movements. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1), 109–144.
Spurlock, M. (2004). Super Size Me [Feature film].
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.