Preview

Michael Pollan's Expository Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
534 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Michael Pollan's Expository Essay
To the average consumer, eating has now developed into well beyond an agricultural act, declares Wendell Berry. Apparent in the audience of his lectures on the decline of farming, American citizens are unable to recognize the existence of food beyond the food industry—the world of fake, processed food. Ask any individual from where their food comes and they will answer, “the grocery store.” Stirring Berry to anger, he exclaims that food begins with life, plant and animal; if food begins in the laboratory, the results more accurately categorize as experiments rather than food. Michael Pollan strongly supports this claim by stating, “what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see” (p. 11). What this means is that food plastered with health claims can only assure the consumer their soon-to-be purchase has been on …show more content…
This profession could undoubtedly be useful in American society today, says Pollan, but not in the way it is used now. The problem is this: “[A] serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods. So fish, beef and chicken . . . become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins” (p. 6). In an effort to consume nutrients in a controlled way, foods are altered; therefore, subtracting the natural interaction of the nutrients and the body. This concept is hand-in-hand with Berry’s claim. Consumers of the food industry are left in the dark as to what they are putting in their bodies—the nutritionist that is now necessary is one who educates consumers on how to cook meals with ingredients rather than deciphering the nutrition label on processed foods. To this, Janet Wojcicki explains food concerns more than

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Critique Paper

    • 802 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In Kristen Weinacker’s essay “Safer? Tastier? More nutritious? The Dubious Merits of Organic Foods”, she makes a claim of fact that organic foods may not be more nutritional than conventionally grown foods. Weinacker does an exceptional job supporting her claim effectively with evidence by using the opinions of several experts, as well as the appeal to our physiological needs. She warrants that by mentioning the use of slick marketing techniques by organic food companies and our belief that organic farmers “bring us back to nature”, we tend to forgive statistical data and start to lean on our common sense. Throughout the essay Weinacker reiterates that most, if not all, of the research data available does not contain the statistical proof necessary to successfully warrant the claim.…

    • 802 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup is being produced each year” (Pg.118). “There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn” (Pg. 19). “The power of food science lies in its ability to break foods down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore’s inherited food selection system (Pg. 115).…

    • 618 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Michael Pollan’s purpose for writing this book was to inform the reader of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, the secrets behind what we eat. As omnivores, we humans have the a dilemma about our food, where it comes and what it comes from. Pollan informs the reader this because many people in America and around the world do not know where our food that we ingest comes from. After Pollan discovers himself the lies and truths of what actually happens through the process of our food, he shares the knowledge and information to many more in this memorable book. “I had to go back to the beginning, to the farms and fields where our food is grown. Then I followed it each step of the way, and watched what happened to our food on its way stomachs”(1.4) In chapter…

    • 266 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Guest's audience for her essay is the average american. As a whole, our society loves to eat the highly processed, chemical-filled foods that are cheap to buy and excessively sweet to the taste. Guest acknowledges…

    • 326 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the introduction, Pollan brings up a very good point about Americans and their views on dieting and eating “healthier”. Pollan explains the way that Americans went through a so-called “carbophobia” period in 2002, and how, unfortunately, this seems to remain true even today. The foods that American’s tend stay away from because of scientists and nutritionists devaluing…

    • 324 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Mark Bittman: Analyzed

    • 1308 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Mark Bittman, a food journalist, 30-year author, and writer for “The Minimalist”, a column in the New York Times, explains his views on obesity and other food related issues in his article, “Why Take Food Seriously? Because Your Life Depends on It”. In the article, Bittman uses specific examples such as personal shout-outs to famous chefs, morbid descriptions, harsh facts, and shocking comparisons between “then and now” in the food world, emphasizing people’s ignorance along the way to show the way he believes to be wrong. He does this, hoping to guilt readers to correctly grow, distribute, prepare, and ultimately change the way we eat it.…

    • 1308 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Nutritionism is the idea that the nutritional value of a food is the sum of all its individual nutrients, vitamins and other components. This is also known as scientific reductionism, when nutritionists and food scientists began to isolate the health components of food rather than the whole food product. Therefore, the food is divided into invisible nutrients and each nutrient within the food is divided into the healthy and unhealthy ones. Since nutrients are invisible, it is now necessary to rely on nutrition experts to make food choices for us and tell us which nutrients are healthy or unhealthy. Moreover, it also means that the only point of eating is to promote bodily health, which nutrients are “good” for health and which ones are “bad”.…

