Michael Pollan's Expository Essay

To the average consumer, eating has now developed into well beyond an agricultural act, declares Wendell Berry. Apparent in the audience of his lectures on the decline of farming, American citizens are unable to recognize the existence of food beyond the food industry—the world of fake, processed food. Ask any individual from where their food comes and they will answer, “the grocery store.” Stirring Berry to anger, he exclaims that food begins with life, plant and animal; if food begins in the laboratory, the results more accurately categorize as experiments rather than food. Michael Pollan strongly supports this claim by stating, “what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see” (p. 11). What this means is that food plastered with health claims can only assure the consumer their soon-to-be purchase has been on
This profession could undoubtedly be useful in American society today, says Pollan, but not in the way it is used now. The problem is this: “[A] serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods. So fish, beef and chicken . . . become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins” (p. 6). In an effort to consume nutrients in a controlled way, foods are altered; therefore, subtracting the natural interaction of the nutrients and the body. This concept is hand-in-hand with Berry’s claim. Consumers of the food industry are left in the dark as to what they are putting in their bodies—the nutritionist that is now necessary is one who educates consumers on how to cook meals with ingredients rather than deciphering the nutrition label on processed foods. To this, Janet Wojcicki explains food concerns more than