Wendell Berry The Pleasures Of Eating Summary

In Michael Pollan’s essay “Escape from the Western Diet,” he informs Americans about the western diet and believes they need to escape from it. The reason Americans should escape the western diet is to avoid the harmful effects associated with it such as “western diseases” (Pollan, 434). To support his view on the issue, Pollan describes factors of the western diet that dictate what Americans believe they should eat. These factors include scientists with their theories of nutritionism, the food industry supporting the theories by making products, and the health industry making medication to support those same theories. Overall, Pollan feels that in order to escape this diet, people need to get the idea of it out of their heads. In turn he

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto is an eye-opening analysis of the American food industry and the fear driven relationship many of us have with food. He talks in depth about all the little scientific studies, misconceptions and confusions that have gathered over the past fifty years. In the end provide us with a piece of advice that should be obvious but somehow is not, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He follows the history of nutritionism and the industrialization of food, in hopes to answer one question….. how and when "mom" ceded control of our food choices to nutritionists, food marketers and the government.

The United States of America is the world’s largest corn overproducer. With such heavy focus on corn, I would like to draw attention to a measure taken by the United States government, the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996. This act increased the amount of farm land that is meant to be used in the States for growing corn from 60 million acres to a whopping 90 million acres. Such a significant increase cannot go without some kind of effect. Writer, Michael Pollan, in his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, discusses the instability of the US farming industry as well as the negative environmental implications corn has on us. This instability and environmental impact has given rise to movements promoting a return to more

In the article “The Pleasure of Eating”, Wendell Berry expresses his idea that in order for consumers to truly appreciate the food on their plates, they should know its origin and how it is produced. Berry was inspired by his realization that nowadays food productions are becoming more and more industrialized, and the consumers themselves are slowly transforming into industrial eaters. He states that there is a barrier between the people and the reality behind food production because people can purchase already packaged food at anywhere and anytime. This makes them ignorant to the hardship and the cruel conditions it went under to get on the shelves. He also criticizes the food industry, as it manipulates people to regard eating as a way of survival and not one of the many pleasures in life. Berry successfully appeals to pathos in order to further convince his urban consumers that eating is an act of pleasure. Therefore, people should take more into consideration on what they are eating and how it will affect them in the long run.

Whether or not a person wants a burger and french-fries’ or a salad from the salad bar, the decision should be up to him/her. Two articles share views on food, “What You Eat Is Your Business” by Radley Balko and “Junking Junk Food” by Judith Warner. These two authors wrote articles about how they felt about food and how it’s related to obesity. However, Radley Balko would not approve of Judith Warner’s views on food for the reason that the two authors have different viewpoints on the aspect of the government helping people to make better food choices. Warner and Balko also has different views on the ideas which are that eating is a psychological matter; and eating healthy should be a personal matter.

American society has grown so accustomed to receiving their food right away and in large quantities. Only in the past few decades has factory farming come into existence that has made consuming food a non guilt-free action. What originally was a hamburger with slaughtered cow meat is now slaughtered cow meat that’s filled with harmful chemicals. Not only that, the corn that that cow was fed with is also filled with chemicals to make them grow at a faster rate to get that hamburger on a dinner plate as quickly as possible. Bryan Walsh, a staff writer for Time Magazine specializing in environmental issues discusses in his article “America’s Food Crisis” how our food is not only bad for us but dangerous as well. The word dangerous

Over the last several decades, the diet of society has been continually changing. This has resulted in different formulas for nutrition and the proper portions of foods that must be consumed. To fully understand the various arguments requires looking at numerous viewpoints. This will be accomplished by focusing on Michael Pollan's Escape from the Western Diet in contrast with Mary Maxfield's Food as thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating. These views will highlight how diet and nutrition is based upon individual opinions. This is the focus of the thesis.

Corn is not the ideal nutritious food. It wreaks havoc on the animal;s' digestive system and gets turned into sweeteners that makes people obese, aside from giving us an unhealthy diet. In other words, the industrial food chain that American man is sustained on is largely based on corn, whether in its direct form, fed to livestock, or processed into chemicals such as glucose, and the cheapest forms of these are high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol. The former, particularly, through a combination of biological, cultural, and political factors, appears in the cheapest and most common of foods that constitute the American diet. It is the ingredient that results in obesity, and, since it appears in the cheapest products, the ingredients that more poor, than wealthier individuals, consume.

