Blog post #4- Jaeyun Moon

Pollan's Argument in In Defense of Food

The New York Times bestseller, In Defense of Food, is a book that gives readers a variety of ideas about American food. There are three main parts in this book. For the first part, Michael Pollan describes how nutritionism, an ideology in which foods are the sum of their nutrient parts, is replacing the real food. For second part, concept of Western diet and diseases are introduced and in the last section of the book, Michael Pollan elaborates the statement, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”, by giving more specific examples. However, the main argument Michael Pollan tries to achieve throughout the book is that people with Western diet should change their food culture to traditional diets, because Western diet is not as healthy as others. His argument is effectively convincing by three techniques: redefining definitions, asking rhetorical questions, and giving strong and irrefutable evidences to his argument

Throughout the book, Michael Pollan discusses how Western diet is not healthy. On page 89, he defines Western diet as “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains”. Also, on page 104, he says, “foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet”. These definitions made readers have a terrible impression about Western diet and when readers read his arguments with Pollan’s redefined definition of Western diet, his arguments are more convincing.

Michael Pollan uses rhetorical questions and gives answers to these questions in the book. For example, on page 165, he writes, “So what about eating meat? Unlike plants, which we can’t live without, we don’t need to eat meat—with the exception of vitamin B₁₂, every nutrient found in meat can be obtained somewhere else.” This technique encourages the readers to think about what the answer to the question should be and makes them pay attention to the contents in the book. In other words, rhetorical questions make the arguments more convincing by giving readers a chance to sum up the contents and making them wonder what the answer would be.

There are many clear facts and evidences that support Michael Pollan’s arguments. When he tries to refute the lipid hypothesis at the beginning of the book, he uses specific details and conclusions from “Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review”, an article from Harvard School of Public Health. Michael Pollan gave such evidences, which people usually do not know, for his arguments so that they are irrefutable. Likewise, the experiment about ten middle-aged, over-weight Aborigines with health problems participated to see if temporarily changing the process of westernization they had experienced would improve their problems was a great evidence to criticize the Western food. Use of these strong and irrefutable evidences made Pollan’s argument more convincing.

As a result, the main argument in In Defense of Food is that people should change their Western diet style to traditional diet for their health, and his argument is effectively convincing by three techniques mentioned above.