Timmy's Rules

      Throughout the several weeks of taking this class, the one expert that I agree most with is Michael Pollan.  He tends to have great ideas and solutions to our problems today while remaining realistic as well.  He addresses the problem at hand while trying to make his solution rational.  Upon reading my previous blog posts, Professor Pfeiffer thought that Pollan and I had similar ideas in which we are trying to regulate the health and food problems within our world today.  Thus, she recommended Pollan’s book Food Rules in which Pollan lists the “rules” to follow on foods in order to live a healthy life.  I thought this would be a great text to analyze and critique his views on the food we should and should not be eating.  In this blog post, I will analyze Pollan’s rhetoric in Food Rules and then provide my response to his rules.

            Before I begin analyzing Food Rules, I want to first discuss the ethos behind Michael Pollan.  For those of you who do not know, Michael Pollan is a journalist and professor at University of California Berkeley where he teaches journalism.  With a masters degree from Columbia University in English, Pollan has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Times magazine.  Although we know him through his work in Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan has also written Cooked, The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, A Place of My Own, and Food Rules.  Several of his books revolve around the eating habits in the world today.  He analyzes what we eat, why we eat it, how we eat it, etc.  He offers a great rhetoric of our food problems today.  Food Rules was originally published in 2011.  In this novel, he offers solutions to the food crisis problems in today’s world.  He provides these rules in an effort to make a healthier America.  Penguin Press in the United States of America published this book.  It is a small book, under two hundred pages, with several illustrations by Maria Kalman.  This book is sold at a majority of Barnes and Noble bookstores as well as other big bookstores.  Pollan addresses audiences like himself and myself.  According to his book, he “set out to get to the bottom of a simple question: What should I eat? What do we really know about the links between our diet and our health? I’m not a nutrition expert or scientist, just a curious journalist hoping to answer a straightforward question” (Pollan 3).  His audience is the average American who wants a simple eater’s manual on what food to eat.  Almost any American who is worried about their diet will appreciate the rules Pollan has provided. Although not technically a food expert, Pollan has the knowledge to provide a simple eater’s manual for America.

            Food Rules is divided into three sections: what should I eat?  What kind of food should I eat? How should I eat? However, in the introduction, Pollan makes two facts that all nutritionists will agree on clear: Western diets can lead to several obesity related diseases while those who partake in a wide range of traditional diets don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.  The Western diet is “generally defined as diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains” (Pollan 6). In the first section, Pollan offers types of foods to avoid.  For example, the second rule is don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.  My great grandmother would not know what Go-Gurt portable yogurt tubes are; hence, do not eat them.  Also, avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.  This would help eliminate foods that contain ingredients that are artificially made because they tend not be healthy for the body.  According to Pollan, the first part is a simple key to a simple healthy diet.  The second part is to “propose a handful of personal policies regarding what to eat, above and beyond ‘food’” (Pollan 88).  Some of these rules include sweetening and salting your foods yourself as well as treating meat as a flavoring or special occasion food.  The point of this section is to offer more rules on what to do to your foods rather than just eating them.  The rules of the third and final section “are designed to foster a healthier relationship to food” (Pollan 147).  One rule that I find most significant is to pay more and eat less.  America has always believed that bigger is better.  However, there is an inverse relationship between quality and quantity.  If Americans were to pay more for more expensive food, it would help eliminate people buying cheap processed food in bulk.  This would cause a huge drop in our rates of obesity because less people would be buying cheap “snacky” foods.  Pollan sums up the book with the motto “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”  If one were to follow this simple diet, they will live a healthy life.  This is Pollan’s purpose, a nice simple diet that will help encourage many Americans to live a healthier lifestyle.

After reading Food Rules, I come to realize that I would agree with almost everything Pollan has to say about dieting.  If one’s purpose in life were to live a healthy life, then they should follow his “rules.”  However, there is one main difference between Pollan and I.  The difference lies between our purposes in life.  If people truly want to live a healthy life and make all their decisions about eating healthy, great for them.  Personally, I find living a happy life more important.  If eating a twinke while sipping on a glass of Coca-Cola makes one happy, then I say go for it.  Pollan touches on this in the final section.  His final rule is “break the rules every once in a while” (Pollan 197).  Obsessing over food decisions could be poor for one’s health.  Unhealthy foods in moderation will not make one obese, or have diabetes.  This is relatable to my blog in the way that Pollan offers a solution to eating healthily and how I find solutions to other hood and health problems today.  Yes a lot of my solutions contain regulation by the government; however, that is not only my purpose.  The dilemmas we face with dieting, obesity, and fast food are a major crisis in our world today.  Like Pollan, I am trying to find a solution to this crisis.  Bottom line, if one were to live like me, follow my advice, “Eat food. Not too much. But mainly, be happy.”

Work Cited

Pollan, Michael. Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.However,