04.05.2024

Welcome to the Thompson Library's video tutorial on our topic concept map. This is a really good way to start brainstorming your topics for any papers or projects that you have coming up in your classes. This is a very simple diagram, and it might, you may have already seen this being called a mind map. So typically when we start out we've got a few different lines coming off of it like this. And the topic I'm going to focus on today is vegetarianism. We do have some downloads of this concept map on our website on our Research Process Guide, so if you'd like to download it you can but it's really simple to draw as well.

So my assignment is to write a persuasive paragraph about a topic of my choosing. I chose vegetarianism, so I need to start off by coming up with some definitions of what it is. So we know the general one is that there is no meat in our diets, but I have some friends who are vegetarian but they eat eggs and dairy. I have another acquaintance who is a vegan and that is absolutely no animal products. There might also be some religious reasons why you are vegetarian or restrict some parts of your diet. As I'm going along and researching and reading I can add in other things as well. So for example, if I'm reading along and I realize that egg and dairy is also called an ovo/lacto vegetarian because they do eat those types of food.

Also I'm researching and I find out that there are such a thing called a fruitarian, which is a person who eats only raw fruit, nuts, things that come off of a tree, so it's a little bit more restrictive of a type of vegetarianism. So I've got a pretty good handle on my definitions, so let's move on to some other aspects a vegetarianism in that I might want to talk about. We're going to start with health. There are a lot of different articles and research out there that's done on the health benefits of being a vegetarian as well as some of the drawbacks. So let's start with the pros. So we know it's low fat; it can also be low cholesterol, depending on what type of diet you've got.

You can also be high in fiber, and possibly high in some types of vitamins and minerals. How about some negative consequences. Alright, so you can be calcium deficient especially if you are vegan and do not consume dairy products for example. You might be low in iron or possibly low in protein depending on how you structure your diet concerning legumes other high iron products. A lot of this can actually be taken care of though through supplements, right, so that can also be a kind of a retraction of this con and become up into a pro if you need it to be later on. Let's move onto another area of the being a vegetarian here.

How about personal cost, how much does it actually cost you if you change your diet to this. So meat is often very expensive, but at the same time fresh produce can be expensive or hard to get. We're in Flint and Flint still has some issues with food desert, and so we can link this aspect of being unable to find fresh produce to aspects of being in a food desert as well. We could again kind of shift some of these issues with fresh produce and grow our own food. Depending on where we live, if you're in apartment that might not be possible but if you have land you might be able to start your own garden.

We can also talk about eating out. Not all restaurants have really great vegetarian options, some do, but depending on your strain of vegetarianism you may not be able to eat out as much, which might be good for your wallet as well. Alright now let's move onto the last issue that I can think of when I initially start thinking about vegetarianism and that's the environment. So if we go vegetariif a large portion of us become vegetarians there might be a cost of less animals being used for or in agriculture and that means less animal waste which is something that a friend of mine in college pointed out, so we'd have less methane in the air.

There'd probably be a redistribution of how water is used, so from being used by those animals that we are producing for our consumption to agricultural reasons. We'd probably also have a restructuring of land use as well, so moving from grazing and land devoted to animal husbandry to more agriculture or possibly devoting it back to aspects of wild use or forest land. Now as I'm going through this, I'm adding on things, I can also start taking them away. As I start doing my research, if I am finding more issues related to health and not as many to the environment, and truthfully I don't have as many ideas about the environment at least based on this map, I can cross this off and say I don't actually want to use any of this right now.

I can also maybe go to my definition; I'm probably definitely want to keep some of the different types of it and our basic definition of not eating meat, but maybe in a 3 to 5 page paper I don't have enough space to talk about religion, so I'm not going to talk about religion. If I come over here to health, there's definitely a lot of things that I can focus on but maybe I don't need to talk about everything on here. And it's interesting with personal cost this is one of those things that I could possibly test myself, so I could take a week figure out how to find meat, can I find some sales or is my bill lower just finding fresh produce and other vegetarian items in the grocery store.

I could even do an experiment to see if I grow my own food over the summer how does that affect my budget. So there's quite a few things on this side that I would be more comfortable writing about than the things on this side. As you're going along please feel free to add any related terms, synonyms, other concepts that you find related to kind of where you've chosen to go on your concept map. This is a living document that you will need to change and grow and constantly use while you're going through this process as well. So remember please come to the library and ask a librarian if you have any issues or help that you need with your topic; the writing center is also a great place to go when you're thinking about your topic as well.

Thank you very much for watching.