LK Abitur 2008 I, Composition Topic 1
Can or should people be forced to adopt a healthy lifestyle?
Big Fat Brother Is Watching You
You walk into McDonalds, head for the counter and wait in line. You don’t have much time so you just want to grab something quick. Maybe a double quarterpounder with extra cheese and super size fries. Oh well, you haven’t had anything all day so make it two quarterpounders. You order your meal and sit down to eat. Oh gosh, you like those burgers! You open your mouth to take the first bite, eat your whole meal in five minutes and … gain two more pounds! You’ve probably been in a situation like this before. You’ve had fast food and afterwards you feel crappy. And you know why? Because that’s just what you ate! Fast food and other unhealthy groceries like microwave food are cheap and quick ways to live a really unhealthy life. So this kind of food should immediately be prohibited for the common good, or shouldn’t it?
First of all, the whole industrial sector of convenience and fast food would break down, or to put it right, would lobby against this idea. And since they are a very powerful branch of economy, a law prohibiting fast food would never pass any vote. More and more people buy their food, so why care about nutritional facts? Nobody reads those charts anyways. The government would lose enormous amounts taxes.
Also, if the government would actually pass a law like that, it would be sure that they wouldn’t be elected again. Prohibition of certain food is not compatible with basic human rights as self-determination and therefore wouldn’t survive in a democracy. People would go on the streets to protest, because who knows, if they take away our food today, then what will they do tomorrow?
And finally, a law like that couldn’t be enforced at all, unless you’d install a camera in every house in the country and have the nation under permanent surveillance. If you prohibit fast food or even just limit how much people may eat, they would sure find ways to do so secretly, just like Prohibition in America in the 1920s showed.
So it would be healthy, but under no circumstances possible, to force people to adopt a healthy lifestyle. In a democracy, every person is responsible for themselves and should be so. All that should be done is encourage people to eat more whole food products maybe with lower taxes or special benefits and establish stricter directives for the producers of fast food; maybe offer some free fitness training to every obese person. Because after all, we want to eat good food, and if it’s healthy at the same time, that’s even better. And we don’t want big (fat) brother to watch us having lunch every day, do we?
Kommentar
Mit über 450 Wörtern natürlich viel zu lang fürs Abitur. Vor allem Einleitung und Schluss könnte / müsste man deutlich kürzen.
Die Überschrift ist eine witzige Kombination aus „My Big Fat Greek Wedding“ und Orwell’s bekanntem „Big Brother Is Watching You“. Besonders gelungen ist der Rückbezug auf die Überschrift im letzten Satz, ein perfektes Beispiel für „a sense of closure“.
Schreibe einen Kommentar