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.

In the article ”Unhappy meals,” and “History of food advice”, Pollan and Dupuis illustrated their opinions regarding to a prevailing argument regarding to “what should a health-conscious society eat”.

Pollan shows lots of examples of how nowadays people transferred from food-concentrated into nutrition-concentrated. Thanks to the development of our science, the nutrition a certain food contains can be easily accessed and people stared to base their food selection on nutrition rather than the food itself. But is nutrition-based food selection really a good way to solve today’s bad eating habit problems? Pollan holds the opposite opinions. People “takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle”, make the experts advice, hard to insist, thus we continue to eat badly. And the final solution Pollan suggested is to go back to the old days, like our ancestors, eats the “real” food which is free of any additives in it. And Du Puis tracking back to the history that how the “spirit of Gluttony” arose. Worker asked for more wages, more compensation because they want to more meat to achieve a feeling of satisfaction. The eating problem is more like to be linked with political decisions since the fatty is more likely a signal of poor rather than wealth due to the political decision of producing cheaper meat and corns, which make the low income class fatter.

The two essays claims from different perspective about the solution of nowadays eating paradox. It is true that nutritirism are playing a more and more serious role in our food selection. People want to be healthy and constrain the food (or the nutrition) they could intake on a daily base. But it is not the real attitude towards life. Eating is an inherited gift and we could not live without eating. Gluttony is not unusual to be seen in a young girl who insisted several days of strict diet. Only if we can combined the way of healthy eating into our lifestyle, making it part of our daily life, then we would eventually get the answer of “What to eat”, in a satisfied way.