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 »
The trends of food system industrialization and nutritionism outlined by Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food have not diminished in the decade since its publication. Neither have the global social, political and economic forces driving those trends. Pollan outlines the bodily and environmental dangers that our new food landscape presents, making a compelling argument that our food needs defending…. Read more »
The industrialization of food has brought along with it billions of dollars of food marketing to get the shopper to spend that extra few dollar on the newest product. Pollan mentions that the food marketing industry has an annual budget of about thirty-two billion dollars (4). Along with the marketing being shown on television commercials, on billboards, there are more… Read more »
Gathering my thoughts about our first lesson, I am amazed by how complex food actually is. After having read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, it’s surprising that even though there are things like the slow food movement and scores of people fighting for community gardens, the veil of nutritionism has not really lifted from the American psyche. Generally speaking,… Read more »
Whole foods are essential for health and well being; however, even some “whole” foods lack valuable nutrients based on where and how they’re grown. Pollan points out that there has been “a decline in nutrient content of…forty-three crops…tracked since the 1950s” (118). The industrialization of farming has created a nutrient-deficient world, even for those who attempt to eat in the… Read more »