I’ll start at the beginning. I worked to my idea for my paradigm shift essay by finding a topic for my TED talk and then working backwards to the shift that caused my TED topic to be important. I found that this worked quite well and I was actually able to pick a shift that was fairly straightforward to document.
My topic was how dietary recommendations have changed from eat meat to eat seafood. I designed my paper to follow the USDA’s recommendations from 1990. They publish a new set of recommendations every five years and in doing so they conduct (I hope) rigorous research about the science of the day. Unfortunately, the USDA is indirectly controlled by agribusiness and thus the recommendations don’t always follow the best guidelines. Anyways, that’s not the point of my essay, I followed these recommendations through the years, pointing out differences and analyzing why certain changes occurred and why some differences are significant.
I ended by talking about the future and what this shift towards seafood means for our country and economy.
I emphasized the before because the shift and the after are difficult if not impossible to document. The latest data isn’t up to date enough to figure out if there actually has been much of a change in American seafood consumption, however, I think most people will agree that there has been much more emphasis on eating fish in the past few years.
