Unhappy Meals Summary Essay Example

Unhappy meals summary Michael Pollan opens his New York Times article “Unhappy Meals“with a rather ambiguous statement, “Eat food, Not too much, Mostly Plants”. Pollan gives the “average Joe” a new perspective on what food really is in this article. But in reality it’s not a new spin rather a throwback on a time trusted take on food, but I’m getting ahead of myself now. He does this starting off, by giving his rule of thumb, “if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims.” A rather odd claim I thought at first. It seems to go against everything that we have ever learned about nutrition. I have regularly found myself going out of my way to find foods that make such claims. So why would I avoid these foods? He points out that produce doesn’t usually come with a label shouting “healthy!” Still I found this statement a little off, so I read on and continued to ruminate on his words.
All throughout this essay Pollan explains his “rule of thumb” by saying most of the things we eat are manmade nutrients, nutrient enhanced foods or fortified with manmade nutrients, rather than the food your grandmother would recognize. He further goes on to state that he believes that modern-day food, even with the health claims are worse for you than you the foods of the past generations. He backs this belief by discussing how some low-fat diets have been proven to actually not work. “The results were announced early last year, producing front-page headlines of which the one in this newspaper was typical: “Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds.” And the cloud of nutritional confusion over the country darkened.” But how can this be I pondered? I was always told that low-fat is always better. By this time in my reading I had started to see a trend. The light bulb was flickering but not fully on yet.
Another topic Pollan stresses on multiple occasions is eat less. The "not too much" part of the advice is cited