Pollan’s “Unhappy Meal” and Dupuis

At the end of Dupuis’ essay, she relates back to Pollan’s “Unhappy Meal,” and effectively says that you can not use historical advice for face value. Throughout Dupuis’ essay, she talks about the historical food movements, from the very founding of the United States, with the nutritional discoveries, to later generations dietary feud with Chinese immigrants. Using these as backing evidence for the often incorrect statements of cultural phenomena, she concludes her essay arguing that Pollan’s statement “Eat food… Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” is not necessarily true, due to all of these faulty historical contexts. In the concluding paragraph, she discusses her own opinions, and states that “We need to stop trying to solve our social problems through our stomachs and think about the ways in which this type of politics simply justifies current inequalities. Injustice is worth serious attention, but diet won’t do the trick.” Through this, she means to convey the idea that all of the new nutritional waves bent on fixing health issues or other cultural and societal issues will not work. As a whole, we need to step away from this approach, and instead trying fixing the problem through viewing the politics of the issue, and asking why we keep asking what to eat.

                In Pollan’s “Unhappy Meals,” he too talks about some of the political issues surrounding food. In here he talks about how people’s and scientist’s focus on “nutritionism” is actually detrimental to people’s approach to health and diet. He thinks that people should “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” as a basic approach to fixing the problem. Pollan sees people’s habit of overeating from meals to be the biggest issue. If everybody just ate to a certain point, and then stopped everyone would be happier. The issue of politics surrounding food is another key point he discusses. One area that is contemporary issue, is the nutritional dispute over the health value of red meats and dairy products. Recent studies have shown that red meats and dairy products are not as healthy as thought, and dairy and meat lobbyists have pushed to keep this from becoming influential in government operations. It seems that societal views of diet and health are constantly changing, and are not always correct, and instead of simply relying on the diet statements of the generation, people should look at their own lifestyle instead.