Michael Pollan suggests in his book In Defense of Food that our reliance on processed foods and obsession with fad diets is a kind of disordered eating – that we have become so far removed from the natural processes of creating food that we have lost touch with the need to consume whole, unaltered foods. His discussion of nutritionism posits… Read more »
Despite receiving some criticism on his book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”, Michael Pollan is quite passionate about the stance he has taken about food, nutrition, and the Western diet. Pollan points directly to unhealthy behaviors that many of us, to include myself, are guilty of, yet provides a straightforward solution. He says to, “Eat food. Not too… Read more »
Almost everyone who has ever been a child in an industrialized nation can tell you that the above is not a question. It is the demand or encouragement, depending on your mother or maternal figure, issued to the dismay of all Cheetos deprived children at one point or another. But what is real food? Michael Pollan gives his answer in… Read more »
This week’s lesson has been incredibly insightful regarding nutrition and the food industry. What really stands out for me is that as consumers, we are led by the food industry to believe that foods of convenience and longevity are also nutritious, as Michael Pollan describes it, food is being replaced by nutrition “…a great many of the traditional supermarket foods… Read more »
The assignment of moral consumerism onto the individual citizen, labeled “the individualization of responsibility” by Maniates (p.33) is the popular idea that consumers can buy their way out of ecological problems through informed purchases, and shifts blame away from the product manufacturers. Maniates goes on to discredit the idea of “consumption-as-social-action” and reveals that during the 1980’s in the United… Read more »
The United States wastes about half of all its produce. Millions of dollars and thousands of pounds of perfectly good food is left to spoil or thrown out prematurely. At the same time thousands of people face hunger and food insecurity daily. How can both these things be true? How can we seemingly have enough food to throw half of… Read more »
Diabetes type 2 is on the increase. This disease has been identified as a new phenomenon which is linked to diet and exercise. Exactly, what is type 2 diabetes? It occurs in people whose bodies no longer use insulin. The insulin hormone helps the body regulate blood sugar. When the blood sugar is too high, the disease causes blood sugar… Read more »
While food is typically thought of in correlation to comfort or nourishment, what I have found to be most interesting is the politics of food. In Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, he discusses the perils of Nutrionism, the ideology “that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient” (28). Nutrionism didn’t begin with average people attempting to… Read more »
The root of our consumption of processed foods leads us back to our historic drive to consume sugar, salt, and fats, in order to sustain ourselves in an environment that was characterized by scarcity. Although globally we still have a staggering problem with hunger and malnutrition, in developed and food stable developing nations we no longer have the same scarcity… Read more »
Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is persuasive that today’s industrialized agriculture model and the resulting Western diet has led to an American population that is overfed but undernourished, eating more calories than ever before (on average 300 more per day than in 1985) and showing alarming rates of diet-related disease including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and cancer. [1] In… Read more »