In the educative essay “What’s Eating America,” Michael Pollan designates the history of corn, a good and healthy food if cultivated properly. This essay is very informative because it talks about American’s diet. In this essay, Pollan examines the way of growing the corn as an influential example of using the chemical fertilizers in food. Also, He complains “Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food…” (Pollan 302). While it might be very useful when used in a prudent way, in reality the usage of chemical fertilizers is higher and the farmers are feeding their corps more than it needs which affect the ecology’s system. In other words, his focus is on corn and not only does him just points out corn presence in nearly all food products; but he comes up with other matters like fossil fuels and the factories polluting the atmosphere. Thus, it’s astonishing when someone stops and thinks about how many things are composed from corn.

In his article “We Are What We Eat,” Michael Pollan discusses how industrial corn makes up the majority of food consumed in the United States. When one attempts to trace the origins of their food, it usually ends in a corn field. Most of the food that people eat have some type of corn product or corn derivative in them, which indicates that nearly all of the food is corn-based. Additionally, Pollan claims the obesity crisis occurring in the United States is due to the overproduction of corn, which has caused people to eat more calories. Also, aside from seafood all of the population’s food comes from the farm, and compared to the past, farms are producing five hundred more calories of food per daily intake. This high production of corn has

I believe this is a main argument in the story because diabetes and obesity are main problems in a lot of countries and the numbers have risen so much due to the sugar that has been added. Pollan adds that a “Recent university shows that less sugars have been added and in sodas and especially glucose”. Corn is glucose and glucose is led to trigger something in your body that triglyceride levels will rise and cause high chance of diabetes. Also growing corn is also very bad because it kills our environment and does serious damage this is caused because of the chemicals farmers use to put on corn to take care of it but it in the end it is also very bad for the corn which causes it to be

In the article “Pleasures of Eating”, Wendell Berry opens up a new line of thinking with the statement “There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom.". Ultimately, a person has to wonder what exactly does this mean, and how can food have any correlation to politics and freedoms. What a person consumes, directly correlates to freedom. People have the right to question where the food came from, etc. How can one be free if they don’t have an understanding of what they are consuming and it is not placed before them? As a consumer knowing exactly what’s going on is essential to everyday health, and without this information people have become victims to the world pool of passive consumerist. Mr. Berry calls these

Michael Pollan describes that ecologically corn can be grown in a safer way that doesn’t kill of the earths fossil fuels. In old times, corn was grown by using fertility drawn from the sun, but this way took a lot of time because the process was being naturally made and the serving size was exceptionally smaller. Since America wants everything grander, faster, and cheaper, factories are the way to go. Factories give occupations to the lower class and fuel the countries wants and needs but by doing so Michael Pollen declares that the factories are burning out toxins into the air and it cause pollution.

In the United States agricultural demands are high as many individuals tend to buy more food then they actually need in their everyday diet. This process of over consumption or over buying of products can eventually correlate to America’s high obesity rates. This process of buying more then we actually need affects the increasing demand for products. Often times these high demands frustrate farmers as they are having to speed up productions to meet these demands and it doesn’t help that they are loosing agricultural land as well. In an article 2010 it says, “The USDA did s survey to see how much food is wasted in a year in the United States. In that survey they found that 132.9 billion pounds of food were wasted in 2010 (USDA 3).” This shows that Americans take more then what they can actually, which creates an unnecessary demand for agricultural products that concern farmers. This concern is what leads them to go through using GMO, which helps them stay in business with these high

Priorities are the key to a healthy and fulfilled life. Humans live everyday, eating and drinking, an attempt to nourish their bodies with the nutrients to run properly. What if these so called nutrients, were in fact poisoned with sacrifice and saturated sugars and fats. In the paragraphs below I will be exploring different aspects of our nations food corporation, both how they produce their foods and how and how the nation accepts these foods to be sold at our local grocers.