Organic Industry Essay Example

as over-exaggerations about the things that he says are what the food industry gets wrong every time. She says that even though he works his hardest to break down the food industry’s expensive teachings: he does his own way of making people pay him money so he can tell them how to eat. He tries to say that people dictating a nutritional diet are the ones people should not listen to, but he continues to end his essay with “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”. (443) Mary sees him more as another contradiction rather than an answer to the best nutritional diet.

Mary continues her essay by talking about Pollan and every person who thinks that they know the ultimate way of keeping a healthy diet. She thinks that this is the wrong way to think about food for everybody because it doesn’t go with the historical purpose of food as fuel for our bodies.

Americans are willing to listen to these people because Americans are always hearing about how unhealthy we are. She goes on saying that our understanding of health is all wrong because of everything that we have been told especially about the connection of diet, health, and weight. Using Pollan again she claims he blindly says that obesity is a Western disease, which assumes that weight and health are connected

Pollan’s main points consist of nutritionism, the food industry, the medical community, and his own rules on how to escape the Western diet. There are many factors preventing our escape from the Western diet, but with a little bit of dedication Pollan believes it can be done. The first issue Pollan addresses is

that of nutritionism. Nutritionism, by his definition, is when people tend to focus on single nutrients in food as the problem or solution.

Things such as the lipid hypothesis, the carbohydrate hypothesis, or the theory of omega-3 deficiency are being blamed for why the Western diet is responsible for so many diseases. These theories, however, conflict with one another. People tend to place the blame somewhere that is easier to deal with. “It is only natural for scientists no less than the rest of us to gravitate towards a single, all-encompassing explanation” (Pollan 421). However, we do not have to choose one to decide how to eat well.

They are only theories; the real solution would be to stop eating a Western diet. However, the food and medical industries benefit more from these theories than we do. The food industry feeds off of people’s beliefs in these theories and they use them to further process their food. According to Pollan, “The food industry needs these theories, so it can better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical changes to its business model” (Pollan 422).

The food industry would rather place the blame on something specific than admit that the food they are serving is the real problem. In the medical community these scientific theories nourish business. “New theories beget new drugs to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol; new treatments and procedures to ameliorate chronic diseases; and new diets organized around each new theory’s elevation of one class of nutrient and demotion of another” (Pollan

422). Basically, Pollan is saying that they are making money off us being sick. The medical community talks about diet change and how effective it is, but just like the food industry they benefit from people believing in these theories. That is why they focus more on treatment and less on prevention.

So, Pollan proposes that escaping the Western diet will be hard, but he believes it can be done. It will be hard because of the horrible food environment that surrounds us, and because it is hard to find whole food that hasn’t been processed in some way. But instead of going back to the bush, Pollan proposes a set of rules to help create healthy meals; algorithms, that when followed will help Americans escape the Western diet. Eating “healthy” is also a much broader concept than we think. According to Pollan, “I no longer think it’s possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food and health” (Pollan 425). What he is saying is that the way we eat involves more than just our body.

The way we eat effects the environment as well. Eating healthy will also require more time, effort, and resources to accomplish. That means a major change in the way Americans think about eating. According to Pollan, “Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food; they also spend less a half hour a day preparing meals, and little more than one hour enjoying them” (Pollan 425), Traditionally, food preparation has always taken up most of the time, as

it still does in many other countries that eat healthier than Americans. To escape the Western diet, we need to be willing to spend more time and resources on food for ourselves.