In Michael Pollan’s book, “In Defense of Food,” Pollan introduces the audience with a brief background about the development of nutritionism in the American political sphere in the 70s. One of the concepts that stood out to me from the first week’s reading was the important role of language in promoting nutritionism. In the first part of his book, Pollan… Read more »
Collective action is the way to achieve any change whether socially, economically, politically, environmentally, locally, or globally. We understand this when it comes to climate change, or political regimes. So why do we not believe the same to be true about food? One person growing their own food sustainably won’t change industrial food system. I had believed that by being… Read more »
Within his book, Pollan discusses how chronic diseases were “quickly acquired” by immigrants in America. This reminded me of an experience I had while living in Dubai, as it was only people from North America that were allergic to nuts. Within our expat community growing up, it became a ‘running joke’ to identify North American’s through their nut allergies. New… Read more »
The lessons that I learned while reading Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, were extremely eye-opening. From what I have learned, what stands out to me the most are the extreme changes that have taken place in the process of procuring food as an individual. It seems to me, from what I can tell at this point, that the… Read more »
One of the ideas that I would like to elaborate on after reading Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” is the warning of the Western Diet becoming a global phenomenon. Due to the fact that agriculture revolution and production world wide has follow the trends of the Western nations. The idea that our agriculture production today focuses on high quantity… Read more »
When the history ever been recorded, there is nothing like “my dinner is from the factory in somewhere around the world and all I need to do is put in the oven for three minutes”. Does it sounds familiar to you? Nowadays, yes, it says everything about people’s eating habit. We used to grow our own vegetables; we used to… Read more »
Food is much more than just the objects we consume daily to survive. It’s a way of enriching our lives with the nutrients we derive from the foods we eat. For big companies who hold enough power over the media, it’s an opportunity to get fast cash by using the reliability and accessibility of information to enforce norms—with the intent… Read more »
In Michael Pollan’s book, “In the Defense of Food”, Pollan states “Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much”. His three rules on how to eat have good intentions, but they have created a culture of food shaming in society. However, society has taken his book to the extreme with nutritionism and health. For instance, many people believe that… Read more »
According to “In Defense Of Food” by Michael Pollan, this book can be summarized that the problem of the foods industry which focusing on maximizing profits, Food Science- limited nutritional science, consumers food and the change of consuming pattern. Large-scale agro-food companies focused on maximizing profits seek sales efficiency, uniformity of quality, and ease of storage. This characteristic affects not… Read more »
Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” is problematic. He identifies key food issues we face today and their causes. This is important, but his supposed ‘solutions’ are subpar at best. He pushes for individualized effort, but just like many other issues we face currently, the issue of food has become systemic, so individual efforts will have little to no effect. … Read more »