blog post 4

Pollan Under Criticism

“In Defense of Food,” a argumentative book by Berkeley professor Michael Pollan, is an interesting book which makes interesting claims about personal nutrition that deviate significantly from the facts that you may used to hearing. Basically, he argues that eating processed food is the sole reason for the health problems in western civilization, due to its low nutritional value. He feels that processing foods takes out the essential nutrients, only leaving fat, sugar and empty calories. He also criticizes health professionals in the United States, mostly due to their obsession with the so-called “good and bad nutrients.” Pollan argues that food is much too complex to be able to analyze specific nutrients on their own. Michael Pollan’s argument is not sufficiently convincing, because, more often than not, his arguments are based on his own self determined opinions and often lack sufficient or reliable data to back them up.


Some of the evidence that Pollan uses to back up his conclusions is the rise of heart disease and diabetes in the western world. Pollan links the rise in these conditions to the western diet. This may be true, but the evidence that Pollan presents and the conclusions he makes are not convincing due to the fact that the connections he makes between the two are tenuous at best.

One specific piece of evidence that he used to support this was Karen O’Dea’s 1982 experiment with involved reverting ten Australian Aborigines, who were living under western culture and suffering from health problems such as heart disease and diabetes, back to their ancestral lifestyles for ten weeks. Since they were now hunter-gatherers, they now had to rely on themselves to acquire all of their food. At the end of the experiment, the Aborigines showed increased fitness. Pollan makes the conclusion that these changes were solely due to the change in diet of the Aborigines, as processed foods were taken out of their diet during the experiment (Pollan 88). Okay, this may be true, but it is hard to understand that Pollan would not speculate as to the effect that the increased amounts of physical activity that they inevitably got while living off the land had upon their health. This casts a great shadow of doubt over the conclusions of the experiment, as this seemingly obvious uncontrolled variable could have altered the results in many different ways, and it is hard to take Pollan seriously when he uses such obviously flawed data to back up his argument.

Another way in which Pollan’s argument is unconvincing is that he relies on information (scientific experiments) to back up his arguments that he previously labels unreliable, and even directly contradicts himself. This occurs with the love-hate relationship he enjoys with omega-3 fatty acids. In one section of the book he bases his reasons for the benefits of eating natural leafy plants by the high omega-3 content of them, and uses the fact that some scientists regard omega-3 as the “missing essential nutrient of all” to back it up (Pollan 125). However in another section he criticizes how nutritional scientists are using omega-3 as the new “in” nutrient, and criticizes these scientists obsession for assuming single nutrients contribute to the health of an individual and speculates that food is too complex to be able to effectively analyze a single nutrient, and also points out how these scientists have been wrong before about some nutrients (Pollan 31). Such a clear contradiction in his book is somewhat frightening, and he even goes on to claim that since Americans consume three times as less omega-3 as the Japanese then they are four times as likely to have heart disease (Pollan 128). It is astounding that he says that the difference between the healthy Japanese and the unhealthy Americans is due to a single nutrient when this shares ideologies with the food scientists who apparently, according to Pollan, don’t know what they are doing. In praising omega-3 fatty acids, he adopts the same one nutrient obsession that he criticized earlier in the book. It is hard to take an author seriously when he labels his own conclusions as unreliable and daft.

Another reason why Pollan is hard to take seriously is that he is by no means an expert on this subject. Though often full of contempt for the people who devote their lives to the study of nutrition for their failure to make the United States a healthier place. Pollan believes that himself, on the other hand, to be an expert in the subject, even though his area of expertise is English literature, for which received a doctorate degree from Columbia University for, and Journalism, of which he is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. While this does not make him an expert on food it certainly helps him appear to be an expert of food. This book clearly demonstrates Pollan is an expert writer, as he speaks with such profound arrogance that it is easy to believe he knows exactly what he’s talking about. In fairness, he does cite people with more knowledge on the subject than him that support his views to some extent, but his advice on how to eat better should be met with skepticism.

Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” is an enjoyable book to read, and makes some very interesting arguments. However, the evidence Pollan uses to support these arguments are often flawed, as even Pollan himself (unintentionally) criticizes the logic behind his own conclusions. It should also be said that Pollan has no conspicuous experience studying the content that this book is about, so blindly accepting what he says as truth may be just or more dangerous as blindly following what food scientists say, whom, as Pollan has pointed out, have been wrong.

Bibliography:

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Print.

Pollan, Michael. "It's All Storytelling. An Interview with Michael Pollan." Interview by Pamela Demory. MichaelPollan.com. Michael Pollan, 1 Nov. 2006. Web. 24 Nov. 2009.