In Defense Of Food In My Family Analysis

Adeena Samoni
Mr. Quinby
AP English Language and Composition
28 April 2014

The Evolution of Food in My Family Michael Pollan’s recent book In Defense of Food offers a new outlook on food today. Unlike many other writers of our time, he discusses the flaws of the nutrionist system we have adopted and encourages his readers to once again follow their familiar family recipes. According to Pollan, we should no longer feel guilty about eating a traditional meal because of its supposed unhealthiness. Instead, we should embrace our roots and cultural cuisine because that is the diet that kept our ancestors alive and healthy, unlike the “scientifically proven” Western diet of today that is causing mass obesity epidemics and other health problems.
Outside of her small, growing city, she hadn’t gotten much exposure to other cultures before she came. Now, she was in the center of the convergence of cultures where she met people from all over the world. She had roomed with them and encountered their styles of cooking. She took a liking to Chinese food, especially, finding it to be exotic, but not too radical from the food she grew up with. Despite the cultural renaissance my mother experienced, she also got exposed to American cuisine consisting of fried chicken, Buffalo wings, Doritos, and other processed foods. Soon afterwards, my mother like many other immigrants at the time faced health problems such as “high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other weight-related issues not uncommon for immigrants to America to develop” (Tavernise). Eager to lose weight and return to her healthy lifestyle, my mother fell victim to the nutrionist ideals of the time such as believing that carbohydrates had negative effects. Now shunning the rice she once ate in India, my mother found herself gaining more weight. Only after she returned to India for a three-week visit did she lose all of the weight she gained in the States. This just proved that something was wrong with the apparently not-so-full-proof American diet, not the Indian one that had sustained her for so long. Similarly, my mother realized this and decided to avoid processed American foods
Also, she had to take care of her three kids, including me, which left her with even less time to cook proper meals and work out. After reading Pollan’s book, many of his ideas about us compromising our health and nutrition, in exchange for saving time and effort, started to stand out and I started to notice how wrong this situation was becoming: we were starting to spend less time with each other and were starting to eat less healthy as well to save time for other activities. For instance, both of my brothers would have soccer practice one day so it wouldn’t make sense for my mom to put in so much work to make one meal as her mother did when she was younger if no one was going to have time to eat it so we would just take out. Because we would take out, we got exposed to a lot more cultures than my mom was exposed to. However, we were losing the connections with family over the dinner table that was so crucial to my mother’s upbringing. Furthermore, our produce was not as fresh as hers was in her childhood because it was genetically modified and would be bought once a week from the super market, a practice a lot less time-consuming than buying fresh groceries every day. Our desserts were turning into store-bought cakes while her childhood desserts would be the fruits she would pick off the trees, herself.