Understanding Healthy Eating

Michael Pollan is a published journalist who writes a great deal about food and food related topics such as farming, germs, and climate change. The article “Unhappy Meals” was published in the New York Times Magazine on January 28, 2007, you can also access it via the authors website, www.michaelpollan.com. The food and nutrition debate is becoming very popular and as more information becomes available through science, it becomes clearer that there are several benefits to a healthy diet consisting of whole, unprocessed foods including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and meat. The goal of this paper is to analyze Pollan’s work and relay that information to the reader. Pollan attempts to educate his readers on the current state of the food system in America, promote a healthy lifestyle, and genetically modified organism or G.M.O. education and labeling.

As the food and farming debate continues to gather followers on both sides, the issue is becoming more and more mainstream. Pollan begins with a brief history lesson about how our food wound up the way it is now. He also touches on the far reaches of the beef industry, all the way into federal government . At the time this article was published, and even now, there is a large demand for organic foods. Pollan briefly touches on the ever changing ideas of food science and the American diet shifting from low fat to low carb. Next on Pollan’s agenda is nutritionism, he states in his article “Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed.” Pollan says the reason behind this is simple: when a person eats, a variety of things are ingested and interact with each other in different ways during the digestion process. Nutritionism looks at a single nutrient, not how that single nutrient contributes to the nutrients as a whole.

Pollan has several good points in his article “Unhappy Meals”. The main focus is on the Western diet, with emphasis on processed foods and nutritionism. I believe prior to writing this, Pollan decided that he was going to attempt to appeal to as many people as he could. In order to do so, he had to rely heavily on logos and pathos to make the argument more personal and appealing, while relying less on ethos because many of the readers may have different ethical values. His argument relies heavily on logos with some backup from pathos. He states “By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes”. It would seem that nutritionism is a positive way to look at food until the author broke things down. Logically, a banana should be healthier than or some other mass-produced nutrient paste cooked into a muffin or vitamin and fiber infused cookies or whatever comes to mind, and the author allows us to draw that conclusion for ourselves after presented with the facts. Pollan’s article ends with a list of nine suggestions for healthier eating, in one of them he states He is using logic to appeal to us again, certainly nobody would want to eat something that their great grandmother would not even recognize! There is a bit of pathos in the article, inadvertent or not. This almost certainly causes one to think about their own mortality and as a result it strengthens his argument.

Pollan attempts to educate us on several of the flaws in today’s known concepts of nutrition. Pollan uses this example to point out an important bit of information: although Americans had been advised to change their diet and shy away from saturated fats and excessive meats, the total consumption was still the same, fats were just swapped out for carbs, which is not necessarily the healthiest thing.

Pollan’s article is full of important information that you should know. This hopefully i have conveyed the main ideas in the article. It is absolutely necessary to know these things in order to live a healthy lifestyle.