    • 1307 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The book I chose to read for my summer homework was In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Pollan has written many books regarding what to eat and how the foods we consume affect us. In this book, he opens with simple advice, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants” (Pollan 1). As straightforward as it sounds, Pollan quickly demonstrates how complicated this can be. Food is all around us. However, there are whole foods, stuff you’d find at a farmer’s market, and then there are the foods that line up the walls of our supermarkets, highly processed snacks and “foods” that contain a mirade of unpronounceable ingredients. Many of these foods processed foods, especially those that make health claims such as “low-fat”, “lowers…

    • 731 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    How might we plot our escape from the nutritionist and, in turn, from the most harmful effects of the Western diet? To Denis Burkitt, the English doctor stationed in Africa during World War II who gave the Western diseases their name, the answer seemed straightforward, if daunting. “The only way we’re going to reduce disease,” he said, “is to go backwards on diet and lifestyle of our ancestors.”” (423) Which sums up fairly well that this point is that the problem is more about our current social structure when it comes to food. “For most people for most of history, gathering and preparing food has been an occupation at the very heart of daily life.”…

    • 413 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “In Defense of Food” is a book written by Michael Pollan which was released in 2008. Pollan writes about the “Western Diet” and the dangers associated with it. He proposes a new answer to what we should and should not eat. He states that it comes down to seven simple words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Those are the words that he opens the book with, this is his basic recommendation. He states that the rest of the book is just a detailed elaboration of those words. The first half of the book is all about criticizing and deconstructing the “health disaster”, as Pollan calls it, of the “western diet”, as well as the philosophy of nurtitionism that surrounds it. The second half of the book focuses on solutions to this disaster and Pollan’s thoughts on the matter.…

    • 702 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    ‘Food Inc’ starts off with a camera moving slowly through supermarket shelves with menacing background music and a bass voiceover informing the audience that, ‘in the American supermarket, there are no such things as seasons.’ Tomatoes and fruits, we are told, are grown overseas while in season but still green, then gassed to induce ripening during shipment. The anonymous voiceover, which the audience soon learns belongs to the author of ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ Michael Pollan, then backtracks, with a brief explanation of how the process of food production has evolved, or perhaps devolved in the eyes of many, over the years.…

    • 1327 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The book also talks about how nutritionism has caused an outbreak in “false marketing.” I put false marketing in quotations, because it isn’t exactly false, but it only tells a partial truth. For example, I’m sure most people have heard that dark chocolates contain antioxidants which are supposed to be healthy. Now let us look at the whole truth. First off, what is an antioxidant and what does it do? Most people would not be able to answer this question. Also, all food…

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Author, Wendell Berry, in this article "The Pleasures of Eating," Discusses how us as humans don't pay attention to the things we eat. He writes this article to try to explain his answer to many people's question, "what can city people do?" This question refers to the decline of American and farming. After he's answered that question he's felt that there were many more things he could have said to the people ,He does that by writing This article, he adopts a strong tone in order to get others to understand his ideal feelings about the food we eat.…

    • 565 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Defense of Food

    • 1216 Words
    • 5 Pages

    In the first section of Pollan's book, he explains what nutritionism is and how it has led to bad food science. Nutritionism is the "widely shared but unexamined assumption that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. To put in another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrients"(Pollan 28). According to nutritionism, since nutrients are invisible and a mystery to us, we rely on scientists to explain the unseen reality of food for us, and look toward them for expert help. But Pollan asks, why do we need help? Throughout human history, Pollan explains that before nutritionism was invented, "to guide us we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for mother"(Pollan 3). As he further elaborates on this, he explains how nutritionism has successfully replaced culture as a guideline for what to eat. "Over the last…

    • 1216 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Michael Pollan’s essay “Escape from the Western Diet,” he informs Americans about the western diet and believes they need to escape from it. The reason Americans should escape the western diet is to avoid the harmful effects associated with it such as “western diseases” (Pollan, 434). To support his view on the issue, Pollan describes factors of the western diet that dictate what Americans believe they should eat. These factors include scientists with their theories of nutritionism, the food industry supporting the theories by making products, and the health industry making medication to support those same theories. Overall, Pollan feels that in order to escape this diet, people need to get the idea of it out of their heads. In turn he provides his own rules for escaping the western diet as well as the idea of nutritionism set forth by scientists.…

    • 743 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays