Blog Post 4

Flaws in Pollan's Arguments

Michael Pollan is an educated author who has written several books. In his book, In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto, he has certainly shown that he is knowledgeable about food and holds strong opinion about it, which was evident in the book. However, as a reader, I found several flaws in his main arguments.

First of all, the majority of the book is about “nutritionism,” which is, according to Pollan, defined as “reductionist way of thinking about food” (Pollan 28). He points out several flaws with nutritionism as he says it must have “evil” nutrients to sanctify “savior” nutrients and it values the quantity of nutrients in the food. Nutritionism, Pollan claims, follows from the premise that it divides the healthy nutrients and the unhealthy nutrients to promote physical health. By separating the two, the food industry has found a way to add those “good” nutrients into food and market it to sell more products. Because nutritionism emphasizes the quantity of the nutrients contained in food, it gives a false image that processed food is better than whole food, which he claims is false. In the book, he criticizes additives of “good” nutrients in the processed foods, because he believes that whole food is better. However, he rarely mentions the benefits of eating whole food and devotes most of his book just criticizing nutritionism and reductionist way of looking at food. Also in his fourth part of the book, he goes on to praising how good antioxidant and Vitamin-C are good for our body and how they are beneficial to our dietary system and health. Pollan literally spent the majority of the book on criticizing the reductionist way of looking at food. He had conflicting ideas in the book that just failed to convince his arguments to his readers. How can we, as readers, buy into authors’ arguments when they have conflicting ideas?

Another main argument in his book is "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In his fourth part of the book, he talks about how to eat healthy and recommends how to promote a healthy eating style. Although his idea about healthy eating is ideal, he fails to realize that most Americans can’t afford to follow it. One of the reasons why processed food became popular is because they were cheap, tasted just like the whole food and had nutrient additives that promoted health. He then talks about choosing organic food for better eating habit, but organic food is just expensive. In a supermarket called “Whole Food”, which devotes it store to entirely organic food, the food is much more expensive than those is “Jewel Osco” or “Dominick’s.” It takes more time and care from farmers to grow organic food and his idea of eating more organic food is only suitable to upper-class people. He talks about how learning to eat like cultures of other countries is also a good way of eating healthy. We are in a world where people just do not have enough time to cook for themselves, which is now a new foodie culture. The advance of fast food restaurants and easy-to-cook processed food clearly shows that people do not have enough time to learn to cook food or actually make one. Also, average Americans can’t afford a luxury of going to exotic restaurants. Everybody would agree and want to follow to his ideal, but it is not convincing as he fails to see who his real audience is.

After reading the book, I couldn’t help to question how many of his readers would actually follow to his arguments. My answer to the question was ‘No.’ Not only did he have a conflicting ideas in his argument about nutritionism, but also, he failed to recognize his target audience which is average Americans.