{"id":675,"date":"2018-04-15T06:57:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-15T06:57:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/?p=675"},"modified":"2018-04-15T07:09:54","modified_gmt":"2018-04-15T07:09:54","slug":"the-flaws-within-michael-pollans-book-in-defense-of-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/2018\/04\/15\/the-flaws-within-michael-pollans-book-in-defense-of-food\/","title":{"rendered":"The Flaws within Michael Pollan’s book “In Defense of Food”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food<\/em> tackles the issue at the heart of America’s health problems today: Nutritionism. Throughout the book, Pollan mentions how the science behind Nutritionism is flawed, saying that “Few scientists ever look back to see where they and their paradigms might have gone astray\u2026” Later, Pollan explains how Gary Taubes \u201cblew the whistle on the science of the lipid hypothesis by explaining how there is no scientific evidence backing the hypothesis.\u201d In one breath, Pollan discredits science as a non self-correcting methodology, while in another, uses the lack of scientific evidence to support his narrative. Pollan’s praise for the science when it come to support his narrative, and his dismissal of it when it doesn’t is troubling to say the least.<\/p>\n

Pollan also mentions that eaters used to have a sort of a relationship with the foods that they ate before the industrialization of food. Before,\u00a0humans used to\u00a0have a relationship with other biological entities as part of a larger ecological system. However after the industrialization and the deculturalization\u00a0of food,\u00a0humans\u00a0are now\u00a0seen as the top of the ecological food chain, and thus not “food”. \u00a0\u00a0I thought this was an interesting take because the thought of food as \u201cseparate\u201d from humans, implies that humans are above the ecological system and\u00a0thus the top of the ecological system. This thought of humanity on top is not something that is new. This coincides with Western industrialization, and parallels the ideologies of Western thought arising at the time (non-white populations that were\u00a0considered\u00a0inferior\u00a0to white populations, driven by things such\u00a0as colonialism, slavery, and genocide). When Pollan says that food\u00a0has separated from humans, he isn’t lying. You need only to look at the effects of Western ideologies to see how this could happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food tackles the issue at the heart of America’s health problems today: Nutritionism. Throughout the book, Pollan mentions how the science behind Nutritionism is flawed, saying that “Few scientists ever look back to see where they and their paradigms might have gone astray\u2026” Later, Pollan explains how Gary Taubes \u201cblew the whistle on the science… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[78,31,77,76],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industrialized-food","tag-methodology","tag-nutritionism","tag-science","tag-western-ideology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}