Unit 2 - P9

P9: Read the essays by Pollan (“Unhappy Meals”) and Dupuis. Write a post in which you connect the essays to one another and to a contemporary food issue. In other words, read the essays alongside one another and use that reading to inform your commentary on an aspect of our food cultures.

            Both authors are concerned with the question of "what to eat?" It's one thing to identify that some dietary habits and foods are bad for you, but it never provides a better alternative: what to eat? Pollan talks about how many people gain from the "Conspiracy of Confusion" such as journalists, "institutional imperatives of the food industry, and nutritional science" which creates the "edible foodlike" substitutes in the markets. Dupuis relates this to how Mormons were manipulated and were told that people received callings from angels of the "healthy living." Pollan details how food has almost lost its meaning, being replaced by "nutrients" and other terms like "macronutrients, cholesterol, fiber, and saturated fat" to complicate things even further.

             A contemporary issue that this relates to is how lobbies really influence government's decisions at the sacrifice of public awareness of health issues. Pollan explains it perfectly with the Senator McGovern example where his recommendations were rewrriten from "reduce consumption of meat" to "choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake." The pull that these lobbies have forces institutions that are responsible for public awareness of these issues to compromise to save face. Pollan refers to the issue of the Western Diet as the "elephant in the room." Pollan talks about how food has become simplified and "fast in another way - predigested." Because of that, we have distorted the ratios that we eat essential fat like omega-3. Our food culture now revolves around fast food, and another aspect of this is proportion distortion. Not only are we eating unhealthily, we are also eating in excess of what we need. Even the essentials for our body are being consumed in the body more than we need, which becomes bad for us. The adage of "everything in moderation" really applies to this problem.

            In both Pollan and Dupuis' article,  they talk a lot about "invisible messengers" which people used as crutches in their arguments in food in gastropolitics. There were fear campaigns towards the germs in food, and there was a separation in working classes because of food and the "right to calories." Since there was no observable proof, namedropping tactics like these were used to confuse the public. Pollan explores how "nutritionism" is in itself fallacious because eating better does not mean that it is good for us as individuals. He brings up the example of the Atkins craze to represent that "framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients" is avoiding the real issue which is to "eat less of any particular food." The scientists in Dupuis' article even try to use nutritionism to show which is the superior diet: the Chinese or the Western? This is pointless to discuss because as Pollan says in his article, there is a "French paradox - the fact that a population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many ways healthier than we Americans are." Both argue that the treatment of food politics has become entirely reductive. Pollan believes that as scientists continue to break down the complexities of food into "nutrients," they lose sight of the bigger picture. Dupuis thinks the same of how food is a scapegoat for more pressing social problems and how we should not "solve through our stomachs" any longer.